All posts tagged in wonderscope
Aug 2, 2022
With Complete Creative Freedom Build to Your Heart’s Content and Invite New Villages to Enjoy the Fruits of Your Labour
Publisher Team17 and developer Wonderscope just released a new announcement trailer for the release date of Hokko Life! A lot of new features and updates have been added since receiving the feedback of fans and now the game has it all! You can craft, mine, fish, catch bugs, build, gather resources, farm, and befriend the anthropomorphic animal villagers!
The greatest game feature is the extensive item editing and customization options! You get to design and place every single building in town, including homes, from the exterior to the interior. Redecorating is made easy as you can freely move anything anytime anywhere. The same goes for individual items such as furniture! You can modify every separate piece of decor with different shapes, sizes, colours and textures.
Coming to Switch, PS4, Xbox One, and PC September 27th, 2022
Hokko Life has been in Steam Early Access for a little over a year now and it’s finally time for the launch of the full version! The Animal Crossing-like life and farming simulation game is officially coming to Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One on September 27th, 2022!
- May 17, 2020
Hokko Life is desribed as a ‘cosy, creativity filled community sim game’. The game is being developed by Robert Tatnell who runs his own indie game dev company, Wonderscope. Initially Wonderscope intended to both develop and publish Hokko Life. However, this is an understandably big feat for one person. Therefore in April 2020, it was revealed that Wonderscope had ‘teamed’ up with Team 17, who will now publish the game. Team 17 are notorious for publishing games such as My Time at Portia, Overcooked, and Yooka-Laylee. Hokko Life will hopefully release for PC via Steam at some point this year. The price of the game is not yet known.
About The Game:
Hokko Life begins with your player stepping off of a train. Having taken over your very own (albeit a little dusty and old) workshop, you are free to craft and create to your heart’s content.
The quiet village which you now call home needs your design expertise. Help create an endearing town for its inhabitants. Armed with paint and tools, you can design, build and decorate new homes for your new furry friends.
Players can craft materials and combine them how they wish. This allows you to create a variety of cool new furniture and items for the town. By collecting flowers and mixing paints, you can use them to design wallpapers, flooring and even clothing!
Given plenty of design choices, you could design a bright flowery wallpaper set, or instead create an urban-industrial furniture collection. Whatever your taste, with a workshop at hand, you have complete freedom in designing a beautiful town for the townsfolk.
Features:
- Chop, mine and dig for resources by venturing out to the forest or the abandoned mine. After bringing those resources back to town, where you can craft them into materials to use in your designs.
- Gather materials, head into your workshop and put your own spin on each item you make. The design table lets you build your own furniture. Here you can combine various shapes and materials using a simple yet powerful editor.
- Design a variety of wallpaper, flooring and T-Shirts for you and the villagers to wear. Feel like a famous fashion designer and get everyone in town wearing your bespoke designs.
- Enlist the help of the local builder in order to begin expanding the town. You get complete freedom over where buildings are located and then need to ensure they are ready for new villagers to move to town.
- Customize both the interiors and exteriors of any home. Release your inner interior designer and pick designs and place furniture to create a home your new friends will adore.
- Turn any plot of land into a place where plants and vegetables will grow. When your produce is ready, you’ll be able to sell it.
- Enjoy quiet moments at the various fishing spots located in Hokko and expand your fishing collection. The fish have unique habits, and so players will need to vary their approaches. Similarly, each catch provides it’s own challenge when you reel them in.
- Hokko is home to a wide variety of different insects. These insects can be caught and added to your collection. Be sure to keep a eye out, as some may be hiding in a bush.
So,
What’s new pussycat? Woah, woah. What’s new pussycat? Woah, oh, woah(ahem).About The Latest Devlog:
The latest Devlog from the creator of Hokko Life appeared on Steam on May 6th BST. In it, featured some exciting little updates about the game’s progress.
Now working with Team 17, Wonderscope have stated that ‘epic updates to Hokko Life’ have apparently already been made! The ones mentioned in the Devlog include:
Art Updates:
- More variety in the shape, pattern and color of mine rocks
- The fish receive makeovers. After contemplating how he’d like them to look, Robert settled ‘on a clean and stylized look’. Additionally, there are now a wider variety of fish in the game.
- Tidier textures for buildings. Using the workshop building, one of the older elements of the game, Robert gave it a newer style and cleaned up its texture.
- Improved ground textures. One of the biggest improvements is the appearance of the game’s grass. The grass is now 3D, has more depth, and in the words of Robert ‘brings the quality level up a notch’.
