on all hallow's ween, a post for you

hey everybody!!!
welcome tooOoOoo another "heres what ive been workin on this past month" post!!! it's been a busy month. the focus this time around has been on two systems: tapes and player customization!

ENTER A NEW ERA OF HOME ENTERTAPEMENT
tapes. you know em, you love em. open palm slammin one of those bad boys into the slot gets your day started off just SO right.
however, all your favorite tapes from the outside world... they don't work quite right here in the zones. your game tapes, your vhs tapes, your music tapes - none of these tapes fit in the slots here!! it sounds like a disaster, but worry not. the genius mistics at fobis corp have engineered a special type of mistforged media that works just dandy in the zones.


a tragically unreleased port of a classic title

in zone sweet zone, tapes work a bit different from regular furniture. you don't have immediate access to every tape in the game from the start - you'll be collecting them, through npcs, special areas, events, and Other Methods. you can pick tapes from the menu and place em around the room (on your shelves, for instance!) if you like! but, when you insert a tape into a piece of furniture with a tape slot, they serve a second purpose: an audio-visual experience!


Forest Lights, a tape created by my pal Ashley!

BASICALLY WHAT THIS MEANS IS if you liked collecting tvs and music in animal crossing, this system's for you! each tape has a unique looping animation and song, as well as its own tape color and suspiciously high resolution tape art. i'm hoping they'll be a great way to add some atmosphere to your zone!

some of these spells are still, in the works,

LETS MAKE A TAPE
at some point i'm going to be opening up submissions for tapes, as well! each tape has three components: a low-res looping gif, an audio loop (any length), and cart art. eventually i'd like to get some kind of submission repository together for folks who can only create one or two of the required components... maybe you can do music but not pixels, or you can do pixels but don't feel up to putting together the boxart. i think it'd be fun if folks could help each other out and get inspired by the gif/music loops others have put together, to collab on a finished tape!

swap 'em in and out! each tv has a default program that it'll revert to when no tape is inserted, but that wasn't done when i recorded this gif!!! WHOOPS

i've got some more work to do before i'm ready to accept submissions, but feel free get those braingears crankin! once the system's in and the game's Extant, folks who create a tape that's added to the game will naturally be granted a copy of that tape for free.

Knight & Slime Chivalrobics tape art courtesy of my buddy leigh!!

SHARE YOUR FAVES
i mentioned earlier that there are Other Methods of getting tapes. this refers, of course, to "Tape Shards". see, mist technology isn't perfect yet. sometimes when you're blowin the dust out of a tape before slottin' it in, some Tape Shards fall out. just some extra tape that happened by accident. you can gift these shards to other players through their mailboxes, and once a player gathers enough shards for a specific tape (not a whole lot - i'm thinkin 3-5) they can forge it into a full-blown tape! this allows you to share your favorite tapes (and tapes you've created) with friends and strangers.

i'm hoping folks will have a lot of fun creating and collecting tapes!! zone is a game without a whole lot of Ownership/Collection aspects when it comes to items, so i want these to be super fun!! keep an eye peeled for submission guidelines sometime this month!

HEY HOW ABOUT SOME PLAYER CUSTOMIZATION
wahoo!! it's time to start focusing on that good good stuff. i'm really excited about this aspect of zone!!

the first two aspects of your character in zone sweet zone are your name and pronouns. they don't have any effect on the appearance options available to your character, and can be changed freely from the menu if you ever feel the need. they're the only two free text entry fields with content potentially visible to other players that i have planned, so please be nice with them! (there'll be a banned word list to hopefully handle most attempted rudenesses, and i can manually fix anything awful that slips through, but... PLEASE JUST BE NICE,)


each spot has a little dialogue sample to make sure you're comfortable with the way your pronouns sound in practice!

once you've got those squared away, you can customize the rest of your character's appearance. i still have a whooole lotta asset creation to do, but this month i got a lot of the core systems in place! you'll be able to customize your char head to toe, with color sliders for each part. clothing will be sort of modular: for instance, in your "shirt" slot you can mix n match a top and sleeves to get the sort of look you're goin' for, and then pick details to layer on top (like a logo or stripes etc). basically i'm hoping to get the widest variety of potential Looks out of whatever assets are available!



more ui fun!!!! steadily learning how all this junk works in unity...

also, while the player character i've been using while building the game is decidedly human-ish, i'm gonna be puttin together plenty of non-human parts too - ears n snouts n tails, the works. different body types are also something i really want to do, but i don't want it to be a lazy width/height slider thing so!! i've got some figurin out to do there.

swap your styles! all two of em.

anyway!!! i'm gonna work toward getting an early version of the player editor together as a standalone thing for patrons to play with this month!! that's this month's big goal. y'all deserve something to play with after all this time, ehe.

colors!!!!!!!! hex codes are here for easy copying from slot to slot.

UHHH ok i think thats it

that's it for this past month i guess!! this next month will be a lot of work on polishing up of the tapes and player edit system. once those are done, it's time to finish up the remaining aspects of zone setup (mouse inputs for changing ground tile height, zone gravity, water level, etc).

i'm basically trying to finish things in an order that'll let folks get in and start messin' around asap, ahah. even if move-in month ends up being a little Feature Bare, i want folks to be able to get in there! after all, move-in month isn't a one-and-done launch - it's just the start of zone sweet zone as an evolving game, a lil internet home away from home.

thank you all so much for your continued support! i'm doin this all on my own and i still have a lot to learn, but i hope what i've shown and talked about is keepin you excited for what's to come! keep an eye peeled in the coming weeks for a player edit build!!

poor technique.