Spooky Forest (progress update 2)

Hey all! I'm back with the bi-weekly update, here's what I've been doing for the Spooky Forest

Fast Travel

As I teased last week I've been working on a warp demoness that enables fast travel. She's located in a few key places around the realm and lets you warp between them after you've unlocked them by visiting her in those areas. This is a general gameplay feature so it will eventually make its way into the demo build, but I'm not prioritising demo fixes until the first Spooky Forest build is out, so you'll all be the first to experience it!

UFO Questline

This is what I've been focusing on mostly, with three animations being tied to and unlockable through this quest. It's split up into three parts currently:

1. You have to avoid the UFO beam or it'll pull you up
2. You have to help the alien lady convince cow ladies to go into the beam
3. The UFO will fly you to the next area, the castle, after you've completed the quest

Two out of the three animations are in progress, specifically the animation that happens when a cow lady goes up the beam, and the reward animation you receive after you're done with the full quest. The last and remaining one is the animation Erisia would partake in after she gets pulled up into the UFO by the beam during the first part of the quest.

Local split-screen co-op

Something I had the sudden urge to work on was local split-screen co-op and so I did! I ended up making good progress on the technical features needed before this becomes a reality, but there are still a few things left and I don't expect this to be part of the first Spooky Forest update. Once I've got the technical part covered I have to test the gameplay and user experience of co-op and likely make a few game design tweaks. The ultimate goal here is that you can use something like Steam Remote Play to play together over the network, which some popular casual games do.

Trains

I was inspired by a cozy image of a sleeper train with wooden interiors and warm lighting and wanted to create something like it in the game - so I ended up doing just that. I've only created part of the environmental art assets here so it's very early, but I hope to have a quest or two tied to it, plus new NPCs and entities and their animations as well. I've also decided to add enterable rooms as part of this, to make the trains a bit more dense in terms of content - so you'll have NPCs doing things in their cabins.

Well, that's it for this one! I might post a smaller teaser or animation, but otherwise the next update will be in two-weeks, October 21st, see you then :)