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Hey Folks, As we finish up the first pass of Chatty Moosecatty I believe it is time for us to look forward to Moosecat Manor. With that in mind I want to take some time to cover what will be in the game. An introduction, mechanical summary, and goals. (Heaven help me, I did not proof read this) Introduction It's a breezy spring day. The feeling of warm air against your cheek reminding you of your childhood. Your parents used to bring you to Grandpa's manor every year. You remember running through the greenhouse, checking out all the flowers from around the world. Exotic plants of a million colors and even more smells. The animals buzzing from petal to petal, and even the birds that nestled within the trees. You remember getting lost in the farmland and orchards. Falling asleep to the same soft breeze you feel today. Those moments of lucid dreaming where each time your eyes softly opened you could see your father. Carrying you back to the manor to nap somewhere that the sun might kiss you a bit less. You smile, glancing down at the letter your Grandpa had written you. The letter shimmered in the sunlight, giving off an otherworldly quality. But that was no surprise, everything that Grandpa did was beyond normal. You remember every night listening to his stories of his recent adventures. Of all the wondrous things he had seen. Each tale grander than the last. If not for the trophies on his walls, or the flora around the manor, you'd likely never believe it. The manor too had always captured your imagination. In your childhood it felt like it stretched off in every direction forever. Frequently you'd set out on an adventure through its many rooms and come back with whatever interested you. Grandpa would sit you down and tell you the tale of each and every thing. He never minded what you brought back, no matter how numerous. Sometimes you'd break things but he never raised his voice. You'd both sit together and piece the things back together while he pieced together the adventure. The wind picked out of the blew drawing the letter from your hand and your attention from the street. You looked up to where the manor stood, or where it once had stood. Vast nothingness stood before you as far as you could see. You dash forward to the precipice of where the manor entrance once stood. The ground glowed with the familiar shape of the foundation reflecting in your eyes. Not a single plank of wood, not a single brick, nothing remained. You looked around to the greenhouse and saw that while it stood, it appeared to be completely empty. The glass cracked and in some places panes had completely crumbled away. Vines crept up from the earth and crawled along the metal frame of the building. Nature itself threatening to reclaim it all. The farm and orchards too were overgrown. If not for your own memories it would appear like nothing more than woods and patchy grasslands. Your heart raced in the confusion as the letter passed by your face once more. The breeze whipping it around the air. Your eyes turned to follow it until it landed upon the glowing ground before you. The letter flashed brilliant pearlescent colors, blinding you for a moment. As color returns to your vision you see the familiar outline of the main hall of the manor. The hall glows like hot steel from the forge. Time quenches the smoldering hall bringing color back to the blinding white walls. The familiar marble and wood that you had seen so many times before stood before you. The large double doors with their full height windows at either side welcome you in. Your heart races, could Grandpa be inside? You rush up the stairs and swing open the doors. Immediately before you a pair of mysterious animals stare, wide eyed, at your face. One looks a bit like a Calico cat, but with large brilliant antlers atop their head. The other jet black, so dark that light itself seems to be sucked into its form. Above its head space and time seem to bend and writhe upon one another. A voice breaks your gaze and you look up. "Welcome back, munchkin! I've certainly gotten myself in a bit of a mess this time!" Grandpa smiles, arms open for a hug. Gameplay Moosecat Manor is planned to be a hybrid of some of my favorite game archetypes into one experience. They say that you should write what you know, so I'm guessing that you should code what you like to play. The goal of Moosecat Manor is to solve the mystery of the missing manor. Along the way you are going to rebuild the manor, the greenhouse, the farm, and the orchard. Each providing you with more tools to explore ever further into the world that Grandfather once routinely explored. You will be accompanied by his two companions, lovingly nicknamed "Moose" and "Bean". A pair of magical creatures that he informs you are called "Moosecats". While many Moosecats you will meet look very similar to "normal" cats, there is no limit to how exotic or otherworldly that they can look. Controls will be a mix of Stardew Valley style walking around the Manor (and the nearby town) and some menu based experiences based around things like Adventures. You will send out Moosecats (and over time yourself) to explore the various worlds detailed in Grandpas notebook. Indeed each time you explore there is a chance you might find another page from his notebook detailing even more places to explore. These pages seem to have a magical quality to them, sometimes changing right before your eyes. The vast majority of your experiences and adventures will be nonviolent. Moosecats tend to solve their problems through harmless pranks, friendship, or by being too crafty to be harmed by any dangers. However don't be fooled, the power of some, perhaps many, of the Moosecats is potentially quite vast. Perhaps they had something to do with the manor vanishing? As you complete adventures you might find more "seeds" to regrow the manor. Each room looking fantastical. They will provide new ecosystems for your Moosecats, one room might be full of liquid hot magma, another frozen over, another somehow completely under water. Moosecats that enjoy those biomes will tend to collect in those places and be happier for it. Additionally some rooms, like the Kitchen, will provide you with access to cooking recipes, buffs, and perhaps even minigames for said items. For adventures, it may help to check out some Kairosoft games (or the recent Potionomics). Initially they are planned to be similar to sending out things on adventures in those games (as I really enjoy those games). You'll be able to watch the your Kitties progress along in their adventures and get updates on how things are going. For movement, around the world map it'll be *very* much like Stardew Valley or Curse of the Lamb. The manor is undecided but may be closer to Animal Crossing, with each room being its own zone that you can load into, with a fast travel map you can use. The Moosecats will have various unique traits, wants, and needs. Combining certain cats on certain adventures will net greater rewards. Asking certain cats to help you with the garden or orchard will help enhance those areas as well. Goal[s] The goal with this game is simple. I want to give people a nice relaxing experience. Something close to a slice of life but with fantastical almost dreamlike qualities. Some things will never be quite explained and you'll just have to wonder what is going on. The hope here is to give the player something to take their mind off whatever might be going on in their own life. To settle in with a familiar safe place to unwind and reset.

