Monthly Update #22🪴

Hello, Sleepyheads! We’re finally getting some proper spring weather here in my part of the northern hemisphere. It’s been nice to be able to start getting out a bit more after spending all winter cooped up inside working on Little Nemo. Perhaps I’ll even get to do some work outside on the laptop soon. 😎

We’ve made lots of progress this past month, but I’m gonna try to focus on the most fun stuff. Since we have almost all of the NPC portraits done, I thought I’d show off the portraits for all of the Guardians (and tell you a little about each one). We also finished up with all the enemies and pluckable gimmicks in 🍄Mushroom Marsh🍄 so I’m gonna show off most of those. I’ve been making some good progress finishing up the Little Buddies as well, but I’m gonna save that for another month (I was originally going to include them in this month’s post, but it was getting too long and it takes a while to capture footage for everything). I also got some important work done for implementing the logic for Captain Sweetbeard and Bon-Bon (two NPCs who are very important to the game’s candy economy), but I will also save showing them off until we have more finalized sprites to show you.

So just to give you a sense of what’s behind the spoiler tag below: I’ll be spoiling stuff about all of the Guardians of Slumberland (we’ll take a look at each one, show you their dialogue portraits and share a bit about them and how you’ll help them) as well as all of the new 🍄Mushroom Marsh🍄 enemies/hazards/pluckables. So if you don’t want to spoil any of that, jump all the way down to the bottom. I’m gonna start tagging both the start and end of spoiler sections for those of you that like to jump down to the end safely.

Spoilers Abound ❗🙈❗

The first seven of the domains of Slumberland each have a Guardian entrusted by King Morpheus to maintain the safety of their domain. Since Morpheus’ disappearance, however, things have not been going well for these Guardians. Most of them have lost their scepters and been transformed into animals. It’ll be up to you to return their scepters so that they can be transformed back to their human form, and thus can help you reach the 🏛️Palace🏛️. I’m gonna be somewhat spoiling each of the Guardian’s quests as well, so if you don’t want those details, you can just skip through and check out their dialogue portraits.

Alright, let’s meet each of them…

The Guardians of Slumberland 🪄

Minerva (or Mina) 🫧Dreamswept Plains🫧

Mina is a particularly intelligent and knowledgeable Guardian who has been transformed into an Owl. Her scepter has been lost, and you’ll need to defeat the Rocktopus to get it back. She is the first you’ll rescue, and will help set you on the path to finding and rescuing the other Guardians.

Mina is cheerful and friendly once back in her human form

Once you rescue Mina, she’ll provide you with your first opportunity to spend some of the candy you’ve collected. You can buy the Owl PJs which will grant you the “experienced” perk, allowing you to fill your moon meter more quickly (as well as giving you a color scheme that closely matches Mina’s).

Jules 🍭Gumdrop Gardens🍭

Jules is a very excitable and energetic Guardian and is very much not enjoying being stuck in Narwhal form. Flip has heard something about a Piñata Dragon having the scepter.

As with the other Guardians, rescuing Jules will unlock a core memory, dispelling the Oblivion in this domain. Perhaps there are some new areas to explore or secrets to find once you’ve done so.

Wilfred (or Fred) 🍄Mushroom Marsh🍄

This young Guardian has been transformed into a Frog. He’ll be of no help like that, so we’re gonna have to go hunt down his scepter. You will have seen the boss of this area in some earlier trailers, but the final version isn’t ready to share yet.

Wilfred is happy to be able to help Nemo with his challenging task

The core memory Wilfred helps you unlock is not a pleasant one, but he will help you through it.

Alex 🎃Haunted Hollow🎃

Alex is the one Guardian that has managed not to lose his scepter and get transformed. But, despite not being in need of rescue, he has a small favor to ask before he helps you get into the 🏛️Palace🏛️…

This Guardian was part of a very special reward tier: 👤 You as One of the Guardians of Slumberland

Rather than fighting off some kind of monster, Alex will send you off to find a few video game cartridges that are scattered throughout Slumberland. You’ll need to bring those back to him if you want his help getting into the Palace. He’s a big fan of those old retro games that you need a cartridge to play. He loves playing them with his Dad.

