A new update has been posted to Kickstarter. (Not sure if this one is public or only for backers -- apologies if it's not visible to everyone.)
The Pine team seem to be making progress on a number of fronts: music, UI, world assets, and interaction with the world and NPCs.
It's still hard at this early stage to see whether the "fun" will emerge from the pieces. But it does look like the pieces are coming together.
Re: Pine
Posted: Thu Oct 26, 2017 3:08 pm
by Talvieno
Pine is looking pretty.
Re: Pine
Posted: Mon Mar 05, 2018 10:17 am
by Flatfingers
Twirlbound posted a new update for Pine today. Here's the part that might be of interest to LT fans:
With a lot of cool Pine content waiting to be implemented, we’ve been spending just a bit more time on our intricate low-level simulation systems in February again. It’s shaping up to be an extremely sophisticated system of commanders, organisms and performance-considerate calculations, and we are making sure it supports Pine’s full experience well. Here are some highlights of what we did this month!
By far our biggest challenge this month was to work on commanding villagers (the species) to do the proper things in proper company, while making villages look AND work dynamically. Quite a handful of considerations!
On the visual side, we’re now allowing our artists and designers to place points of interest, place ‘potential’ sockets and dynamic fencing around different tiers of villagers. This all combines in our dynamic ‘slot system’, where we basically indicate ‘potential’ village layouts and let the system do the rest based on species, location, tier, wealth and more. Variation everywhere!
Organisms now gather in groups, wait for each other and the village defines tasks for each. You can have a gathering group with a few traders, or a trading group with a couple of ‘soldiers’ to defend them.
On a much larger scale, we’re working on optimized, low-level simulation that runs in the background. This is perhaps the most intricate step – bringing the organisms you can see and feel to a data-driven level where battles, trades and affinities play out, even without your involvement. We’re happy to say that step is going well, and we’re managing a low-cost layer of simulation to be playing at all times, on the whole island!
I think this one might also be of interest to Limit Theory fans:
To supply for their inhabitants, village chiefs send out groups to gather food and resources, or trading/scout/raid groups to get to that goal. That alone brings many concepts: leaders, groups, goals, banks and more.
I'm looking forward to this game.
Re: Pine
Posted: Thu May 17, 2018 11:08 am
by Talvieno
That's pretty cool. It'd be interesting if the world itself could change dynamically, too, but I suppose that's a bit much to ask. Is there a map of the Pine island anywhere?
Re: Pine
Posted: Fri May 18, 2018 1:15 am
by Flatfingers
It's probably a bit too early still to look for a map of the Pine world. I think they're still updating a lot of the world-y content of the game.
Re: Pine
Posted: Fri May 18, 2018 10:52 am
by Talvieno
I somewhat regret not having been able to back this. It's fun to follow along with it, at least.
Re: Pine
Posted: Thu May 09, 2019 11:54 pm
by Flatfingers
It's been a while since I last updated this one, but the Twirlbound team have been busy working on Pine (and pretty good about updates).
Current plans are for a closed beta probably in May or June, and possibly launching in August 2019.
It's certain that there'll be aspects of this game I don't personally care for -- design decisions I wouldn't have made. But even knowing that, I'm still pretty excited to see this one making progress because the AI sounds like it's going to be a lot of fun to play with.
Re: Pine
Posted: Thu Sep 12, 2019 8:41 pm
by Flatfingers
Aaaaaaand we have a release date for Pine: October 10, 2019.
Unfortunately, dynamic weather couldn't be included in the initial release. But there's still a lot of simulationist goodness, plus all the exploratory gameplay.
They're doing a beta now to scrape off the last buglets, but it's looking good!
It'd be interesting if the world itself could change dynamically, too, but I suppose that's a bit much to ask. Is there a map of the Pine island anywhere?