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TOPIC | Village Lodge Part II

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Squid

The Not-Village

(they/them)

admin

Dec 22, 2022 10:41:44
cats in a post office and by roadside market

This update brings the second half of the village lodge and a development plan check-in.

-- Last edited on Dec 22, 2022 10:42:10
teahug
Cat's End Artist/Developer
Hope all of you are enjoying your cat time!
Not-cat with a black solid shorthair coatno white markings neutral eyes. aaaaaaaaaaObsidian SmokeWhite Wildflower CrownBlue Wildflower Necklace

Squid

The Not-Village

(they/them)

admin

Dec 22, 2022 10:52:04
Hello everyone! I have a couple of weeks off of work and plan to work on the game full-time during this period (thus why this update is on a Thursday instead of a Sunday). As a disclaimer, since this update is finishing up the village lodge, this is going to be an update tailored more towards the very late game and might not be the most interesting update for November newbies.

teacup1 Thank you!

First of all, I want to thank you all so much for your response to the ad changes. All of the support (and cute little cat pictures and art and such) really does make such a big difference. This has already raised much more than adsense ever would have, and it's much more fun to look at.


house Village Lodge Part II

After appointing a mayor, you can now unlock and assign 5 new special occupations (no more sad lonely page 4 cat, yay!). These will function similarly to the mayor, but each with their own special effect.

Note: Once you assign a cat to one of these special roles, you can't go back to not having that role, so I highly, highly recommend you do not do this when you have a small village as it will decrease your gathering capacity and you can't go back. (This is why the lodge intentionally has such a high crafting cost).

Doctor
The village's doctor is a smart but caring cat who spends all of their time caring for the others in the village, whether they have a little cold, are expecting a new litter of beans, or were messing around and fell off the roof!

The doctor is unlocked by building the apothecary, so many of you will already have this one unlocked. Doctors provide HP boosts to the village in adventuring based on their Cleverness and Benevolence as follows:

- Cleverness: 17-19 [+5%], 20-22 [+10%], 23-25 [+15%], 26-28 [+20%], 29+ [+25%]
- Benevolence: 8-10 [+4%], 11-13 [+8%], 14+ [+12%]

Innkeeper
Running a little inn can get lots of travelers stopping in your village, helping you to meet more new cats!

The innkeeper is unlocked by building one of the inns. Innkeepers allow the use of traveling cats in scenes and boost the odds of getting a cat from Nestor* based on their Extroversion as follows:

- Extroversion: 8-10 [+1%], 11-13 [+2%], 14+ [+3%]

*This chance comes from common offerings and thus does not lower odds of getting rare clothing or decor from Nestor. If you don't want the boosted odds, you can just assign a low-extroversion innkeeper.

Merchant

Someone has to sell all your random things running about, and what better cat to wander about, selling and haggling, than your merchant.

The merchant is unlocked by building one of the roadside markets. Merchants reduce the cost of out-of-season items from Whiskers Wares based on their Extroversion as follows:

- Extroversion: 8-10 [-10%], 11-13 [-20%], 14+ [-30%]

Mail Carrier
Sending one of your residents to work for the postal service can really help to increase the letter capacity of the village.

The mail carrier is unlocked by building one of the post offices. Mail Carriers increase the amount of mail a village can receive* from its traveling cats based on their Extroversion and Agility as follows:

- Agility: 17-19 [+5%], 20-22 [+10%], 23-25 [+15%], 26-28 [+20%], 29+ [+25%]
- Extroversion: 8-10 [+4%], 11-13 [+8%], 14+ [+12%]

*This includes both odds of returning a letter and the maximum number of letters.

Teacher

A smart and kind cat to look after all the young cats and teach them everything they need to know!

The teacher is unlocked by building one of the schools. Teachers unlock the 'student' job for kittens and adolescents. Students have a small random chance of permanently increasing their adult stats when performing their day job in Gather Resources. The chance is based on the teacher's Cleverness and Benevolence as follows:

- Base odds of stat increase are 1 in [50 - CLEVERNESS - BENEVOLENCE]. Student's dedication will be subtracted from this as well. Odds cannot exceed 1:9.


book Student Occupation

The new student occupation is an indoor job that uses Cleverness and Dedication. It requires Black Ink to perform (though it returns extra ink at a higher rate than the other tier-2 jobs, so it shouldn't run your supplies down as badly as some of the others.) While it doesn't return much interesting in terms of resources (mostly just extra homework assignments which are only good for quickselling, but occasionally the odd other crafting currency), it does give potential permanent stat boosts.

The following new items appear when performing the student job:
resourcesWriting Practice
resourcesMath Practice
resourcesScience Practice
resourcesHistory Practice
resourcesClassroom Doodles


stick New Craftable Items

New buildings (to unlock the special occupations) and other decorations can now be crafted.

