This Week in the Forest! #194

HEY FOLKS! Sorry it's been a minute! Like, we posted a build and stuff and the call out, but I haven't done a TWITF in a minute! So lemme fill ya in on what's been up.

COOKING?!

That's right! One of the minigame features we've been planning is Cooking! This was another thing I wanted to add, but didn't want to add it until I came up with a fun unique gameplay experience!

Rascal will join Charlotte as a prep-chef, prepping the ingredients that she cooks!

• You won't find new recipes. There's a cookbook with all the recipes already!

• You will need to find ingredients! They will come from the other mini-games.

  • TFOL isn't a "currency" game, so you won't need to gather multiple materials.

• Like most of the other mini games in TFOL, cooking will give rewards for other mini games, things to collect, and sex scenes! It'll also required progress in other mini games.

---

Again, these mini games are WAAAAAY far out in our timeline. But it is some things i've been working on now, so I'm sharing them :> Also, I mentioned before that it would be important for visiting and permanent critters to know what we have planned so they can be involved in any of this if they wanted. And that's what I did a few weeks ago!

Design Onboarding Documents!

Visiting and Permanent critters all have a roll in our Discord server. (If you aren't in it, or don't have your role assigned, please let me know!) They now have access to a forum of ALL of our future TFOL Activities planned. There's about 5 more I haven't posted about yet.

(This is small on purpose)

I've made 7 more of these kinds of spreads to help folks get a better idea of what we have planned. This sorta pitch-document has been really fun to make! I had made one of these as a mood-board/direction for hiring help on another project, and realized this was a dope thing that I should be doing more.

So yeah, after making those, I made their corresponding forum posts on our discord channel and did a bit of cleaning up/reaching out to make sure things were looking OK. Critters now have like 90% of the full picture of TFOL. The last 10% will be revealed in Act 4.

BUG HUNTING!

A lot of the past few weeks has been bug hunting and polishing up stuff! There's been a lot of long-standing bugs that have been needing to get fixed, and we've kiiinda put our Codecks bug list on hold for a while xD

So first thing was first, I helped clean up a lot of our reports and organized a system to take more actions! Vixel improved upon that system, verified a ton of already-fixed bugs, and widdled out list down to a handful of bugs. Thank you for everyone who bug tested! SO CRUCIAL!

ANIMATION!

I've been pushing ahead with the finale animations for TFOL's campaign. It's 2 scenes, and this first one is approaching 30 unique main frames, and I'm prooobably a bit more than half way done with it. The toonboom workflow has been super helpful on making sure these areas look good and solid. Especially with the more complicated designs. I'll still need to do a cum-pass after which adds a butt-ton more frames. But they are way faster.

MABEL TOYS!

We sold out of pre-orders :O! Fuckin' amazing! They are scheduled for delivery to me by the end of this month. Vixel will be flying out and helping me ship everything!

I put in an order for batch 2's production a bit ago. So pre-orders for that is available too! Those should be much less of a wait. I'm thinking at latest early November? Probably more like October. (like, till I have them and ship them out)

STUFF ON THE HORIZON?

... I'm never sure when to tease these things... But I've been self-funding another project on the side, and I'm running out of the funds there lmao. We've always had plans to make more games and expand the critter-verse. So somethings been in the works for the past 7 months...

Let's just say, it IS a sequel and it's NOT TFOL related...

-

ANYWHO that's about it!

I'm gonna post the last month's Animation today too, I was gonna do a fluids version, but couldn't get around to it. I still will probably try later though >o>

Ok! Talk to ya guys soon! Take care!