Next Project

While the work on WaB is closer and closer to the finish, let’s talk about the next project.

Disclaimer. It’s in a very very early stage o f development, and not demo will be ready anytime soon.

For now I go with a code name Village of Boobs, just to call it something other then “Godot project”.

All the below aren’t promises, please understand that the project is in a very early stage and a lot can and will be changed.

Engine

Village of Boobs is being developed on Godot. Godot is an open source free engine. I tried it out, found it much more intuitive and easy to work with then some other options.

It has some issues, but big plus the engine itself has very low requirements, and the resulting game will rather light weight, and hopefully will be possible to run on the older PCs.

It does support Android and HTML5 export, so theoretically possible to have android and web versions, but it would require some exploring.

I decided to not update to Godot4, and stay with more stable version.

My favorite feature so far is Profiler. It shows in real time what functions take the most resources. So if you accidentally write something that slows down the game, it will help to track the issue down.

For example it helped me find out that this function was causing a slow down because how it was searching all the scene, so I replaced it with much simple code that doesn’t work for every situation but works in this specific one. (Gray text is the old code)

This makes me much more confident in my ability to solve possible issues with performance.

What kind of game

It will be fantasy themed game in a remote village. I want something similar in vibes to WaB. Chill, without much emphases on battles. Same world as WaB, but in a different region.

I’m not planning to bring important characters from WaB, but maybe some side character could appear, occasionally.

So what we bring from WaB: world, vibes, open nature of sexual relationships.

What’s different from WaB

The following is partially implemented but partially only plans. This is a subject to change.

The game will be in real time, with free movement without grid, with top down camera.

Characters will be more free in their behavior. They will be following their schedule according to the job thy assigned in the village, but won’t be just teleported around. You will be able to see them waking up, going to work, doing their tasks, socializing, and returning home and go to bed.

This feature could cause a lot of issues, but I hope we will overcome them :) I do love some oblivion style NPCs.

The dialogue system will be more something like we saw in Morrowind – with different topics you can discuss with the character

The time will be always moving while you play the game and do stuff. You will be able to use menu to skip (speed up) the time when you want to wait for a few hours.

What’s done

UI, Main Menu, Settings. Basic UI is done. The game is possible to control with keyboard and mouse, with keyboard only, or with gamepad.

Save system. Players are able to create as many save slots as they want. The game saves Player stats, world state, the position of every NPC and their intention (for example if they were moving somewhere, they won’t forget where they were going after you load save file). The save system is functioning, but will require constant control with every new system added to the game that requires saving data.

Music system. Very basic for now. Switches between 3 tracks during the day and 3 tracks during the night.

Movement system. Player can walk/run around and interact. NPCs are navigating around trying to not block Player’s way and not get stuck with other NPCs.

NPCs behavior. NPCs are moving around according to their schedule. They wake up, spend some time in their house, go to work, play animation of working or open the shop, etc. They do not yet interact with objects like chair. For example when visiting tavern they can’t yet pick a not occupied stool and sit on it, but I do want them to do so eventually. For now it only works with their bed when they go to sleep. Their schedule for now consist in a single day, but in the future I want them to have different schedule for different days of the week.

Inventory, containers and shops. Player can open containers and move items in and out their inventory. Some NPCs open shops during working hours, and sell items that we can buy. Money consist of gold, silver and copper coins. Shops are working but for now are very basic. They need a lot of work regarding how they are being restocked, what affect the prices, what happens to the items Player sell, etc.

Translation system. Currently the project uses 2 languages, English and Russian, but this time all text is stored in separate file that you can open in Excel. It means that if somebody decided to add Spanish translation, they will be able to edit the file, send it to me and ask to add “Spanish” in the language settings.

Footsteps. For some reason it felt important to me. It wasn’t easy but I figured out how to add different footsteps sounds on different materials in Godot v3.5.1.

World. The village for now consists in several houses, a tavern and a church.

Characters

These are a few current characters that populate village. They aren’t final and can be changed in the future.

From the left to right.

• Elsa is the head of the village. She also runs local store.

• Briena is a dwarf lady, and she is a blacksmith.

• Martha is the owner of the tavern

• Amber is a barmaid that works in Martha’s tavern.

There is also a fisherman, but Sebastian is temporary filling in for this role.

There is also a list of possible villagers or visitors in the future. You could saw me painting some of them in the youtube videos.

The main character

My idea is that we are playing as a student of some kind of magical institution, who was expelled, allegedly because he slept with dean’s wife (?). Now he is sent to remote village to work as a look out for something weird happening in the area. It could be a nice job in a more populated area, but not in a remote settlement where noting interesting ever happening. Right?

I’m considering this being design on the main character, but I haven’t decided yet.

I can’t say for now if there will be an option to play as female, or if we will be able to change outfits as in WaB. These things complicate development a lot, so I’m trying to be careful with promises.

Conclusion

The project is in very early stage and I wouldn’t expect playable demo anytime soon. But as we getting closer to WaB finished, you can expect me posting more work in progress stuff.

Village of Boobs video 1 (YouTube)