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Sorry that I've dropped off the face of the earth! People always told me Kickstarters were hard work, but the real word is distracting. I've had a hard enough time trying to keep up with my dev work, and I've fallen out of habit keeping topics like this updated!

There's just a week left so I'm in the final stretch. I think it's going to be a photo finish, but I'm going down swinging!

[link to the Kickstarter at the top of the post!]

The whirlwind rages on.

It's stressful, sure, but there's also something fun about running around like your hair is on fire - it makes the days feel a lot more productive

I'm foregoing the typical weekend digest this week because a) I don't have time, and b) I didn't really do a whole lot on the game this week/ Still, I do have a few things to chat about, so let's make like a gun and bullet.

Oh, and again, I'd be silly to not link to the Kickstarter at the top of the post! If you like what you see in this topic and want to support me, then please consider sharing or making a pledge.

Regarding Kickstarter...

• Early this afternoon I crossed the 30% funded mark, which is a tremendous milestone. Thank you to everyone who has backed the campaign! Your support has given me so much motivation.
  
• The Early Bird tier is just about sold out - as of writing this there's only ~15 slots left. Act fast if you want to get the game at the lowest possible price
  
• The newly introduced Village Younger tier has slots left as well. If you're interested in a monster of your design being added to the cast of Village Monsters then please take a look
  
• I've started posting longer looks at the various systems and features of Village Monsters on Kickstarter. The latest one is on the Mysteries system. They're view-able by anyone - no backing required

Regarding the Game...

• Another Alpha 1 released today. You can grab it right here. Alpha 1.03 brings with it some more bug fixes, but more importantly it's the first demo that includes Linux support! You'll see a separate link on the Downloads page for Linux. I haven't forgotten about you, Mac - it's just a lot harder to get you up and running on Virtual Box
  
• Alpha 1.03 also re-implements the ability to swap your gender - a much requested feature
  
• Finally, Alpha 1.03 makes it a bit easier to send feedback. It seems some people were having some issues, as my inbox has been full of feedback emails that look like the below. That should hopefully now be fixed
  

Well, that'll do it for now. Hopefully this coming week is a bit slower, as I'll be able to get more done on the game - including more dev streams!

[a link to the Kickstarter]

Phew, what a whirlwind the last 36 hours have been. I'm not exactly sure how much sleep I've grabbed since this thing launched, but it's surely not a lot!

Hopefully I'm not being too annoying spamming this, but I'd be remiss not to include a link to the Kickstarter at the top of this post

A few notes!

• I am super insanely happy to report the game has reached the 20% funding mark! There's still plenty of campaign left, but I cannot even properly express how much gratitude I feel toward people that have backed already. Thank you!!!
  
• A number of tiers have sold out already, but the Early Bird tier - where you can grab the game for $12 - still has ~60 slots
  
• Today I also added an additional reward I'm calling Village Younger. The Village Elder tier - the reward that allowed you to design your own monster - sold out very quickly on the first day. This new tier is identical to Elder with one difference: the monster you design will be added to the game after launch. This is so that we have enough time to design and create a really cool monster without impacting the overall schedule of the game
  

Things will most likely slow down from here on out if previous Kickstarters are any indication. I'm actually ok with that, as I'll use the 'downtime' to resume working on the game. I'm hoping to get out several new releases between now and the end of the Kickstarter, though of course they'll be smaller in size than the previous bi-monthly demos.

Thanks as always for following along!

Well done, great stuff

News frontpage done (Read all about it! Read all about it! )
http://exilian.co.uk/index.php

That looks so good! Thank you so much for all the support!!

Oh, hello there! Village Monsters is now officially LIVE ON KICKSTARTER! Come, help me build a village!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/389391560/village-monsters-a-monstrous-life-sim-game

There's also a new OP (the old one was getting pretty stale) and a new trailer!

[right here]

Hey guys, another quick patch went up tonight in advance of tomorrow's Kickstarter campaign.

