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[LunaticDancer]

So it's an undercooked Dwarf Fortress's Adventure Mode
It sounds like something I'd play. I guess there's no Multiplayer planned? (I know, the dreaded m-word is offensive for many of us developers )

Yeah DF is one of my inspirations, it uses a fully fledged ore and smelting system based on real-world concentrations (like sphalerite -> zinc and iron) and a similar materials system where you can choose to build stuff out of different metals

There's multiplayer, it's already in. There's a server browser or you can direct connect to IP or play over LAN.

Right now my focus is on fixes and polish (which will include art changes) after which I'll be going to beta

Damn man, so you've actually finished Armok 

[Schrompf]

Just found this post from 2015:

... I've decided I'm going to stop wiping saves since we're close to beta ...

Oh boy, you've come a long way. Looks are still weird, to be honest - I hate block graphics, and in addition yours look somewhat awkward. But all the stuff you apparently can do in this game... it's really tempting. Please notify me/us when you go live on Steam.

And I sure hope your networking code is more robust than 7DaysToDie. Collect 20 corn in a row and the server goes into 30s of hibernation... wow. Unity projects sure have a reputation to defeat.

[Kassoon]

Beta was originally going to be a "midway through development" point and a smaller feature-set, but the alpha players thought it needed more features/content, and I decided to wait until things were more feature complete for those that expect beta to be more like traditional software dev where it's "functional but buggy."

I actually ended up doing much of the networking code from scratch because of how bad Unity's default multiplayer functionality is, which is likely where it's earned that reputation. I've worked on networking in corporate, so that was at least an option.

I'll be doing some significant graphic overhauls before beta so I hope you'll give it another chance then.

[Schrompf]

Thanks for the headsup.

I'll be doing some significant graphic overhauls before beta so I hope you'll give it another chance then.

Oh, don't worry. I'd give it a chance *right now* with some friends. After all you get used to graphics very quickly.

Another wish of mine: do you have some sort of bracket story to give all the activities a sense of direction and progress? Because lately I don't get my friends to play Survival stuff anymore because without an aim they don't even feel like starting. For my survival game I wanted to solve this by providing a story wrapper and thus a target towards you survive and craft. After the end people may continue if they're inclined that way.

[Kassoon]

The current plan is to have a main questline where you get mana sickness and travel the world to cure it, learning about the industrialization of mana as you go. Then there will also be some smaller npc storylines where you can learn more about them and eventually marry them if you like. Those are unlikely to be available until the very end of beta since the current focus is on the core systems and I don't want testers getting preemptively spoiled on it while things are in flux.

[Kassoon]

Work on graphics begins with grass



There's a new grass appearance complete with flowers and little details. Bushes have also been changed to both fit in better and be easier to spot amongst the grass.



Trees have both gotten bigger (because trees are big) and received some visual changes to be a bit more striking and make better use of the lighting.



I've used up my screenshot budget but there's also 15 new hairstyles and some improvements to character customization. I'll be posting more about those and maybe doing some lookalikes once I'm all done with that.

I also discovered a bug with my editor that was taking my screenshots at super low resolution, so I'll try to be a bit more careful about that.


Patch Notes
* New grass appearance
* Made trees bigger because trees are big
* Lots and lots and lots of fixes/tweaks to the customization sliders
* Fixed normalize in customization
* Added 15 new hairstyles
* Tweaked female face

[Kassoon]

Lots of polish and tweaks this week.



Grass has had some further tweaks with hue variation and gentle wind effects.



Besides that there's a lot of subtle art changes, palette work, uv seam fixes, and model changes.

Patch Notes
* Added hue variety to grass
* Added slight wind sway to grass
* More grass appearance tweaks
* Fixes and tweaks to various plants like flowers, bushes, etc
* Player model tweaks
* Foliage tweaks

[Kassoon]

There's all new lighting, global illumination, and further grass improvements.



I've made some substantial changes to how lighting works including new post-processing effects. Realtime GI has been improved and should be more performant.



Load times have also been greatly improved. Whereas before it could sometimes take up to a couple minutes on initial load, this has been cut down to a few seconds. Some loading will still occur once you first get into the game which might give you a second or two of stuttering, but you should see a "loading" notifier when it does, which means it doesn't count cause I called it!



The ocean has also had its look improved, with some better reflections and waves.



This was originally going to be a hats update, because I've added a bunch of new hats for you to craft, but then the lighting changes happened and well... you can see the results of that.



There are new hats! You can craft them and wear them, and the villagers will be both using the new models and wearing the new outfits. Check the patch notes for the full list of hats.


Patch Notes
* Huge optimization for load times
* Huge lighting, global illumination, and post-processing changes
* Improved the look of the ocean
* Added Cowboy Hat
* Added Gas Mask
* Added Horned Mask
* Added Plague Mask
* Added Tall Boots
* Added Sheep Shawl
* New clothing pieces can be crafted
* Villagers will wear certain outfits
* Increased max for belly/chest
* Added loading notification when terrain loading is finalized. It should be a small stutter that occurs a few seconds after loading your game

[Kassoon]

Hello cleud



Clouds have been improved, both in appearance and more realistic density.



New gameplay challenge: forget the actual game, just sit and look at the clouds for a while and see what shapes you can see.



Glass now has reflections. This was much harder than it may seem since it also needed to be transparent, something that the engine wasn't super thrilled about handling.



The result was worth it, as you get nice shiny and reflective windows as you're walkin about town.