Other Changes & Additions:
Edit Designs Anywhere:
In April, Robert started work on allowing players to edit the design of objects in the world, by simply interacting with them. Until that point, players had to return all the way to their workshop in order to edit a design. They would also need that object in their backpack to do this. (Sound familiar to Animal Crossing: New Horizons crafting and customization peeves? 😂). Now, however, if players spot something that they want to edit, they can do so from anywhere in the world.
Lessening Hassle & Frustrating Things and Making Hokko Life More Immediate & Fun To Play:
Robert says in the Devlog that he will continue to think of ways to make the game more convenient and fun to play. He wishes to remove anything that might be a hassle to players in order to improve their gaming exprience. (Take notes, Nintendo 😂).
Another small change could possibly be the ability to evolve your players avatar. The information about this is in a recent Hokko Life Patreon post from May 15th. However the post is only accessible to the game’s Patreon supporters (which is totally fair btw!). If you are a supporter of the game on Patreon though, and know what this post is about, feel free to enlighten us! We’re curious!
You can check out an exclusive interview with the game’s solo developer, Robert Tatnell here.
And to get a more in-depth insight into the game, you should check out this article here.
You can visit the game’s website for info here and visit their Steam page and read their Devlogs here. Additionally, you can follow them on Twitter, and/or join their Discord server here.
- Oct 27, 2019
Hokko life is an adorable town-building simulation game heavily inspired by Animal Crossing and created solely by developer Robert Tatnell. We previously posted about the most recent updates and changes made to the game which you can read about here. Robert Tatnell was kind enough to take some time out of his busy schedule to do an interview with myPotatoGames! We are truly excited to have sat down with yet another indie developer to talk about what matters most to us – adorable, fun, cute and exciting games!
We just can’t wait to dig into the game and start gardening, fishing, decorating our homes with crafted furnitures and more. Furthermore, much like Animal Crossing, you can befriend all of the fluffy villagers and have them move into your town. Who wouldn’t want to live in a town filled with cutsie animals?
Robert has recently put together a little Hokko life hub where you can check out some new screenshots and more to be added in the future (so we hope). Make sure to check back weekly, daily or (like us) hourly, in hopes to get some more news about the game. You can also follow him on Twitter to share your excitement and send some support his way!
While Robert was kind enough to share some exclusive early look at Hokko Life we know that the game is still in early development, and as excited as we are about this indie title, features, visuals, gameplay and everything else is not final and subject to change during the development cycle.
Q&A with Robert Tatnell – Creator of Hokko Life
[su_service title=”What made you decide to create a simulation game? What are some of the games you love to play or took inspiration from?” icon=”icon: star” icon_color=”#8300ff” size=”32″ class=””][/su_service]
The decision I suppose wasn’t really a decision in itself, I kind of naturally gravitated to this type of game. Hokko Life started very much as a hobby project in my spare time while I was working at Arrowhead; one that I continued after leaving the studio. I really enjoy more creative, relaxed simulation games. Personally, I sunk who knows how many hours into Rollercoaster Tycoon and The Sims and loved being able to create the park I wanted to in RCT, often planning layouts and ideas on paper before taking them into the game.
I suppose it goes without saying that Animal Crossing has been a big inspiration for Hokko Life; the cozy, “escaping to another home” feeling one gets with that game is something I think is very special, and something only games can deliver. I often play games as a means of escaping to another world and I wanted to bring that feeling into Hokko Life too. I have a whole bunch of other inspirations, it’s a long list, but those are the stand-outs.
[su_service title=”Can you talk about the process of getting new villagers to come to the town and move in?” icon=”icon: star” icon_color=”#8300ff” size=”32″ class=””][/su_service]
Villagers in Hokko Life start out as visitors, there may be one or two already living there when you move in, but the majority of the characters will start off coming to town on a day-trip. There’s a train station in town and at various times during the day characters will hop off the train. My intention is to have your town, and your achievements affect the animals that come by. After you’ve met a visitor a few times, helped them out with tasks they have, and become friends with them, you’ll open up the option to ask them to move to town. You’ll need to build somewhere for them to live, and once they’ve moved into their new home, it’s up to you to decorate it in a way they’d love.
[su_service title=”You had mentioned some characters will offer quests to accomplish. Will there also be an overall reaching storyline to complete or goals to progress the game?” icon=”icon: star” icon_color=”#8300ff” size=”32″ class=””][/su_service]
I wanted to keep Hokko Life pretty open and not really define a set storyline for the game. I want to let players be free, pretty much from the beginning, to decide what they want to do with their time. There’ll be a loose story tying things together, but don’t expect an epic story-driven “main quest” or anything like that! As you play you’ll be unlocking more features and upgrades based on what you’ve been doing, and these will often be book-ended with a small quest and story.
