#wishbonegame

I am pleased to announce that the Wishbone Fall Year 1 beta is now available for download for Windows PCs! Go to the Beta Download page to grab the latest patch.

Wishbone is a cowboy character drama with farming sim elements. Raise critters, farm crops, and get entangled in the eccentric townspeople's personal drama via quests, minigames, tons of dialog, and a story that gradually builds in intensity as the seasons pass.

@wishbonegame knows how to get me wondering about the characters

I finally feel seen in a way I didn't realize I was missing until I saw the right honorific and pronouns pop up. And how everyone just gets it right from then on...ain't too proud to admit I teared up a bit.

And other impressions--I'm not particularly far in so no in depth review but it's cute, the characters are very fleshed out for a beta and I would already die for my dog and my cow. The controls are also fairly intuitive, which I appreciate.

Hello everyone! It's been a while, hasn't it?

I've been kinda underwater with IRL stuff these last few months and was feeling frustrated making so many monthly updates that amounted to "still busy, working where I can, don't know when it'll change". So I took a little break to focus on the project more quietly.

And it's paid off! Fall Y1 is done and the private beta went out to testers yesterday. I'm going to spend the next few weeks working with them to get bugs fixed and finishing up some tertiary features (like the weekly town newspaper that reports on goings-on and the player's actions) to create something that's ready for public release.

It's a little hard to show many screenshots from Fall without going into spoiler territory because whoooa boy does the plot tempo ramp up this month. You get the chance to know the outlaw characters much more deeply and some of the existing Wishbone residents are revealed to be a little less law-abiding than they might initially appear. The cutscenes/events and quests are more involved and fancier, with more complex animations and sequences that build on what was developed for Spring and Summer. And, before the season is up, you'll see betrayal, explosions, grievous injury, and maybe even a little bit of named character death.

August update! A little late, but... y'know how it is.

Life continues to be busy, but I've been working on patching the upcoming Summer Y1 beta in response to bugs discovered by beta testers. Currently, the Summer beta needs one cutscene and two small quests, plus some Ask About menu work and some additional beta testing but is otherwise pretty much complete.

My big priorities last month were knocking out reported bugs and doing some low priority but time-consuming tasks, like improving the menu contrast. I combed through 3000+ graphics and redid a huge chunk of them. Hopefully it's a little easier on the eyeballs now.

Little late on this one (it's been a busy couple of weeks), but the Fall quests and events are being implemented now! Currently have several small and medium ones done and one big one that's mostly done (still troubleshooting the scene playing out, making sure characters don't get stuck and animate properly).

December Update!

I finished all the Summer 1st event and quest stuff from the last update, did some more work on Ask About retooling, and just finished implementing the second event of Summer year 1.

I also fixed the code to unlock window resizing with our custom game window size/aspect ratio... I couldn't get the maximize window button to work without digging deeper into Windows window control API than I was willing to do (needed to find a way to get a "close enough" fullscreen window to count as fullscreen and/or do black box padding to maintain the aspect ratio) but you can still drag the corners of the window to make it bigger. Why such a key feature is disabled by default in VX Ace is a mystery for the ages.

December's never a particularly productive month due to the holidays but I got a lot more done this year than last year. I'm finding the rhythm of building quests... it's really not so bad with the new system (big ones with lots of characters and map transitions still are rather time-consuming, though).

Still angling for Summer Y1 to be done around the end of spring. At present, we have 2/8 events for it complete. However, a few of the remaining events are quite big and there are also a number of sidequests for the month that need writing and implementing, so there's still much left to do.