Greetings, friends! Happy Friday, and happy dev diary day.
I've spent most of this week expanding on the weather system and better integrating it with the game. Weather and seasonal events are meant to be a major roadmap item, so in doing it through monthly updates, it ends up happening a bit piecemeal. Still, I think weather itself is fairly well-integrated now — aside from adding more events and making some existing stuff more reactive to it, which will happen over time.
The algorithm also needs a bit of tweaking. When I implemented it, I spoke about the simplex noise algorithm and its purpose in providing a sort of smoothing between weather conditions so that they don't appear to swing randomly back and forth so much. This mostly works, but not perfectly. I've already made some changes for this update, but with 0.7 coming soon, we're due some very thorough internal playtesting, so I'll work with it more then.
Longer term, it's seasonal events and changes to specific locations that will really be the bulk of that roadmap item. Extended events like spring break and creating the campus lake location will all help to make weather and seasons feel relevant. But until then, we can still have some fun with it.
For example, we have noonycurt's wet clothing system! Clothing that gets soaked by rain may cling to the body, become transparent, or both, which of course can have all sorts of consequences when you're observed by others. Clothing will dry over time once you're out of the rain, or you can dry off instantly by visiting a restroom or putting your clothes through the laundry.
I've added a handful of weather-related events that affect your character's mood. For example, being outside on a mild sunny day is very nice, or just being warm again after a chilly day yesterday. On the other hand, being stuck in class when the weather is great outside isn't so fun, but that's life.
Snow has been better integrated as well. Following the first heavy snowfall in winter, snow will accumulate, changing maps and location images, and it'll stick around until it melts in warm weather in spring.
I also went through and changed a bunch of events that relate to outdoor activities, mention grass, etc., to be reactive to when weather is poor or when there's snow on the ground. Long term, I'd like seasons — at least the snowy times of year — to really change the character of the campus. Winter does come with some negatives, like needing to bundle up, so there should be some things to look forward to with it too.
Additionally, bad weather will change where NPCs like to hang out. During cold or rainy weather, the campus park will become less popular, but your residents' hall and the dining halls will become more populated. Again, longer term, I intend for the campus lake location to be a reliably popular year-round hangout.
This brings summer to mind. I've noticed an increasing clamor to allow summer to be optionally playable. Skipping summer was a decision I made just prior to release, when there was only one job, zero mini-careers, and four major event sets — without classes, there just wasn't enough to do to sustain the player through a whole month. Not to mention that, realistically, the dorms should close over the summer, so the player wouldn't have anywhere to live.
Well, that latter problem still needs to be fully solved, but that's certainly not insurmountable, so I would like to begin to think about adding the option to play through the summer now that there are more things to do. It's a little bit easier said than done, because the assumption that the campus is fully open and operating is baked into quite a few scattered systems, but I think getting this done will be part of checking off the weather and seasons roadmap item.
In any case, this is probably about it for weather itself, at least for the moment! The July update has only gotten about a week of work so far, which is less than average, so I'll be carrying on with it up until public release. After that, however, I'll be making a hard push to get 0.7, the Greek house update, into early access by the end of July.
So: early access for the July update on Monday, more work on it through that week, then public release, followed by a marathon of work to get Greek houses ready for early access. That's the plan!
So you'll hear from me Monday, and I'll be back next Friday as well for another progress return. Until then, have a good weekend! And, as always, thank you so much for your support!