Designer Update!

Its been a while since my last Devlog Update, so lets catch up~

My duties that I was originally assigned were delayed due to some trouble we have been having with the battle systems, so I have been regulated to paper playtesting for a while now.

However, with the 4th milestone, I have begun working on my secondary task, working on and improving the map!

I have taken desperation from previous Harvest Moon games and using feedback that was received from playtesting, I designed a part of the game that should be a good basis to work off of! I moved the farmland in front of the cabin to make it more noticeable to players, as well as made a path upwards what will be the town. I made a break in between the path to signify a scene transition between the player's farm and the town.

I am also working on streamlining applying hitboxes to objects, as trying to apply conventional hitboxes to them won't work. I am creating a handful of "x by x" boxes to fill in the spaces of where ever we don't want the player to be able to move into. Eventually, these can be worked into the object prefabs themselves to save time in the future once we get them fully functional.

Another thing I have been working on is making it so that the player can go in front of and behind objects that are taller than one square. Currently the player can move in front of things, like the cabin, but if they try to go behind it, their sprite will be on top of the cabin. While this is comical, this is definitely not what we want. There are a few ways around this, like splitting the object in half and assigning one to the background and the other to the foreground, or making each object into its own tilemap and assigning said tiles to the need layer. This is something I will work on in the upcoming weeks after discussing the options with the group.

It has been a bit of a rough road for me personally as my primary job has been delayed a few times, however I now have another aspect that I am able to work on and dedicate my time to while I wait for the battle systems to be fully implemented! I look forward to what is to come, as I hope you are as well!

Until next time, which hopefully won't be as long~

Daniel Reber - Designer