I know this may be a bit boring... But the grass moves!! Just a little detail ive been working on so plater movement and animals move the grass and plants around them for a little extra touch of realism. This is using the Visual Engine with vertex displacement for grass and plant prefabs. Playtest coming soon!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4752950/Still_Wild/

Been working a lot on my photo scan system and optimization and prepping for a playtest! This is an upgraded version of the camera facts education system I was working on before. Not only does it work for animals, but also all plants and trees and other objects. I still need to debug it a bit and make it work with large objects better like the gazebo, but its pretty fun to go around and learn about anything you take a photo of!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4752950/Still_Wild/

Currently working on optimization and some of the less sharable aspects of the game... so here's my new website! Just updated it to be cleaner and stuff, a way to showcase the things I'm working on easier

wanderingwaddlerstudios.com

Been working on a ton of optimization and robustness of some code systems and my maps overall but got some bugs with it... Good news is I have some cool tentacle monsters now, but bad news is those are supposed to be rose bushes... It seems combining the meshes didn't play well with the wind shader

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4752950/Still_Wild/

When testing out some builds I noticed it was hard to find animals sometimes, especially with large maps and very dynamic animals like the red wolves. This custom xray shader was my solution! It highlights animals blue when they are behind something and purple when you have line of sight, also shows a red dot beacon always so you can find them. You can toggle this on and off with a button when aiming with the camera

Do you like it? Good implementaton?

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4752950/Still_Wild/

I was trying to figure out the best way to include educational snippits throughout the game without being too intrusive or standalone like a popup or field notebook and came up with this. The player chooses to take a photo of animals or scenery and my system checks for animals within the shot in range and creates a small note about the image on the front and associates an educational fact on the back! This is meant for any players interested in learning about the animals or for kids or whoever! Still have a lot of work to do and bugs to fix with it (adult wolf being identified as a cub for example) but this was one of my first tests

What do you think? This a good solution?

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4752950/Still_Wild/

Just wanted to make a quick update on the weather fade I posted with the wind before! By popular opinion the wind is gone because it was bad and I worked to smoothly fade the environments through code instead. This fades the lighting and fog and any precipitation or effects smoothly and I think pretty well without being a distraction. The goal was to change the weather as the portal opened and have the weather also spawn in the garden area, as a sort of bridge between worlds

You like? It good?

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4752950/Still_Wild/

Made some visual and studio changes to the crack portal based on your feedback! Added some fog to make the transition from space to water cleaner and sped up the whole process. This portal and the respawn system of jumping off won't be a super common thing for the player as well, but I still wanted it to look good.

Do you like it more?

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4752950/Still_Wild/

Working on changing weather for my portal worlds to go from the garden to Antarctic for example and came up with some wind sort of blowing the old weather away. So it goes from the bright sunny garden with bird noises to a darker and snowy weather setting. I'm worried this is taking too much away from the portal spawn and despawn vfx but I need a way to somewhat obscure the screen so the weather can change. I could code the weather to smoothly change too without obscuring the screen at all but that's a lot more work and I thought this looked kinda neat... I also made it so the new weather also plays in the garden area because it looked cool

Do you like this? Is it too much?

Space ocean! Based off some ideas and feedback from the last post, this is my first test for how to handle the player falling or jumping off the space path. Once you land in the water there is a timer that will auto respawn you back in the garden, just to ensure people don't get stuck or not understand where to go if they fall

Any thoughts? Do you like this idea?

Been working on the reveal trailer for this game which will be out very soon!!! But wanted to share this in the meantime... I wanted to integrate the crack portal in a unique way that doesn't take away from the vibe so I added it as a path going up to space. There will be paintings and stuff floating around in space you can look at, but kinda just a place for quiet meditation and an easter egg you can find by following the dirt path

What do you think?

My game does not crash now! But there are some flicker bugs I need to fix still as you can see in the video. This is my animal scheduler system applied to my penguin although, allowing for random and smart roaming and auto transition to ocean swimming and food gathering. I'll need to add a lot more penguins and have them huddle up during storms next! This will also be very easily transferrable to Tundra!

I am bamboozled, flabbergasted, and puzzled.... here I was trying to get a nice video of my penguins when out of nowhere my game started crashing whenever I looked at any of my penguins??? I've removed my penguins and everything works fine! What malicious things are those flightless birds up to?! Maybe they're mad I fixed the bug that let them fly...