[su_service title=”Is there a backstory to our main character? How much character customization is there for the player?” icon=”icon: star” icon_color=”#8300ff” size=”32″ class=””][/su_service]
Similar to not locking the player to a set main story, I wanted to keep the player character pretty anonymous. Your avatar in game should be a representation of you the player, or a character you want to role play as. In this way your character is pretty much a blank slate for you to customize how you wish. Customization wise the obvious basics are available: hair style and color, skin color, clothing, shoes, hats, accessories etc. Clothing is non-gender-specific, so you’re free to wear whatever you want too. If I have time I’d really like to explore adding more options for body types.
[su_service title=”Since there will be a day-and-night cycle, weather, and seasons, will the calendar be in real-time or will the game have its own internal clock?” icon=”icon: star” icon_color=”#8300ff” size=”32″ class=””][/su_service]
I’ve toyed quite a bit with whether the game should be in real-time or not; it’s a tricky decision I think, as both options feel quite different and give different types of play. As I’m currently targeting PC & Mac I feel a real-time clock doesn’t quite fit with those players’ play styles. I think if you’re sitting at a computer or laptop you’re often playing for a reasonable amount of time, and you want to feel like things have progressed and that you’ve achieved a lot during your time there.
In my opinion a real-time clock lends itself better to more portable platforms, where you can come back several times during a day easily, and play as little or as much as you’d like; for me, if you’re sitting down on the PC, it’s a bit more of a dedicated session. To be honest though I’ve not settled 100% on my decision; I think it’ll be something that will remain quite up in the air until early testers get their hands on it and I can see how players approach it.
[su_service title=”Will you be creating special events for holidays? Will the town continue to change?” icon=”icon: star” icon_color=”#8300ff” size=”32″ class=””][/su_service]
I would absolutely love to do special events for holidays; they’re a lot of bespoke work, with each event needing its own unique content, which means unfortunately they might slip from first release and have to be added as an update later. We’ll see though; it might be a case that simpler events that happen more often are included initially with special events coming after; right now I can’t promise though! As for the town changing, that really centers on the player. Meaning, you’ll be the one placing buildings and other items to decorate your town how you want, so hopefully over time you’ll end up with a town that really represents you and your creativity.
[su_service title=”You can build items for not only inside the homes, but for the town on the outside. Will players or characters be able to interact with those items?” icon=”icon: star” icon_color=”#8300ff” size=”32″ class=””][/su_service]
Yep! When you start designing your own items, you’ll choose what base you’d like to start from; whether that is a chair, a table, etc, and it’s from this base that behaviors are applied to the furniture. This then defines what types of interactions are available to the player and to the villagers too.
[su_service title=”What are some of the shops we can expect for the town? What items will be purchasable?” icon=”icon: star” icon_color=”#8300ff” size=”32″ class=””][/su_service]
There’ll be a handful of places you can purchase items from in town. These will include a general store, selling furniture items, as well as things like backpack upgrades, and some resources you’ll need when crafting. There will also be other stores selling clothing and customization options; as well home decoration items like roofing, wallpapers, flooring etc.
[su_service title=”How can we make money in the game besides fishing and mining?” icon=”icon: star” icon_color=”#8300ff” size=”32″ class=””][/su_service]
There’ll be a few ways of making money in the game. As well as fishing and mining, villagers will often come to you with requests for items or custom furniture, and you’ll be rewarded when you help them out. Any materials you’ve crafted will also be able to sell. Over the coming weeks I’m going to be looking into what other activities to add to the game, a lot of these would provide other means of income too.
[su_service title=”How much freedom do we get for creating and placing furniture, buildings, etc?” icon=”icon: star” icon_color=”#8300ff” size=”32″ class=””][/su_service]
Creating furniture is really open for you to design whatever you want. It’s designed around a simple but flexible “piece” system, where you combine different shaped pieces in any configuration to make an item. These pieces vary in material, can be rotated, scaled, painted etc. It’s pretty exciting, and I’m really looking forward to seeing what players create! As for placing furniture and buildings, well, I’m trying to go with the mentality of “if there’s space, it can be placed there”. Generally, I think it should be up to the player to place things wherever they want.
