Planking the horse

A new month and more updates!

When gentling a horse, an important step is to get the horse used to weight on its back. This often takes the form of a person "planking" on the horse, easing their weight on and off of the horse to the horse's comfort level. That's the training minigame we've fully completed since the last update, and here is a taste:

Be careful to pet her in the right spot or the horse will bite you!

This leads into the next minigame I mentioned in the last post: the player pets the horse to get the horse used to human touch and being touched where the horse can't see. We've created touch zones - areas on the horse where the player is allowed to touch - and are finalizing the zone's look, scoring, and kicking the player out of the game if they mess up too badly.

Once this minigame is finished the demo will be very close to being feature-complete! Due to the intense nature of creating animations, only small progress on creating the Points of Interest was made, but here's a sneak preview of the fishing hut, where the player will be able to find the items necessary to make a fishing pole:

To tie all of these elements together we have the Journal. In general, we don't want the player to ever be confused about what they should do next. While this is a semi-open world game and the player may explore, gather, and craft at their leisure, the game has a through-line where the player should gentle the horse, tend to her wounds, and set off into the world. So as the player progresses through the game there will be different goals and game mechanics that the player will need to complete. This is where the journal comes in. The journal contains the information necessary to help the player know what task is next and how to accomplish it. As the player progresses, new journal entries become available.

The journal functionality is now complete.

Another thing we've been exploring and finishing up is having the horse use something called root motion. Overall, we don't like how the horse's feet slide on the ground as the horse moves, and using root motion will fix that. We're not 100% of the way there, but we have all the animations created and are getting closer.

Finally, we also completed a wide variety of bug fixes and general fixes for things that didn't quite work so well. I won't get into them here, but suffice to say I like to keep the "Todo: Bugs" list fairly short.

We're still working toward the demo; no promises on dates. We're making a solid game and the demo will be here when it's here. See you next month!

-Leslie