For Builders:
buildingsLarge Inn
buildingsLarge Autumn Inn
buildingsLarge Haunted Inn
buildingsBlue Roadside Market
buildingsGreen Roadside Market
buildingsYellow Roadside Market
buildingsBrown Roadside Market
buildingsPlain Roadside Market
buildingsOrange Roadside Market
buildingsBlack Roadside Market
buildingsPurple Roadside Market
buildingsRed Roadside Market
buildingsPink Roadside Market
buildingsPost Office
buildingsAutumn Post Office
buildingsHaunted Post Office
buildingsSchoolhouse
buildingsAutumn Schoolhouse
buildingsHaunted Schoolhouse

For Clothiers:
decorBlue Pennant Streamers
decorGreen Pennant Streamers
decorYellow Pennant Streamers
decorBrown Pennant Streamers
decorPlain Pennant Streamers
decorOrange Pennant Streamers
decorBlack Pennant Streamers
decorPurple Pennant Streamers
decorRed Pennant Streamers
decorPink Pennant Streamers

For Blacksmiths:
decorCast Iron Stove


envelope Boxes!!!!

Your kitties can now get boxes in the mail from both spam and traveler letters.

decorExtra Large Light Package
decorLarge Light Package
decorMedium Light Package
decorSmall Light Package
decorExtra Large Dark Package
decorLarge Dark Package
decorMedium Dark Package
decorSmall Dark Package


beans1 Other Changes

- Playing cats have been nudged 2px upwards in their frames. This should significantly decrease the number of items where I accidentally went out of bounds when drawing clothing on this pose (and thus decrease the number I need to redraw or edit manually). As far as I know, I never accidentally crossed the boundary upwards, so the small shift should be okay. Note: This will also have shifted them up 2px in the scenes, so you might need to nudge them back down slightly.

- Adventuring resources (moss, acorns, etc.) no longer appear rarely from traveling letters as these items are now released. (Travelers sometimes return unreleased items for future updates as a teaser and this teaser is no longer necessary).

seeds Long-term Development Plan Check-in

Since it's been about a year since I reconfigured the development plan, I thought it would be a good time to check in on where we are in beta.

Things that have been completed:
- The Village Lodge and most of the major post-alpha clean-up (though cleaning things will always be ongoing)
- Adventuring (minus Ascension, which may be pushed back to post-beta as I think I want the level requirement to be higher than just 4.)

Things that are still left to do:
- Seasonal events! I'm very excited about these.
- Premium content (premium items, custom user-created items)

This leaves us at about halfway through, though adventuring was quite large so the second half might go a lot quicker than the first.

This is also a good time for me to think about whether there are new items that I'd like to prioritize further and add to the plan. You'll notice that the last few updates I've had a little line in the what's next section called "mentors and students", and I've also mentioned wanting to make some changes to help prevent people from getting stuck gameplay-wise when they have a ton of kittens.

This line has turned into a much bigger, more long-term project that is no longer something with a scope such that I can just toss it into the general qol/fix cycle. It's going to end up needing its own category, so at the end of the beta section of the dev plan, I'm going to add a new section called Cat Relationships Expansion.

So, what is the Cat Relationships Expansion? Let's get into it!

Mentors

This all started with the idea for a mentorship relationship - intended to be a close, intergenerational relationship, one where a much older cat can give personal guidance, advice, support, and more to a younger cat. It's a lifelong relationship, much like that you might have with an older neighbor who would babysit you when your parents were away, or an aunt or grandparent.

I really, really wanted this relationship to be something that family could have in addition to their typical family relationship. (You'll see why that turns into a big deal in a bit).

The mechanics of the Mentor Relationship:
- Each cat (kitten or older) can only have one mentor. For the purposes of adventuring, it's a very close (+2) relationship.
- The mentor must be at least 112 days older than the cat to be mentored (tentatively called the fosterling), but adults can have them too!
- In kittens, assigning a mentor changes "in-game custody" of the cat to the mentor, such that:
- - - If all of a parent's kittens have a mentor, the parents are free to travel or move villages.
- - - Kittens can move to another village if a mentor is assigned for them there.
- - - Kittens can be assigned to one parent as the mentor, allowing the other parent to return from a cross-village beaning.

Like explained earlier, Mentor/Fosterling will be the first relationship pair that can cross over between family and non-family (listed on both sides of the profile). This is.... a big change.

Two cats being tied to each other in multiple ways is currently not something the system can handle at all, so this will require significant rebuilding work. But I really didn't want to add this feature without this being a possibility. And of course, once we open up the door to cats having multiple kinds of relationships, this essentially opens a whole floodgate of possibilities:

More Dynamic Families

Once the system is built to handle this, other kinds of friendships and rivalries can be opened up to cross over with family. There's no reason not to allow that once it's possible. Imagine: rival siblings, best friend cousins, beloved mentor grandmas, etc.

There will need to be a prioritization order (aka rivalry overrides friendships overrides family-type relationships, or something of the sort) to determine which gets "used" in gameplay (adventuring and scenarios), but this should add a lot of possibilities for fun lore.

Found Family

I know lots of people get two similar cats from Nestor and headcanon them as siblings or cousins or other such family members, and I'd love to make it so that you can assign cats as found family in this way.