[su_service title=”We had previously mentioned that there will be an online aspect to the game. Will players be able to buy items from other players?” icon=”icon: star” icon_color=”#8300ff” size=”32″ class=””][/su_service]
I want to let players upload and share their creations with one another online; as such a big part of the game is letting players create what they want I think it would be a terrible shame if creators weren’t able to share what they’ve made with others. At this stage nothing’s really fleshed out, I have a few prototypes up and running and some pretty grand plans for what I’d love to do, but nothing concrete right now. As for players buying items from others I’m not sure how well that would play out. I think the whole community atmosphere would shift, you’d end up with an online economy of sorts; I think things get messy when money gets involved, even if it’s virtual. I’d much rather build a friendly and open platform for creators.
[su_service title=”What are the next aspects of the game that you will be working on?” icon=”icon: star” icon_color=”#8300ff” size=”32″ class=””][/su_service]
Right now I’m in a bit of a direction phase, where I sit down and try and figure out the direction for certain parts of the game. There’s a whole bunch of design questions, as well as art direction that’s been a bit floaty up until now that I’m looking to dedicate some time to figuring out. I was recently away on vacation, and getting some distance from the project really helps you come back to it with fresh eyes. When I’m done with planning and direction stuff I’ll most likely be focused on getting some new activities in the game to give the player even more fun things to do in town.
It seems we will have a great deal of freedom to create furniture and customize our own avatar and village! The art style is also shaping up and looking real crisp with beautiful colors. The game is still in development but we’ll be sure to let our fellow Potatoes know as soon as there is a firm release date for PC and Mac as the first platforms.
Big thanks to Robert for sharing some exciting insights with myPotatoGames on Hokko Life – we can’t wait to get playing! We wish Robert all the best.
- May 30, 2019
Robert Tatnell , developer of Hokko Life, is hard at work and adding new features and designs every day in his studio, Wonderscope, based in Stockholm. If you haven’t already heard of this game, you can get caught up with us here. We here at myPotatoGames are so excited to play this game and wanted to share with you all of the progress that has been made thus far. Therefore, below we’ve given you the recap from the developer himself for 2018 and a look at his latest updates from March 2019.
2018 Devblog Recap
- The main town area got built, at the beginning of the year it was a one-room demo, but now there’s a whole town!
- There are also mine and forest areas that are randomly generated each day, full of lovely resources!
- Speaking of resources: resource gathering and crafting got in!
- You have a backpack now to store stuff!
- The game is now aimed at a PC/Mac release initially, so a bunch of control stuff got changed to fit this decision.
- Fishing!
- Player Customization!
- Painting tool for making T-Shirts, Wallpaper and flooring!
- Dig holes! Weeds!
- Villagers can now move in if you’re good enough friends with them!
- Villagers give you tasks to do!
- A whole bunch of new villagers got added!
- I started getting sound FX into the game!
Recent Updates – Devlog 2019 Start!
Below are the updates from March which include: improvements on the tools for customizing furniture, improvements on conversations with the villagers, and new information on shop interiors and inventory, and more.
Customizing Furniture
The developer has been testing different “drawers” that contain all the pieces you can add to your creation; much like in a real-world workshop. Improvements to furniture creation were made by adding a very handy menu system so as to be able to categorize certain paints and materials.
There seems to be many options of material designs to work with and apply to your furniture which include: wood, metal, earthen, cushions, paint, and dyes. You will also be able to point and click anywhere, alternating between placing an object and editing it. As mentioned previously by the developer, you will also be able to scale the size of your own furniture when creating it. Moreover, you can see in the image that certain shapes are provided.
Dialog Options
Dialogue options are being reworked to give less of a “randomly generated” feel in favor of a more personalized approach. This ensures there’s more interesting variety in dialogue than there was before by giving you a selection of replies.
If you’re an Animal Crossing fan, then you probably enjoy chatting up the locals every day. Therefore, this new feature is sure to please! The overall dialogue system is still in the works but so far it’s exciting to have the option to choose different text and get different options every now and again. The developer ensures that there will be a little more variety in the player and character conversations. You can also see that it’s possible for you to change and create the outfit the characters are wearing and to take requests for items! One can only hope that they are also given audio of adorable nonsensical gibberish for dialogue.
Shop Interiors and More
The interior of the shops will now have all of their inventory laid out and on display. You can walk up to each item and interact with them before buying. The contents of the shops change every day, so you can look forward to checking what’s new as often as possible. Shopkeepers will have set hours and will otherwise have the store locked. You can find them roaming the town or enjoying certain activities when they’re not working. Robert Tatnell also added new animations for mining and fishing which you can read in more detail with the link to his official website here. There, you’ll find all his devlogs which include all the details of his journey from 2018 to present.
For exclusive information about Robert Tatnell and Hokko Life, be sure to check out our interview with him! There’s a lot of new information you will not want to miss!