Like Alpha 1.01 it's a small patch, but it contains many more changes and even a couple new features, so it's worth checking out if you haven't exhausted the previous demo yet.

You can grab the latest it and read the patch notes right here

[Village Monsters Dev Diary Digest]

Hello monster friends!

It's the weekend, and that means another edition of the Village Monsters Dev Diary Digest (VMD3)

The marathon continues! This past week saw the release of the latest demo, and it was a big one.

www.warpdogs.com/were-release/

I want to thank all the people who took the time to share feedback! You are making Village Monsters a better game. You can expect another release tomorrow that contains more features and bugfixes reported via feedback

The Kickstarter is coming soon. Real soon. As in, in the next 48 hours! I'm so pumped. And nervous. Mostly pumped!

As with last week I'm going to keep the text at a minimum and make this a screenshot blitz. Let's get to it

I did a fair amount of work on the last hobby prototype, Cooking. It's far from where I want it, but it'll improve over time

Remember the potion system? I went and combined it with food effects to open the door for all sorts of goofy fun. Snowberry Shrooms now properly chill you to the bone, while Spicy Shrooms put an extra kick in your step

A new area, the forest, has been implemented. This is also your first chance to investigate some of the glitches and faults ruining the world outside the village

The first of many quests have been added - meet all villagers in town! There's no reward for finding them all (yet...), but it's a good way to track your progress

Finally, more helper text has been added to Home Customizer mode. You also are automatically placed in this mode when placing a new piece of furniture

[Happy Full Moon, Y'all]

Happy Full Moon, Y'all
A new full moon means a new version of Village Monsters for you to enjoy. I'm happy to announce that the latest demo, Alpha 1, is now officially released.

Go download it now!

This is a big release, so I included the patch notes in a whole other post - go check them out if you're into that kind of thing!

It's a great milestone, but with the Kickstarter coming up next week there's no rest for the wicked quite yet. My attention now shifts toward finishing up the loose ends in the Kickstarter.

However, there is other good news - because I want present the best possible demo for the Kickstarter (and for you, of course!), you can expect another release within the next week that contains even more features and polish.

Feel free to leave your feedback here, or send me an email at josh@warpdogs.com. Thanks guys!

As 'promised', this week's edition of the VMD3 is late, and it'll be quite brief. I'm keeping descriptions to a minimum and instead focusing of a screenshot blitz.

First up, some usual housekeeping: September has begun, and with it begins the most important month of my entire life. Nearly a 9 months ago I quit my day job to pursue this dream of creating games, and this month will be my first attempt at making it a viable.

On September 6th I'm releasing the Alpha 1 demo of Village Monsters. This is an enormous release that builds upon everything I've done in the last 9 months.

A week later, on September 12th, I launch my Kickstarter campaign that'll run through September and into the appropriately spooky month of October. I'm very excited and anxious for you all to see what I have cooking.

Ok. Enough words. Onto the screenshot blitz.



More village changes have been enacted. The still-unnamed Treasure Chest merchant - run by Skunkworks, the Mimic - has been converted into furniture-only...



...while a new General Store (run by Bottes) has been constructed to sell food, potions, and other sundries



Nearly a month ago I renamed all the months of the in-game calendar, but until now that has only existed in an Excel doc, not the game. That has changed



New interiors have been added to all new home. That has also prompted me to add more furniture, floor and wall types



This includes new homes + portraits and dialogue for the new villagers introduced last week.



These WIP icons for tools are still ugly, but I added numbers to each to make it a bit easier to keep track of. You can also press the number on your keyboard to quickly bring it up instead of rotating to find it



There's so much I can and want to show you, but some stuff I gotta keep under the hat for now. Here's a short clip from the upcoming Kickstarter trailer. It'll be strikingly similar to my first trailer, but like everything else it's been heavily iterated and updated. Hope you're looking forward to seeing it!

That'll do it for this week. With any luck I'll be back on a more regular schedule this week, but things are going to be pretty crazy for awhile.

It's been a wild ride. I hope it never stops. Thanks for joining me on it! <3

[Village Monsters Dev Diary Digest (VMD3)]

Hello monster friends!