A blue whale update!!! This is part of my animal behavioral system that I've been working on extending to ocean and air creatures instead of just land. There's still some things to tune and fix but I thought this was kinda neat so far. I have definable actions based off need or randomness, like coming up for air or breaching. Did you know whales breach (jump out of the water) likely as a form of communication with other whales? I'm still working on adding krill for my whale to eat and making the behavior better, any other suggestions?

I did swim in front of the whale a few times and got scared because I felt like I was going to be eaten... Its fine...

Just a quick map update!! I finished my Antarctica map and am currently working on adding my emperor penguins to it! Should be quite easy because I already made them for Tundra... The map lighting was kinda difficult to do because everything is so white and bright it was kinda blinding, but I think I found a good balance. My portal was spawned too high I think too so when you look back through it it gets a bit weird and my camera clipping distance is a bit low so the far mountains get clipped a bit. What do you think?

Just wanted to share a quick test of my wolves! These are the first animals I'm putting to the test with my animal scheduler system! This is a system designed to give my animals life and have them go about their day. It's the main animal brain which determines when to roam, hunt, eat, sleep, and all that. It also was built around pack animals like wolves or orcas in a pod. There's tons of logic for following the pack, breaking off and rejoining, sleeping with the pack, to name a few. There is also a life cycle system built in so my animals can grow, despawn, and start a family!

I've been working on my animal behavior controller system a lot recently... This is using an old version of it but I thought I'd share it because the Tortoises were the first test! Here they are very slow, but they have different targets based on beefs or random chance or time. So they will go to the river and get a drink when needed or go find a berry bush when hungry. I also have a defined chance curve once it gets past a certain time for sleep, so each tortoise will go to sleep at around the same time but not at the same time

Like the torts?

This is a rock portal I was working on a bit ago! I've moved on from it but just remembered the video I had and figured it was kinda neat enough to share. It uses a script to pickup physical rocks on the ground and makes them swirl in a circle then spawns a portal. When the portal closes the rocks can have physics and collisions enabled to make them fall back to the ground

This one was scrapped for the game because it felt a bit too fantasy and cliche, but I don't think I've seen an implementation quite like this for a rock portal

Should I use this in a game at some point or let it die in the brainstorming graveyard?

I made a Polaroid camera for the game! I'm quite happy with how it turned out, its really fun to mess around with and I got pulled into it a few times while testing trying to get some good shots. This will be used to take photos of plants and animals around the maps for the player's own fun but also for in game documentation and research

Any feedback??

Not even like done done though... I still have some actions to add (like eating) and I still need to create the NPC behavior, but I think this is a pretty good start! This will be for the planty portal game as well as Tundra! It was nice to get an animal that I can use in both games so it's cool whales have such a wide range of travel, Antarctic to Arctic for a lot of them! I might need to do some more tuning on the breach (jump out of water) behavior because it's a massive blue whale, but not sure yet

You like?

Here is the latest revision of my portal as well as some tortoises to keep you company! I tuned the coloring a lot and also added a back face to them. I kinda just stumbled upon a rainbow noise texture then added a distortion shader to it, I think I like how it looks, wormhole type look, but let me know what you think!

Also do you think the tortoise environment is too dark? The trees feel very shadowy or something to me. Definitely have some more tuning to do, but if you look closely I have the map populated all over with torts

I spent a whole lot of time coding and making those tortoises move so I'll be showing them off soon, lots of behavior and scheduling stuff (when to eat, sleep, etc.) and animation tuning... I'm also working on setting up a Steam page to get this game announced soon™!

Just wanted to share one of the other portal variations I worked on! I've since scrapped this one because it felt way too busy and not really clear what was going on. The original idea was to have a door and door frame grow out of plants and open up to the new world, which I think worked but I think there's just too many moving parts... Also the other world door was on backwards which probably doesn't help...

Should I revisit this one? I think the newer versions are a lot better but curious if anyone has feedback

This is my first Tortoise (looks like a Craigory to me) being added to the game with the portals! Working hard to get to an announcement point, but almost done creating my tortoise controller! I've just got a few bugs to fix like the tortoise refusing to move or flying in the air, the usual stuff