Introduction

Hello, it seems like it take us a bit of time since we released the last update, but the game is alive and well.

It was a rough year, 2 people from the team (the programmer, that's me, and the artist) moved cities, we've redone a bunch of complex systems in the game, added and removed a bunch of stuff too.

And we're still have our day jobs. It's rough, you know :^D

But the progress on the game is going great and it finally feels like we got a bunch of things done that we can share before the release of the new version.

Let's look at some of those new features and updates to the game.    

Since I am the guy behind all the technical stuff - this devlog will focus on technical aspects with a sprinkles of game design related topics.

New UI

I don't even know where to start here. User Interface is an important part of these type of games. And ours was, to put it mildly, really bad.

And that's considering I've completly rewrote the UI before. It was still cumbersome, ugly, buggy, not cool.

The previous system (which you can see in v0.0.04) were written like your typical OOP-style UI library. And considering I'm not using OOP language - it wasn't a great move in the long term, even tho it felt ok at the beginning.

Well, I've rewritten the whole system again and now it's a neat immediate mode UI "library". 

It can be easily extended, skinned, prototyping new menus is fast, so it's cool now.    

But it wasn't a fast process, I was forced to pretty much learn (the hard way) how to write an immediate mode UI from scratch. 

And I still don't feel confident enough about the architecture overall, but it was  definitely a good move, because at this point we have way more UI related code and it doesn't feel like ass to write.

From player's perspective the new UI means: 

• New design.
• Feels snappier.
• Floating windows.
• Will be easier to make your own UI (modding will be a thing)

World Generation

One of the recent changes I've made last month is a new world generation algorithm.

Before we had a few opensimplex noises that I've used as temperature/heightmap of the world, which were producing some meh-looking results.

And on top of that it was time consuming and not fun, each biomes had to go through a trial-and-error way to make it to the game.

It wasn't obvious how will biome appear in the world with those exact set of values.    

So, I spent a few days reading through a few articles, github repos and even Minecraft wiki about it's old world generation algorithm.

And now we have one. It's way easier to visualize, prototype and implement new biomes.    

I have a few things to finish:

• We still don't have rivers and lakes, which would be really useful in the future, when we will introduce fishing.
• A few more biome variants is currently wip (let us cook)
• Custom structures like roads, dungeons, outposts require a bit more thought, so I am sitting on it at the moment

Enemies and Combat System

We plan to spend August improving, or as I shall call it, *remake* the whole combat system. 

I won't say much, but hopefully, it will feel less like cookie clicker.    

So here is a few screenshots of the enemies our artist drawn:

Data

More technical boring stuff:

I rewrote the whole "database" thingy we used, so now we have a custom human readable JSON-like format for declaring items, mobs, biomes, etc.    

Apart from loading custom textures, it is trivial to add new items/buildings and minables (that's how I call stuff like trees) to the game without the need to recompile.

You can even play with numbers yourself when the 0.0.05 will be released.

New Content

A bunch of features out of any particular order.    

Research table is now a thing. You need it to research new technologies, which unlocks new buildings and recipes.

The whole random generation thingy got improved, so you can use seeds while making a new world.

Bunch of new items and minables.        

I lost track of all the small things we've added, so let's keep it until the release.

Plans and Future

So, yeah. The game finally starts to feel like an actual game for me.

Recently, I've balanced out technologies and reciepes, so you can actually spend an hour or two playing the game.

Of course, it's a sandbox game, we need like x10 amount of stuff than we currently have, but it's a good start.

We plan to release a few more versions here on itch.io, before feature-freezing it as a "demo" and going to Steam EA.

Yep. Have a good day.