I wish I could say that the title was my thought. It was actually something said to me at work by our Technical Artist. The more that I've applied this world view the happier I've been with my work. With that in mind I'm going to go over the naming conventions for the current Moosecats work. These are listed in no real particular order. Handlers Our different domains have shared handlers. At the base level our handler does two things. It listens for a client and the game state. The former of these processes needs to eventually be moved one layer higher to a "ChattyMoosecattyHandlerBase". This is because we don't actually care about the client in Fitty Moosekitty or Moosecat Manor. But we do explicitly care about it in Chatty Moosecatty. Overall though the benefit of handlers is that they give shared base logic for all the related objects. For Chatty Moosecatty we use the handler for all of the message and commands. But soon we will also have one for the individual moosecats. Each Handler should be dedicated to one particular domain. Listeners These are components that listen for Events. They can listen for multiple events of the same type to do numerous different things in response to different events. They also automatically listen and cease listening when a gameobject is set active or inactive respectively. Events Our classes largely communicate through events and Data Containers. The event tells you "when" to do something and the data container tells you "what" you are working with. Generally, sometimes Events also send data like the state change event or the client event (which sends itself). State This is the name for all of our state machines. Currently the only state machine we actually use is a game state machine. But certain things like Moosecats will likely have their own state machines. Generally these are hybrids of visual and classic scripting. Data This is a collection of Datums. Data is what you'd expect. Collections of a bunch of like items. We generally want to separate Data containers by the shared stats of their constituents. If you imagine a city builder, you might have lots of different buildings, but you would have power plants as one Data collection, Healthcare as another, Transportation, and so on. Collection Purely a cosmetic concept. These are Data that are related to the player. Think inventory, Moosecats, things like that. Calling them collections allows us to more easily search for them and makes class names a little less confusing. A collection also contains Datum just like Data, as functionally it is largely the same with likely some small specific helper functions for me. Datum This is a single unit of information. Think individual cats or individual items in your inventory. Or even individual players in Chatty Moosecatty. Artifact These are scriptable objects that allow us to share data between objects without direct references. This makes adding and removing sections of our project easier. So if an idea doesn't pan out we can remove it without breaking references across the project. I Prefix This one is a bit weird. But the I Prefix tells us that something is an interface. There isn't a really hard and fast rule for these interfaces. Mostly that they are I and some kind of verb or descriptive title. Think IListener, or ILoadsFromJson.  

When you need to design a character for a story there is a simple pair of questions that'll help you out. The first questions is what does this character want? The second question is how far would they go to achieve that goal? I think you can take that same sort of logic and use it to layout design plans for a game as well. With that in mind lets talk about my plans for Moosecats in three phases. The short term, the mid term, and the long term. Some of these things should be accomplished within the next six months, some things within years, and others may never happen. The Goal I would like to create a game that marries a few concepts. The first is a sense of irreverence. Tell a story that has twists and turns but ultimately doesn't involve a lot of extremely dark narrative. Life is complicated, and sometimes life is deeply sad, I think it is nice to occasionally have outs from that. The next concept is of the importance of fitness and being active. So I would like to have some sort of integration that allows people to advance their gameplay by being physically active. This will obviously be limited by the APIs I have access too and my own capacity to learn. The final concept is of community interaction. I want to have close connections with the players of the game. Part of that will be through the Chatty Moosecatty (Twitch Cats) program. Which will be another vector for advancing the state of your cats and also add to your collection. These are the three prongs of my plans. So now we know what we want. But how do we achieve this goal? Short Term These are all of the things that I'd like to complete for each project within the next year or so. I'm going to try and list everything out so that we can strike through things as they are completed. Chatty Moosecatty - Twitch Game Viewers are gifted a randomized Moosecat. The cats will say what the viewer is saying. This includes emoting whatever the player emotes. Cats will respond to a series of commands. These commands can be located with the !help command. Should add things like dance, sleep etc. Players can swap between their cats, or activate a new cat while others are on adventures. Cats appear and disappear depending on viewer activity. If someone stops talking for long enough their kitty goes to sleep and poofs. Obviously is fine, will return when they chat again. Fitty Moosekitty - Fitness Game The goal of this project is to enhance both mental and physical fitness. Players will get a Moosecat upon loading the game. They can also utilize the cats they've collected from Chatty Moosecatty. Walking will earn your cat experience. Occasionally