Greetings Tea Witches, It’s Alexandra back with a special Loose Leaf development update all about the wild world of ~fluid simulation~. This is the technology behind making water look and feel like real liquid in game. Which will be pretty important for a game where you’re making tea. How does that all work? I talked to Kitfox programmer Kira to find out: Our main goal with water in Loose Leaf is to make it a fun toy that you’ll be able to play around with in game. You’ll be able to move and manipulate water in satisfying ways that will look and behave realistically. You can spill water on the counter, it moves when boiling on the stove, and you’ll be able to see the flavour infuse in the water when you add ingredients. We wanted to make it so that interacting with water is fun and satisfying, even when you accidentally spill or make a mistake. Kira explained that we are using something called “[url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoothed-particle_hydrodynamics]Smoothed particle hydrodynamics[/url]” with Unity’s burst compiler and job systems. This makes water into little into spheres instead of just a graphic effect like you see in a lot of games. There have already been some interesting results like way pouring looks in the gif. below and even funnier bugs. We had an issue before where opening a teapot lid would cause the water to fly out everywhere like a geyser! [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/44779548/e03905a9bb00619e69ffea2af16e2563960c834d.gif[/img] A lot of the visuals in Loose Leaf are still very much in progress so we will have more images and videos for how all the water interactions will look in the future. Also this month, Charly has been working on the debug panel, Thea has been drawing a very mystical-looking UI and Tanya and Cohen are writing the story. All will be revealed in time. We are also preparing for PAX West in Seattle at the end of August. We won’t have a booth this year but stay tuned for a very special off-site event. You might also want to pay attention to the summer showcase events online in case any Kitfox news pops up during them. The powers that be say I have to be very secretive about all of this. That’s just how it is when you make deals with other covens! More to say next month. But in the meantime, grab a cuppa with us over on the Loose Leaf board on the [url=https://discord.gg/kitfoxgames]Kitfox Discord[/url]. Thank you for the tea recommendations from last month too 🙏 -Alexandra