As the semester comes to an end, and my time working on Wicker and the Whispering Flame as my senior thesis project wraps, I want to take a moment to provide a final update on the project, where I've been, and what's in the future. For my previous online updates regarding Wicker, you can refer to my earliest blog post on the IMM Senior Thesis blog or the previous (very brief) devlog I posted when Wicker's playtest went live. 

We've come a long way...

I want to start by at least addressing how far Wicker has come in the last few months. This is the largest game I've ever made, and even unfinished I'm really happy with how many new (to me) and interesting systems I got to work on. Since December, I built a state machine driven enemy AI system, a fairly comprehensive and flexible item system, drawn up and implemented a boatload of UI, and just generally designed a diverse range of gameplay features. The fact that I got Wicker into a shape where I could release it as even a very rough playtest is something I'm proud of. I'm going to talk a little bit next about things that went wrong, so I just wanted to say all this because I don't want to downplay the fact that I am legitimately happy with everything I've managed to do over the course of these 5 months.

Where have I been?

I had promised in my previous post that I was planning to try and release a playtest for Wicker every 2 weeks, or at least once a month, which clearly hasn't happened, so why? In short, things just didn't go as smoothly as I hoped - it happens. I was working on a complete overhaul to the game's procedural generation in the hopes of making Wicker's environments more natural looking and interesting to navigate. A lot came together really quickly - I created a ton of 3D models, improving upon my earlier work. I also built a much much more complicated system for forest generation which used a combination of Poisson disc sampling and Perlin noise to achieve a more natural and pleasing looking distribution of trees... among other things.   

This all came together quickly, and I believe did a lot to make Wicker's environments look and feel a lot better, but it came at a cost. Wicker's new forests looked much nicer but they also had a lot more going on - they were both larger and denser with stuff, and it started to tank the performance of the game. I won't get into the details (it was mostly just a matter of too many discrete models in the scene at once), but I did know how to fix it. Unfortunately, for silly reasons I had trouble getting things working and it resulted in me needing to step away from the project for a few days. A few days turned into a few weeks when I found myself trying to catch up with other classes. Although I did eventually come back and fix it (I had forgotten to tick a single checkbox...) I realized that I would not have time to complete everything I had planned for the project in time. 

Changing over the games 3D assets and world gen system had a lot of repercussions on... everything about Wicker. The scale of the world was off, and the environment altogether felt different to navigate. I would need to do a lot of tweaking to get things feeling how I wanted them again. The gameplay loop of the playtest also really relied on the old world gen system, so with that scrapped, I would need to adjust and redo a lot just to get the old system working in the new environment. At this point, it just wasn't viable time wise, and with the semester coming closer to an end, and more work piling up for other courses, I decided to leave thing as they were for the time being.

So, what's next?

In the short term, not a lot. With showcase coming up, I want to release a short trailer just showing off the game as it currently is, and I might prototype and release footage of a few new spells, but that's it. 

I want to keep working on Wicker after I graduate, however. I still have no plans to develop it into a full game (the codebase is a bit of a mess, and there are ideas I want to devote more of my time to), but I had so much more I wanted to do. When I first started to plan Wicker out, I wrote an (unfinished) game design document that was over 15 pages, and I would say that only about a quarter of those ideas made it into the game so far. I had plans for more items, more unique weapons and enemies, a potion brewing system, more world structures, a more involved gameplay loop, and a boss battle... and probably more I'm forgetting. I can't promise that all of that will make it into some future release, but some of it should! 

At a minimum I would like to release a second playtest which includes a larger world and the updated generation system. If all goes well, I may get around to a more 'final' version, with more items, enemies, and a proper ending. 

Thanks for Reading (and playing)!

Thank you to everyone who took the time to look at Wicker. I know it's rough around the edges, but I'm still proud of it. If you haven't please check out the game and leave me some feedback! Everything helps. 

If you want to follow future updates about Wicker, or hear about new games I create, please follow my itch.io page!