Patch Notes
* Improved clouds
* Added window reflections
* Fixed some bugs with villagers talking
* Fixed some male appearance bugs
* Fixed some gaps and slopes in town
* Removed excess air mana from sticks
* Improved look of distant terrain

[Kassoon]

Trees have had further improvements, particularly at medium and long ranges, so standing on a mountain and looking off into the distance you'll see more high-quality foliage.



There's also a new graphics option to fine-tune just how far you can see trees. So if you've got trees or a potato you can choose.

The rest of the update is a lot of quality of life changes and fixes, as well as some performance optimizations. Refueling should be easier, and you should no longer be able to lodge items into other items when dropping them. You can see the full list of changes in the patch notes.


Patch Notes
* Improved look of distant trees
* Added "Tree Distance" to options to fine-tune how far you can see trees
* Various optimizations
* Factories no longer require sticks/fibres to be started, you can use any fuel
* Optimized loading when running around
* You can no longer drop or throw an item when it's colliding with something
* Fixed a case where Villagers could fall out of bounds
* Fixed sleep animation
* Fixed icons being wrong when opening chests
* Fixed sticks/fibres falling through the ground
* Fixed some error messages

[Kassoon]

Several biomes have gotten a facelift to match the new aesthetic of the plains. There's new plants and polish, like in this spoopy swamp.



Villagers have gotten many fixes and improvements. They should be much more lively about town, and have more to say. I've also added proper lip syncing to their talking, so they should look better while chatting away.



Aside from all that this was a major bug fix update, so there should be lots of fixes to some of the major issues. Check out the patch notes for a full list!


Patch Notes
* New trees in most biomes
* Added seed buying tutorial
* New male lips
* Fixed NPCs being unable to jump out of pits
* Fixed certain trees falling through ground
* Fixed sapling sometimes falling through ground
* Shop doors should no longer lock sometimes when the shop is open
* Fixed Villagers being unable to open doors
* Fixed a pathfinding bug
* Added proper mouth movement for talking villagers using the new models
* Fixed a case where zooming in/out would ignore inputs occasionally
* Fixed an error message

[Kassoon]

Say cheese!



Facial expressions are back for the new models! You can press the keys on your numpad to do different expressions. Villagers should also be more expressive when they talk to you.



Last week I was sick, and then it was Thanksgiving, so a somewhat smaller update this week. There's some new visuals and fixes as well, check the patch notes for details.


Patch Notes
* Added back in facial expressions for the new models. You can press the keys on your numpad to do different expressions, and villagers will use them as well in their conversations
* Added fall/winter appearance to all trees
* Fixed farm water not properly filling containers
* Fixed excessive jumping from villagers
* Fixed awkward pause when finalizing character appearance

[Kassoon]

There's a new inquisitor's robe!



What an unexpected treat.



A bunch more QoL and fixes have gone in. Boiling can now be done directly, and your dropped items have more of a grace period where you can reclaim them on someone else's property.



There's more facial expressions added as well.

Patch Notes
* Added Inquisitor Robes
* Added curious expression
* Added shocked face expression
* Increased view distance of glass
* some FPS optimizations
* You can now boil liquids by dropping containers directly onto your campfire, if that's your thing.
* Fixed a bug that would cause Gerald to no longer be interactable after his intro
* You should now be able to use items you've dropped if you put them on someone else's property. If you abandon them they'll be taken, though
* Fixed some weird stuff with sitting
* Fixed some bugs with the crafting filter

[Kassoon]

I'm going to be focusing on bugs, performance, and tweaks for the remainder of the milestone. That means probably less exciting devlogs for a while.

There are a lot of fixes, performance improvements, and tweaks though! Check them out.

Also a new outfit! Those will still be trickling out, and villagers should get more wardrobe variety.

Patch Notes
* Added Shirt and Slacks
* FPS improvements
* Added male appearance for Inquisitor Robes
* Added more clothing options for Villagers
* Added /lockcamera
* You can now drop containers onto a solar still to put them in, if that's your thing
* Fixed cursor being visible in first person
* Fixed animation error with chairs
* Fixed a bug that could cause villagers to go missing
* Fixed a bug that could cause components retrieved from an alchemy bench to clip through walls
* Fixed flickering on some of the hair
* Fixed shoppers sometimes skating around
* Fixed duplicate shoppers sometimes appearing

[Devilkay]

interesting project! I follow!

[Kassoon]

Most of this week was spent on performance improvements. I test on a pretty "average" computer that's about 4 years old, and with average settings I'm getting about 50-60 fps in town and 90 fps in the wild. I'll keep working on performance (probably forever), but it tends to be pretty time-consuming and changes elsewhere tend to worsen performance so it's a back-and-forth.



I also created underwater caves by taking existing caves that spawned in lakes and oceans and filling them with water. I did some work on an underwater camera as you can see in the screen, which will likely be going in this week.

Also BIG NEWS for clippers fans. Villagers should be better about not allowing trees to clip into their homes.





Patch Notes
* Got rid of big holes in the ocean
* Replaced them with underwater caverns
* Optimized framerate
* Fixed some cases where trees would clip inside villager buildings

[Kassoon]

Everything has gotten a color face-lift with a new palette.



One of the steps necessary to making everything feel like it belongs together instead of a random mish-mash is to use a matching color palette for all your art. That is, a selection of colors that you'll use instead of just choosing whatever colors you want like some kind of anarchist!!!



Anyway, hopefully these images look pleasing to your ocular inputs. The underwater camera that was teased last week has gone in which should be great news for all the thalassophobics out there. