Faces and voices

Watching Fanny Payne and Hazel Morris talk on their log by the fire, something was off, and it took me a while to see what. Neither of them ever moved their head. Their hands went up and down while they talked, but the head sat on the body like it was nailed there, and nobody had a mouth to talk with.

So the head is now its own part of every person model, hanging from the neck. When Fanny talks it bobs a little, and Hazel nods slowly while she listens. Everyone got a mouth too: a short dark line under the eyes. While someone talks it opens and shuts, in an uneven rhythm so it reads as words rather than a beat.

A mouth that moves without a sound looked strange, so they talk out loud now. Not in words: in cartoon gibberish. I did not want anything that sounds like the Sims. I found five gibberish recordings on freesound, all free to use, cut each into short pieces, and could not pick one, so they are all in. Every person keeps one of the five voices for life, pitched by who they are. Herbert and Emily are the highest, then Selina, Eleanor and the other women, then Luke, Guy and the other men, and the old a little lower, so Fanny sounds lower than the other women. And everyone sounds a touch their own.

Two smaller things happened at the start of the game. When the game opened, the mouse cursor and everything else lagged for the first moments while things loaded. Now a plain loading screen covers that until it runs smoothly. It was dark brown at first, which I did not like, so it is the same pale blue as the morning sky over the camp.

And the start menu has a builder now. The first time you launch the game, a woman walks in from the left and hammers the menu together, a row with every blow, until it stands. The first version did that on every launch, which was too much, so she only builds it once. But she was too cute to send away, so she stays, standing next to the menu every time you open the game.