March Dev Log

March Dev Log

Hello everyone!

Another month of development on the game has gone by and we are finally in the Spring!



However, let's not forget one major global event which happened that's slowed down the entire globe to almost a halt... Animal Crossing came out on the 20th of March for the Nintendo Switch.

Now I'm not here to talk about other games or give you a review on it, however, I will say that it's great. For me personally, it's been really good to see how different it is to 'The Isle of Bobbin'.

I'll be honest, in the back of my mind I've always worried that I'm just making some kind of rip-off version of Animal Crossing; and then when I saw the trailer for the latest game I was devastated to see that not only have they added crafting and some element of survival (although that's not the case) they even set it on an Island!!! I got really worried that people would see all my hard work as me copying this game (even though I'd been working on it for a year prior to the Animal Crossing Trailer). However, having put around 100+ hours into the game so far I'm happy to say that it's really made me realise that my game is TOTALLY different... And I'm full of confidence that, indeed, I'm not subconsciously stealing! Hooray!

The other good thing that came out of it is that I'm 100% sure I need to port this game to the Switch; it's a long journey but I'm starting to look into it as much as I can. Let's see. I never owned one until now, my wife got the Animal Crossing Limited edition Switch and then I got a Switch Lite; I think so far it's one of the best modern consoles I've ever had.

Anyhow, enough bout other games and let's talk 'The Isle of Bobbin'!

The last month has been focused on character dialogue and adding parts of the main town! That's right! I'm finally doing some fun bits.

The first part I've enjoyed was adding a new family of Mice to the game! The father mouse, called Walmond runs the travel agents/tour guide company. If you speak to him once a day, he'll unlock another location on your map and tell you all about what you'll find there. It's helped me build on the lore of the game a lot which is cool; although there is still a lot to go it's been a good start and nice to have a central character that knows all about the Island.

Next came his wife and kids! One of the two children, Jack, is a little bundle of energy and excitement and loves nothing more than Present Day (which comes at the end of December lol). His brother, Irving though, is not all that happy and I'm going to leave it there so I don't spoil things.

Both Children go to the local school which led me to the realisation that I need weekends in the game! I totally forgot about that, so I have to reverse engineer them back into the game; however, this was turned out to not be as hard as I had assumed. Now the kids will be playing in the park at weekends and at school during the week; which will allow me more options in creating quests, dialogue, etc.

I must admit one other thing, I haven't recorded a dev log in time for this update but will be this weekend so please watch the YouTube channel for a new post soon. The fact I'm now working from home hasn't actually afforded me any more time to develop and do all the social media type stuff since we're all adjusting to this new lifestyle and I gotta say it's been hard to pick up another laptop at home and crack on with the game when that's what I've been doing all day for my real-life job... So in actual fact, I've done less on the game than a normal month! I had thought that I'd get so much more done... but let's see.

Anyhow, hope you're all safe and well and we're sending our love to you all!

Phaedra Games Ltd

“There are far better things ahead than any we leave behind.”
C.S. Lewis