March Progress Update!

I finally finished mapping out the town, yay!

^ The town's half blocky map ^

^ Current town ^

Most of this month has been dedicated to mapping out the general layer of the town. The goal was to get a good idea of how it is going to look at the end. So it was mostly me laying down building after building to have a feel of how I should arrange them. Something that became way easier after I found a nice Unity adon called Go Painter, very useful...

You can see now that the town is hugged by mountains, and the little houses at the outskirts kinda start climbing on them, in a way that a real town would expand.

A very important element to get the Cuernavaca-y, San Miguel de Allende-y look is verticality, so there I went, testing different levels of hilly-ness until I had a good balance of a layout that is interesting and cozy to look at, but also navigable, so the player doesn't get stuck on random geomtry, or can't get up certain hills because they are too steep. I think I found a nice balance.

I like looking down in small streets when traveling to these kind of towns and see the inclination. Is always so neat. So I wanted to incorporate that.

I also love how a lot of these towns revolve around a church. So I made the main landmark, the center of the city, a Theanthropic Church Cathedral.

^ This view is inspired by some photos I've seen of Hallstatt, in Austria. Very cute town.

Another very important thing I've also been working on, and that I'll continue to work on, is optimization, that is, segmenting the town in different scenes that I can load based on player proximity, so the whole city is not loaded at once, reducing performance.

This should be fairly simple tho. In fact, I have a system for it that I developed a long time ago for the first town. So the main focus now will be to finish at least main navigable areas, add landmarks, and optimize.

New characters!

^ Angelica added ^. One of the original girls.

^ Goth cat girl Sylvaine :v

New anthro type: mouse!

^ Mouse girl Pili ^

^ And mouse girl Lumi ^

So smol...

I'll keep working on adding more girls, and more anthro types. I need a nice solid, varied crowd of anthro girls to get the "lived in" feel of an actual town.

Need to fill these spaces with cute anthro girls...

So that's basically all... as I mentioned, the purpose of this month was roughly finishing the main town layout, so there's not a lot else to say... well I can say it was cool going on pinterest and getting through lots of reference pics of cozy small towns and villages. Rarely I get to work on something not as techinical, and almost completely artistic...

Regardless, thanks for reading and for your continous support. Now for April, the goal is to make -at least some areas- presentabable and playable. So, that entails more mapping adjustments, optimization, scene design, optimization, and more optimization...

So again thank you, and see you on the next monthly dev diary entry if there are no main announcements in between 🫂