This week was a full-fledged assault on finishing the game. Although it’s not quite done yet, all 3 major animal scenarios are now present and accounted for within the game.
“The other side of the river” used to be an empty place not worth spending much time in, but as of today, you can meet such exciting creatures as the wild boar and the rabbit. It’s nice to see the forest increasingly more populated. Deforestation might be a major issue the world faces in real life, but here in our fictional temperate paradise, it’s only getting more lush.
That’s actually not entirely true. One of the issues we’ve continually found ourselves dealing with (and have mentioned here once or twice as well) is performance and optimization on the Chromebook platform. It’s really wonderful that schools across the world are increasingly able to have access to affordable PCs, but these things are not really made for running games. Google Docs: A+. Open-world 3D games run in the Chrome browser: not great, but it’s high priority for us to figure this out. All of our work will be for naught if when you try to play the game, you can barely move the fox around because the frame rate is chugging in the single digits. To address this, we’ve had to strip away some of the trees, adjust the collision system, and dialed back the effects seen during the sensory overload. This has helped alleviate stress on the CPU, but we still have some tweaking to do.
Meanwhile, our designers are still at work on the post-game discussion that will definitively link the game’s themes to autism awareness. This should be completed by early next week and we’re excited to test it with children and see how they react when we finally pull back the curtain.
Their reactions and more next week. Until then, check out our favorite new feature:
Bee tech! We’ve got bees, ladies and gentlemen. They fly around, they buzz, and probably are up to all sorts of nefarious things that we can’t even begin to imagine.