Critter Cove
Game Overview
Critter Cove is an open world life sim developed by Gentleman Rat and published by TinyBuild. The game is set in a scrappy, flooded world, where wacky and whimsical animal people are rebuilding civilization one stick, stone, and repurposed piece of junk at a time.
Players take the role of a sailor with exceptional tinkering skills who is hired to restore the eponymous island town to its former glory. When they arrive at Critter Cove, it's an overgrown ruin with precisely three inhabitants. Their mission is to change that.
The main loop calls for exploring the world for resources and recipes, then returning to Critter Cove to put those discoveries to good use. Crafting is the core mechanic of the game, and there's plenty of it to go around! But the player can and should also fish, dive, cook, decorate, run errands, and make connections with other communities across the seas.
There's plenty to do, that's for sure! And all that content had to be made by someone. That's where I came in.
MISHELL: Who am I? WHO AM I?!
MISHELL: Only the greatest fine artist of the century! Sculptor, painter, renaissance turtle - the one and only Mishell Angelo! Who do you think YOU are?!
PLAYER: I'm Captain Player.
MISHELL: Well! Player, I ASSURE you I have a perfectly firm handle on my affairs! I have NO need for help, nor pity, nor -
MISHELL: ... Wait. Did you say "Captain"? Like of a ship?
What I Did
In January 2022, I joined the Gentleman Rat team as a content designer. The job is somewhere between traditional game and narrative design, with an emphasis placed on filling the vast oceanic world of Critter Cove with things to do, people to talk to, quests to complete, treasures to find, and so on.
But first, I had to learn a plethora of implementation systems unique to Critter Cove. The game had been in development for years when I came onboard, and the vast majority of its core functionality was in place, though much of it would be revised and streamlined with time. Describing everything I picked up on this job would take far too much of your time, so I'll give a particular example!
Implementing a Scenario
A scenario is a quest through which the player is introduced to a potential civilian. There are a lot of them, and they all need to feel distinctive and fun. So, to implement one, I had to first write dialogue that conveyed the same basic ideas in 5 different voices - one for each personality in the game. I did that directly in the spreadsheets we imported the dialogue from, including tags for pauses, emotes, text decoration, and so on.
Once that was done, I'd build out the scene in the game, using existing models wherever possible. This often involved creating quest items, set dressing, and fandangling all kinds of scripted objects to make the scenario work as intended. I even got to animate environmental objects on occasion, such as the piston platform shown here!
With the scene set up, my next tasks happened in two special windows: The Behavior Designer and the Rules Editor. The former allowed me to direct NPCs with state machines, and the latter used SQL fact checks to call behaviors and dialogue in the form of Rules. In combination, the two were a powerful suite with a steep learning curve, one I mastered quickly.
Finally, it was playtesting time! I ran through each scenario at least a dozen times to root up bugs, fine-tune behaviors, and so on. Testing can be tedious, but it's important to troubleshoot your own work so buggy content doesn't become someone else's problem.
Postmortem
Critter Cove was a joy to work on! The amount of creative control I was given as a junior developer was astounding, and the team was truly incredible to me and to everyone. I would say my only real regret is that we tend to all be pretty heads-down, focused on our own tasks except when they cross over, and I sorely wish there had been more cooperative brainstorming involved in the process. Then again, that kind of independence is something a lot of developers wish they had, so I'm grateful for my lot.