Oliver 💎Crystal Caverns💎

Oliver is a stressed out little guy that likes the comfort and protection of his cave. Luckily for him, being transformed into a bat isn’t so bad because he’s nice and small and has a perch to hang from. But we’d still better save him. His scepter got eaten up by some abandoned mining machinery. I’m sure we won’t run into any issues getting the scepter out of it…

Oliver’s vision is pretty bad. I wonder if he enjoys being able to better “see” as a bat?

Gertie 💡Nightlight City💡

Oh no, Gertie has been transformed into a giant Dinosaur! This is terrible! Because she’ll cause mischief and mayhem in the City? No, because Gertie is terribly shy and hates attention!

Here are some concept sketches for Gertie trying her best to hide in Nightlight City. It’s not easy when you’ve become a giant Dinosaur.

And unfortunately for Gertie, Silas has been dying to get photos of this camera-shy creature that has been spotted hiding about the city. To get Gertie’s scepter, you’ll need to capture a few photos of Gertie for Silas.

Gertie is pleased to be back in her human form, though still terribly shy.

Winsor ❄️The Valley of Silence❄️

This young Guardian has been transformed into a penguin. Winsor actually doesn’t seem to mind too much and is having fun chilling with some other penguins. But still we’d better see if we can find that scepter. It probably just got left behind somewhere in the snow. As long as we don’t run into any other unforeseen encounters, wrapping things up in this domain should be pretty straight-forward…

Winsor is a child of very few words

And that is all of the Guardians of Slumberland! There are other characters you’ll meet, but these are the most important as you won’t be able to enter the 🏛️Palace🏛️ without the help of every one of them.

The Dangers of 🍄Mushroom Marsh🍄

This domain is likely the second or third you’ll explore in your adventure. Though most of the enemies here still only deal 1 damage with each hit, it can get pretty dangerous with ranged spore attacks flying around as you avoid enemies and try to make your way through the gunk.

Ramblecap

This spikey, little mushroom just walks back and forth on a surface, stopping to take a short break each time it turns around.

These little guys just need to be ramblin’

Mushroom Mortars, Mushroom Mines, and Spores

There are several different kinds of spores you’ll encounter here, so you’ll need to stay on your toes to avoid them. Some mushrooms will lob exploding grenade spores at you.

These can actually be quite tricky as they’ll attempt to lead their aiming to make sure to hit you!

Others will fire bouncy spores you’ll need to destroy with your yo-yo, or dodge by ducking under or jumping over.

Be careful with the bouncing spores, they take two hits to destroy and more than one on screen can quickly get out of hand.

And some will fire fuzzy spores which will make you dizzy. If you see a Mushroom growing on Nemo’s head, be prepared for your controls to be backwards! There’s not much to be done if this happens except try you best to manage the backwards controls until it goes away.

touchfuzzygetdizzy.gif

And these Mushroom Mortars aren’t the only way you’ll encounter spores. Some mushrooms just sit on the ground waiting for you to step on them, which will cause them to pop and launch spores into the air.

Watch your step around these parts!

Beware of the Gunk

If you see any candy in the purple gunk of 🍄Mushroom Marsh🍄, don’t trust it. There are some creatures in here that use fake candy to lure in unsuspecting children before giving them a chomp. And while you’ll move slower in the gunk, these monsters can move quite quickly through it.

These scary creatures will show up as you get deeper into the Marsh.

Marshwallows

These goopy creatures seem to be made entirely from the gunk found in this domain, except for the small spikey core hidden within it. Attacking it is not very effective, so you’ll need to find some way to hurt its core when it’s exposed.

This monster only has sketched in sprites at the moment, but we’ll be done with it soon enough.

Pluckables 🌱

And of course we have some new items which you can pluck from the ground unique to the marsh. There are mushroom-looking things poking out from the ground, but they’re actually attached to little bugs. The first is handy if you need something to throw at a distant threat.

This behaves the same as the radish you will have already seen in the Dreamswept Plains.