It's the weekend, and that means another edition of the Village Monsters Dev Diary Digest (VMD3)

Today's update is both late and briefer than usual, but I hope i have a good excuse: with PAX being this week, Alpha 1 release next week, and Kickstarter kicking off the week after that, I've been pretty dang busy.

So no preamble this week - let's just get onto it!

Under Construction
The majority of my time last week was spent on improving the village in some pretty major ways.

First, I created and furnished four new homes for monsters to live in (though they're still pretty sparse for now). I also converted that strange skull in town into a proper home for Saley & Stapes, the two skeletal guards.

Overflow - the town's tavern and a major hangout spot for locals - was also completely revamped...in the sense that before the revamp, the exterior was unfinished and the interior didn't exist. Both outside and inside are now in a much better place.

Beyond new buildings, I also began moving things around to accommodate new ideas. I now have enough buildings to actually have something close to 'districts' in our little village - the town hall, church, and historical society fill out the Civic District, a new general store and existing furniture merchant have made something like a Commercial District, and of course the houses make up the Residential District

Here's a neat GIF showing how the village has changed and evolved in the last 8 months:

Finally, I also created 3 additional villagers and revamped a 4th. Meet Bavarian the Chef Blob, Lucy the Artistic Golem, Rainboy the Elemental, and Serin the...uh...tree.

Dynamic Camera
It seems at least once a month I get bogged down by some obnoxious camera bug that comes out of nowhere, and this month was no different.

However, this time my solution ended up turning into a feature - a dynamic camera. There's probably a better name for this, but what I mean is that the camera smoothly follows the player at its own speed as opposed to always keeping the player dead-center on screen.

This fits better with the relaxed style of game I'm making, and also looks a lot better in motion. It's hard to capture via a GIF, so you'll need to trust me that it looks better.

New Critters?
Sometimes I sit down to do one thing and end up feeling motivated to do something else entirely. That was the case this week, and it's why I ended up creating four new critters to find and collect.

I won't share them so they can remain a bit of a secret, but here's the Capricious Cumulus, a cloud-based critter that oscillates between feelings of timidness and aggression.

That'll do this for this week. Next week is likely to be just as sparse and late, but things are going very well and you'll have a chance to see for yourself on September 6th when Alpha 1 releases.

Don't forget that the Kickstarter starts a week later on September 12th. It's going to be a hectic month, but this fall is shaping up to be a hell of a good time.

Hah! Well I guess it's kinda like a secret society...

Thank you for the offer of support! I'll need all the help I can get

[Attention all Freemonsters & Humans]

Attention all Freemonsters & Humans

BIG NEWS! Village Monsters is coming to Kickstarter on September 12th!

You can of course expect continued news and updates from me in this topic, but if you want to be the first to know when the Kickstarter drops then I definitely recommend signing up for the Village Monsters newsletter

That's awesome. That's actually my preferred method for adding nearly anything to the game - accidental features that become real features, test characters that get promoted to NPC status, etc. I love it when a feature or character has a story or context behind it!

Did you ever play any of the old "tales of middle earth" variants? I never got far with them, they're insanely difficult roguelikes, but I'd keep making kobold characters to see how fast they died, and ended up making two differently named "clans" because their histories started getting stored in the game's archives so I'd treat each run as the next generation trying to compete with the other clan to see which clan's characters lasted longest before death and got most glory in the ingame archive

I do like the seasonal stuff btw, good job

I played a bit ToME4 which I understand is the more recent (and non-LotR) version. But I definitely agree with this, and its my favorite part of Roguelikes

Dwarf Fortress has this as well. In fact, the original intent of DF (though it's since changed) is to play city builder mode to create a wonderful fortress before it's overrun by demons or goblins or something else, and then to explore the ruins of your previous fort as an adventurer. As the adventurer you could examine engravings and artifacts and learn about the history of the people that inhabited the fort. It was all very cool.

Hah, yes, that's a good idea. I always like reading gravestones in games