Surrogacy/Adoption

I have, for a very long time, been idling in my mind an adoption/surrogacy system of some kind. This would be some way to spawn in cats to be raised by a different cat pair. The reason for this is that I think it'd be nice for, say, null cats to raise a full litter and such! Maybe their friends would have some tea and pass the babies over to the couple.

This would also allow users to use their cats to spawn beans with the intention of giving them to other users (and would mean that those with two north partners or null partners would not have to wait for Nestor to RNG them a baby).

This was actually in the original plans, but when I started looking into implementation last January, it ended up being so technically complicated to execute (there were a lot of relationships to manage and shift, a ton of potential exploits, and about a million ways for it to go horribly wrong) that at the time I couldn't figure out how to make it happen and decided it wasn't worth it at that point in time.

The earliest beta users will likely remember a time where the beans prompt blurb actually mentioned adoption.

I'm still not actually sure how to make it happen, but it's on the table of things I've been thinking about for a long time. I don't want to promise it will happen because, as I said, there are about a million ways for it to go wrong, but it's something I'd like to see and is something I've been contemplating.

Summary

So... why has what was going to just be one new mentorship relationship turned into something so much bigger? Essentially, I want to build more diversity in the kinds of families, family dynamics, and relationships that not-cats can have. What we have is a great start, but there is a lot of opportunity to more fully develop this system as it really does sit central to the site.

This is, however, a huge project, and not something I can just smash out in a couple of weeks or idly toss into the site. A lot of it is really complicated and, given the infrastructure we currently have, means I'll end up spending months planning and thinking it over because if it is rushed, the chance of it making a hurricane of your cats' relationships is really high.

I'm telling you this now because I've seen that things like this are the #1 most commonly recurring suggestion of what people would like to see, and I do want you to know that I'm looking into it!

This is tentatively going to sit at the tail end of beta. I'm putting it there because I do not know if I'll be able to figure this out any time soon, and if I do, it will be slow. I also welcome suggestions for different kinds of relationships and general ideas (though I can't guarantee anything due to the technical limitations).

thonk Bug Fixes

- When disabling personality mayor setting, the text no longer reads "enabling"

- Text color has been corrected on dark theme stat cube button

- You are no longer less likely to get mail with 1-4 travelers than you are with 0 travelers (I uncovered this one when adding the mail carrier)

- It's no longer possible to sell zero items to Brian or buy zero items from city shops and generate a 0 note nothing receipt.

- Cat relist button and cat recruit board error messages no longer says item instead of cat

- Too long title error no longer eats the content when sending PMs

- Replying to a message no longer bypasses changes that might have been made in privacy settings since the initial message was sent

- Advertisement images are now centered
-- Last edited on Dec 22, 2022 12:41:46
teahug
Cat's End Artist/Developer
Hope all of you are enjoying your cat time!
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magpie

shen ye

account age 8/9

Dec 22, 2022 11:39:57
oh!!! this is so exciting thank u for the update cryinghug
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jac

Catalis

(she/they)

account age 8/9

Dec 22, 2022 11:43:54
sparklepartysparkleparty absolutely BEYOND EXCITED for all these updates, thank you so much for all your hard work!!!!
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Sprucefort

(any pronouns)

account age 7/9

Dec 22, 2022 11:44:25
Whilst I can't do much with the new features I look forward to messing around with them in the future! I'm also looking forward to all the family update features incoming even if It will take a while. Don't feel pressured to rush at all.
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Unknown

(he/him)

account age 8/9

Dec 22, 2022 11:48:39
Hope the update went (and continues to go) smoothly! Excited to go and figure out which of my cats I trust the most with the village's future in their paws, which I am sure will work out perfectly fine. Probably.

And oh wow, mentoring sounds fun! I've been hoping for found family for a while, and the chance to expand on my cats' relationships with each other opens up much more potential for lore. Not many virtual pet sites explore social dynamics to such an exclusive extent.

The new items are cute, too. Can't wait to make them!

Squid
- You are no longer less likely to get mail with 1-4 travelers than you are with 0 travelers (I uncovered this one when adding the mail carrier)


I knew I wasn't imagining it! flames
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canine

DIAMOND DOGS

(it/its)

account age 7/9

Dec 22, 2022 11:49:17
haha yeah, november noobie here, i dont have a mayor yet. but the new update sounds cool !! and i also really like the items from the student occupation, they're soo cute sparkleparty
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x

(hy/hymn/hys)

account age 8/9

Dec 22, 2022 11:49:45
Aaa this is awesome, thank you squid sparkles
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Kokiru

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Dec 22, 2022 11:55:41
Ohh, I actually made a "sibling rivalry/best friend" suggestion just a few days ago - I guess that suggestion can be closed then laughing

These are some really exciting news! The relationship expansion sounds very promising, I really hope there can be a way to make most if not all of those planned things happen!
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Dec 22, 2022 12:14:16
LETS GO
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