And the other is a little more dangerous, but potentially rewarding. If you hold onto this bug for too long it will squirm its way free, hurting you in the process. But you can toss it or set it down before then to prevent getting hurt. Once it does climb back into the ground, its mushroom can be bounced off of. Perhaps you can find some clever places to drop this bug to get at areas you couldn’t otherwise!

You only have a few seconds to put this bug down before it hurts you!

And that’s it for showing off the hazards of 🍄Mushroom Marsh🍄 for now, as well as wrapping up all of the spoilers.

Back to Spoiler-Free ✅🐵✅

Pathfinding 🎯

Sometimes it’s fun to get into the technical details of something I’m working on, and this month, I’ve been fixing the problems with the pathfinding the Little Buddies use to follow Nemo around. This is a superficial detail, but I think having your chosen Buddy run and jump and follow along, rather than no-clip floating through the air is just a more fun experience. Unfortunately, the existing pathfinding solution had some problems that seemed relatively small, but added up, so I’m doing a somewhat larger refactor of this code.

The old system attempted to create a node for every unit square of the world you could move through, and then connected them and let the pathfinding logic tack on some jumping logic to make it work. But what we’re doing now is creating only the relevant nodes we need at each unit square that is relevant for pathfinding (this also has the nice side effect of running much faster).

Here’s a look at the graph that is generated based on the terrain and any static objects that form the terrain.

We then connect these nodes with specialized edges that describe how we get from one to the other, such as “jump from here to here” or “drop through a pass thru platform to here”. And then we just perform standard a-star pathfinding, and the Buddy will find an appropriate route. Right now I’m still working on creating all the appropriate edges we need (creating jumping edges everywhere is tricky) and also the path following logic (describing how an entity navigates along a given path).

Some immediate improvements to this system are:

• Describing exactly how to jump from one point to another prevents one of the biggest issues with the old pathfinding which is that Buddies would often miss jumps over and over.
• We can easily create bounds we don’t want the Little Buddy to follow. Having Little Buddies in boss fights is a bit distracting, and they also might make balancing the fights difficult, so I will likely try to prevent Little Buddies from following you into boss encounters.
• Better hazard avoidance. Previously the Buddies only avoided hazards because they were told to completely ignore them for path finding, but now we simply increase the cost of moving along a hazard, but don’t make it impossible. This solves an issue where a buddy would find itself on some spikes and just stand there because it couldn’t find a way out.

Once I finish this pathfinding work, I’ll be working on the logic for the final Little Buddy, Polter−Pal👻, and then I’ll be sharing details of all the Little Buddies with you all.

Timeline Update 🕰️

I don’t have anything new to share on this front this month. As I mentioned last month, even once we get the game content complete, there’s still gonna be a good chunk of lead-up time to make sure I can have everything ready for simultaneous PC/Steam and Nintendo Switch release, so we still have a bit longer to go. But we’re keeping a good pace and getting loads done each month.

For those of you with 💾 Early Builds Access💾, I know this current build is starting to get a little bit old again, but we’re still trying to get 🍄Mushroom Marsh🍄 into a state where it’s fun and interesting enough to share with you all. And along with that will come access to at least one new Little Buddy as well. I’ll be sure to announce in the Sleepwalker channel on Discord when a new build is ready for y’all to check out.

Kickstarter Friends 💚

Papersky is a Kickstarter campaign that just launched, and if you’re looking for something that looks very chill, non-violent and fun, then this might be up your alley.

Embark on an adrenaline-fueled paper plane adventure in an interactive semi-open world. Fold your own paper plane and fly your message to the end. Crumple into a paper ball, rolling and soaring through thrilling challenges for an unparalleled high-flying action!

But that’s not the only game that you might be interested in supporting! You should go ahead and browse Kickstarter’s video game category and see what’s out there!

That’s all for now! 👋

Okay, this was another long one, but I hope it was fun getting acquainted with some of the friendly characters that will help you out in Slumberland, as well as some of the latest enemies that will try their best to hamper your progress. Thanks so much for reading (or even just skimming!) all the way through. As always, I absolutely love to hear your feedback, so leave a comment below, or hop on into the Discord and shoot me a message!

-Dave