your cat will find treasure while out on the walk. You can send your cats on quests. They will finish them faster if you are walking. Be able to track your weight, body measurements, water intake, etc. None of this will be sent back to me. Everyone will be free to check their network traffic to confirm. Ya boy don't care about your measurements. Just happy you are getting healthy. Timer/Stopwatch functionality. Auto-Rest functionality when doing workouts. Wii Fit distance/height tracking. Find out when you've climbed higher than Mt. Everest or walked longer than the Great Wall. Moosecat Manor - Roleplaying Game You've received a letter from your grandfather mentioning that he's having a bit of trouble and would love it if you could come around to his Manor and help him sort it out. Users will explore 12 different islands, and their Grandfather's manor to try and uncover the mystery of...just where did his manor go? This adventure will require the help of magical creatures known as Moosecats to uncover the secrets of the missing Manor and the world in general. You will rebuild the manor through magical seeds that grow to become the rooms that had once stood there. Rooms will vary wildly, from volcanic rooms, to rainforest rooms, to a simple run of the mill kitchen! Or so it seems. You will collect pages from your Grandfathers adventure journal that tell of new places to visit and have a chance to experience the adventures you never even knew happened. Individual rooms will unlock new cat habitats. They will also unlock new game features Mid Term At this point all of my projects are at least "started" and in a state where we can move onto enhancements. Some of them might be completed in this phase or before this phase. Chatty Moosecatty - Twitch Game Bot accepts whispers to allow people to check stats without spamming chat. Players can send their cats out on adventures to bring back loot. This loot can later be used in Moosecat Manor. This loot may also be new eggs to add to their roster. Cats interact with one another while I'm streaming. A GUI stream screen that I can swap to to show player progress in adventures. This would also show recent achievements, stats, and other fun stuff. An "AFK" stream play area, so when I'm away people can still enjoy their cats together. Fitty Moosekitty - Fitness Game Weight/Plate calculator. Exercise suggestions. Yoga, Walking plans, weight training. Circuits, programs, that sorta stuff. Workout sharing. Show your friends what you did. Inspire them to get at it too. Walking also earns you points towards any active quests for your Chatty Moosecatty team. Moosecat Manor - Roleplaying Game Minigames Certain rooms will unlock fun minigames. A means to earn more rewards, finish adventures faster, and frankly give me a chance to experiment with miniature game ideas without abandoning this one! Adventure system. Send Moosecats (and yourself) out on adventures to uncover treasure, new areas to explore, and hints towards the mystery of the missing manor. Trust system. Moosecat horns are actually always invisible to people they don't trust. As your moosecats come to trust you more and more you'll see them. Some never seem to show...do they just wot have them? Long Term We've now hit the point where all three projects are either finished or released as early access titles. From here on out we are looking for ways to expand on the games and to provide people with an experience that evolves. At this point is probably where I'd like to look into ways to create artist collaborations and to help small time creators.   Chatty Moosecatty - Twitch Game Bot sees conversations across all services, not simply twitch. Giveaways of some kind based on whatever metrics. Like randomly picking subscribers, or picking a random person with a certain amount of activity. Fun community stuff. Fitty Moosekitty - Fitness Game *Whales* The idea here is one I used before. As you lift we will tell you when you've lifted as much cumulatively as a kind of whale. Then once you reach the biggest whale we'll either move onto combining them or other even bigger things for fun. Achievements from this will show up as items in Moosecat Manor. PB tracking, potentially with an OPT IN leaderboard. Would likely need to have it linked to YT videos (unlisted is fine) or something to keep things nice and fair. Or just have people make friends groups and not worry about it. Moosecat Manor - Roleplaying Game Artist DLC packs. We'll pay artists to make collections of new pets and they'll get the lion's share of the revenue from the collection. Either for at least a year or forever. All depends on if I'm making enough to keep the lights on. It'll always err on the side of them getting more than me in the revenue share though.     In Conclusion This will be a living document that will over time branch out into tracking posts and other content. The basic idea was to give myself some inspirational bullet points to move forward with. Suggestions are also welcome.  

Hey Folks! Added Sirinex Validator (Yay!) Message Count now properly tracked. IO Saving and Lookups have been vastly improved. Way less code, much smarter. Looking into the nightmare that is YouTube API. In the next video we'll see if we can iron this out. Eggs spawn at the right location now. But they are the wrong size still. New player flow shouldn't break basically ever now, if ever. So...yay? Begin overhaul of player data to make it easier to follow and interact with. Got a bit messy. Too much nesting.

Consolidated the messaging system into a single class with sub functions.    While I like the idea I think it still needs a lot of work. I'll mull over the solution and come up with something better. I think it may be time to make save data have a static helper accessor and swap all of these scriptable objects over to classes. For future me I think the most appropriate place to put it would be the MoosecatIO class.