Project Wild One v0.02: Mobs and Chaos

As of this moment, the new version of Project Wild One is going out to my mid-tier supporters! In a couple weeks it’ll open up to lower tiers, and about a month from now the game will be available to the public!

This release represents a significant turning point in my career, but let’s talk about that later. Right now the big thing you want to know is, what’s new?

The main focus of v0.02 is to expand the game to allow for multiple NPCs. You can now have as many creatures crowded around you as you like, and you can interact with all of them, and all of them will interact with each other as well as with you. You can get into big fights, or orgies, or both at once, and the NPCs will build relationships not just with you, but with each other. The GUI has seen a lot of work to let you pick your targets, and some of your actions have been moved to when you “target” yourself since they don’t require targeting anyone else. NPCs will also have personal preferences for crowds or smaller events influencing whether they use the new Howl action to try and draw more people in, or if they’ll leave when things get too busy. And to make things manageable when it gets a little crazy, you have the new Reject All and Invite All actions as well, to make it clear you want everything from everyone… or want it all to stop.

Now, I wanted to push this update out relatively quickly after the last one, so I knew I needed to go for just about the simplest implementation possible. So there are fancy things I’d like to do sometime like have multiple penetrations in one hole, overlapping instances of vore, and all sorts of madness like that, but I couldn’t do that for this version. A lot of the involved systems need to be overhauled and expanded first anyway, but having the baseline of multiple NPCs at once working in the system is an important foundational point for just about everything else I want to get done. That’s why this was my first big expansion from v0.01.

And of course, as may grow increasingly obvious as you play this version… the NPCs are still pretty stupid and act quite strangely at times. To be fair, these NPCs have far more choices for what to do and what their “goals” should be than you’d usually see in any other game, so a lot of flexibility is required, and I’ve mostly focused in the initial build on just keeping them somewhat reasonable in their actions, even if they’re a bit erratic. Still, that chaos will be more apparent here. Hence the name of this update.

After support for multiple NPCs and all the additions that came with that, the second major addition to v0.02 is the new tooltip system. I’m really hoping this will help people understand their options and feel more in control of their situation in the game. Currently the tooltips are written to serve as sort of a secondary tutorial system: they shouldn’t really hold information specific to the current situation so much as an overview for the given choice, what it will do, why you might want to do it, and what effects you should expect it to have. This can also help you better understand why others act a certain way, so if you’re curious about an action, check its tooltip!

Past that, there’s been a big slew of smaller changes:
~Rebalanced the purchasing of upgrades to be cheaper to initially access, but to have fewer options and be harder to spam multiple upgrades in a row
~Adjusted Player.log output to be much less “noisy,” should make game run a little faster
-Fixed an issue letting players break the game if they click while it’s still “thinking”
-Fixed issue letting text display “lock up” occasionally and made visible text log longer
-Fixed issue giving named furries no species

There’s been layers of redesigning and refining behind the scenes, but most of that falls under “making multiple NPCs actually work.” I hope you’ll enjoy all the little touches of the refined GUI and the expanded gameplay!

Now. I mentioned this release is important for more than just its own sake. A while back I held a vote, and my supporters agreed that right now Project Wild One feels like my most exciting and promising project, and that it deserves to take the top spot and become my new Primary Project. I felt like I couldn’t really do that when I hadn’t updated it in quite a while, so with this release, I’m officially designating Project Wild One my new Primary Project. I’ll be putting more work into it than any of my other projects, especially given I’m tapering off on prototyping at this point. I may try a new side project here and there still, as I still have a lot of exciting ideas taunting me in the back of my mind, but we’ve been seeing a lot of uncertainty and a lot of brand new projects, which tend to be slower to come out, so it feels like it’s high time for something a little more steady and to see the most promising of my new batch of ideas get some proper development.

What’s that mean for my other projects? Project Voice is meant to be a very small and simple project, hopefully complete in another update or two, so I do plan to try and get that finished somewhere along the way. The bulk of the work is the sort of thing I may be able to get done easily enough “on the side” while working on other things, as a change of pace occasionally, though that’s not something I’ve had much luck sticking to as an idea so far.

Project Matchmaker was my “safe step” away from MVOL, and it was immensely educational as a stepping stone to other games, but as it stands, the game has a lot of problems I’d have to address before I could continue expanding it, and I’d probably have to pretty drastically rebuild a lot of the game to really be able to move forward. I can’t say for certain, but right now, I feel like it’s likely that v0.02 may be the last build for PMM. It stings, but the sad part of trying out a lot of fun new ideas is being willing to let some of them go later. I can’t possibly make all the games I have ideas for, so it’s better to pick and choose where to focus my effort.

My Very Own Lith is complete, but still needs art, and I can still write a little new side content for it occasionally. Nothing has changed with that– the game still runs, and I still plan to occasionally give it a little touch up. As I mentioned in the Dev Journal just before this post, I do have hopes for a proper rebuild of the game in another engine to free it from the yoke of Flash, but that will be its own significant body of work.

Right now, my plan is to keep working on Project Wild One. What I’m not sure of is where exactly I’ll focus next– my first thought was to push on into improving the AI, since it obviously needs a lot of work and I have some pretty strong ideas for how to build an AI that “thinks” and “understands” what’s happening around it, but I know that’s going to be immensely complicated, and implementing it properly will affect a lot of different parts of the game, so it’s possible I’ll need to overhaul other things first, like how the game stores and interacts with its own rules and text, to make it easier for the game to “read itself” and make decisions as appropriately, and to make the game’s text output more robust and flexible for the long term. So I’ll have to explore things some more and figure out exactly what’s needed. The AI update may have to be pushed off some, especially if I’m going to keep these updates coming out relatively often, so keep an eye out for more Dev Journals to see how that’s going!

I think that covers the big news for this update. If you want to keep up to date on what’s going on, you can follow me on Twitter, join my Discord server, do the RSS thing, or get emailed these posts via a WordPress account using the form below this post! And if you ever want to find links to any of my work or the above social whatnots you can find them in the menu on the left (or above on mobile)!

If you like my work and want to help make it happen, there’s two big ways to do so! Supporters get extra news updates, early access, and all sorts of cheats and bonus content whether on Patreon or SubscribeStar! But if you’re low on cash and/or high on patience and determination, you can join our testing team and Be a Proofer! It’s only thanks to the help of people like you that any of these games have been possible!

Thanks for reading! I wish you health and happiness in this New Year!