Hello 👋 

Thank you for visiting our little dev blog about Narrow One. It's been almost 2 months since our last post, but we have been busy (no holiday yet). And this turned out to be our longest development blog post so far. If you make it to the end of the post there will be a surprise compliment waiting for you. End of small talk,  here a summary of what we have been up:

Female character 

After many many request from female users, we finally got to adding a female character. We postponed it for quite a while because we knew it would be an enormous task.  Players often said something like "Just add a toggle to the UI", but it's not that simple.

To start off, this is what our male base mesh looks like (with some underwear to keep things safe for work)

But while working on the female mesh, we soon (read: after two days) found out this wasn't going to work with the existing skeleton, which we use for rotating and positioning body parts. For example, this is what the female mesh would look like with the male skeleton.

So we had to add support for multiple skeleton types, which should also be changeable at any time during the game.

Now let's move on to networking. Every time a player changes their skin, a list of equipped items is being sent to all other players. So with the old system this would look something like "coolHat,fancyPants,newShoes"

But now that we want to change the gender (and while we're at it, let's do the hair color as well) we need a more sophisticated way of sending this data. A list of items won't do anymore.

We'll use a json object for this instead, which allows us to send all kinds of data to the other players. This isn't difficult to add by any means. But everything that expects a list of items now needs to be updated to handle the new format, and that takes time to add.

Now for these equipped items, it wasn't really possible to reuse the existing ones we had either. These items don't fit at all with the base mesh, and at some places you can even see the skin coming through. 

So after the incredibly long and boring task of remaking all the assets fit (over 120+ pieces of clothing) to the female body, so then we had to make sure the correct asset was displayed depending on your gender setting

Our skin rendering system is a complex mess of all sorts of rules for what item to display, but in short this meant that all kinds of places that were expecting just a single item, now had to be changed to make sure the right one was picked depending on your gender settings.

This covers places such as in game, but also in the list of players, the preview in the shop and also all the items in the shop.

And finally, when all of that is done, we can add our toggle to the UI. Which still probably took more time than you'd think, because we didn't have a toggle like this yet. So it had to be designed and then made functional.

When all of this is done, we almost have functioning female characters. But this doesn't even cover things like: 

- How to store this setting in your cookies?

 - What if you load a new skeleton when one is already loading?

 - Different sound effects depending on your setting.

- What if a skin fails to load? - Updating skins when toggling the setting (so you don't have to refresh the page) - Showing/hiding the 'beards' button when toggling the setting. And many other things.

So the point is (and if you're a software developer this probably doesn't come as a surprise to you): things usually take a lot longer to add than you think.

This is true even for the project you are working on yourself. When we make an estimate it usually ends up taking twice as long because you end up running into so many problems you just can't predict in advance.

Anyway I hope that explains why sometimes we wait so long before adding a new feature. Because usually it is not that simple to add. (I'm talking to you peepoostinkyass)

Shop improvements 

After adding the female skin we felt like the shop could use some improvements.  We used to have 1 character that can equip 5 different weapons, but we are slowly growing into having 5 different classes.  In the future we want to make more class specific items, think about melee and items that can be placed around the map.

The classes are: 

• scout
• Assault 
• Sharpshooter
• Runner
• Defender

 In the new shop you can choose to look different for each class. This could be very helpful to tweak your play style with each weapon, and also show off more of your clothing. Every new class got it's own cool little pose in the shop menu, but you can also export you character to share if you like, just look at these cool images (please be respectful and don't look at the bow skins yet, because this is a topic that will be discussed later in this post):

Presets

Theres also a preset system, so you can link all classes to a preset to quickly assign a certain look. There's not really a limit on how many presets you can make. So go crazy. Also we changed the way the default character works. Now a beginning player will be assigned a more mixed preset, giving the game a more diverse look.

Bow skins

Also new to the shop. 

We proudly present to you 🎺 🎺 🎺  BOW SKINS 🎺 🎺 🎺 !

Get ready to spend all your precious coins, and  customise your bow. Finally everyones first person view will be more unique looking, and hopefully make watching narrow.one gameplay feel fresher. For now we choose to keep bow skins purely cosmetic, no stat boosts. 

The bow skin contains of 2 parts, Handle and Tip. Every bow skin is class unique, so buy the skin for your most used bow first!

We got a variety of bow skins, going from cheap ones to extremely expensive pieces for the die hard gamers. The fearless armor is once again the most expensive one, if you see a player using this bow skin, it is advised to run.

Bow animations

We also got to making the bow move more natural when playing. When you run for a longer period the bow moves down in your view. When you jump the bow has a delay. When you shoot the bow moves back. When you look up or down the angle of the bow changes. The bow swings back and forth when running. All these tiny movements were added to hopefully make everything feel more alive (and also to show off the bow skins in different angles). In the past the bow felt quite 2d in the screen, now it definitely shows more 3d depth. 

Touchscreen menu button

Shout out to all our touchscreen users, sorry for the delay but we finally have a menu option for you. We still need to do some more improvements for touchscreen users, but [insert excuse].

New gear:

Also I really wanted a cool looking black straw hat, to match my ninja look. So this is in the game name, but you can use it too, no problem. Expect some more ninja themed gear coming to the shop.

Verified Player:

Are you a content creator, that suffers from identity theft? We can now provide you with a verified icon. It can be request from a google form found in our discord. We do have a minimal requirement for subscribers. Maybe you match the requirements, just give it a try. If not please don't get mad, I hope you understand we can't give everyone the icon because that would defeat the purpose. Just keep growing and trying, and one day you will get it. You can recognise verified players on the scoreboard by this icon. 

Thats about it! Wow, long post. Thanks for your time, have a good day. 

Cheers,  
Pelican Party Studios. 

And here is your well deserved  compliment "Your perseverance is admirable"