Hello Villagers!

It’s a partly sunny / partly cloudy day here at Village Monsters HQ, and it’s perfect weather to reflect back on a productive week of work.

I’m trying something a bit new this week: instead of a handful of items with detailed explanations I’m going for a lot of items with just a screenshot and blurb about the change. The idea is to make these logs easier to write and more entertaining to read.

Let’s boogie.

Helpful Hints

Each release I like to add a big, goopy layer of quality of life changes. This week I decided to add many more instances of the little ‘helper notices’ that direct how you can interact with the world.

These were in previous releases, too, but now you’ll see them for talking with villagers, picking up items, interacting with furniture, and much more.

New tool belt…

Speaking of quality of life, the tool belt menu has been lacking for awhile. To make it a bit friendlier I went ahead and removed unnecessary tools and changed up the size and transparency to make it look nicer.

…and new you!

The human (you) has received another face lift. Well, maybe it’s more of body lift? He’s now slightly wider, taller, and has new eyes.

I get asked this a lot, so let me be super clear: there will be plenty of appearance options to choose from in the final game! You’ll be able to choose your gender, skin and hair color, and much more.

Swing City

While I was messing with the player sprite I took time to redo the net swing animation. My original intention was to always have something akin to Link to the Past, so I did just that!

As I watch this gif it’s made me realize I need a little FX to play when a critter is caught, so that’s been added to the backlog.

Begone, Bugs!

There’s also a flurry of bug fixes that happen before a new release, and this one is no different. Here’s what I squashed this week:

• Collisions of exterior elements (like fences and trees) have been improved

• The camera is now less prone to “half pixel syndrome”

• Selecting items via the tool belt menu will no longer caused you to “interact” with whatever object you’re next to

• A number of dialogue typos have been corrected

• A number of temporary objects left behind in Beta 1 have been cleaned up

As usual I probably introduced a fun stable of bugs alongside the ones I fixed, so if you do notice any weirdness then be sure to send me an email!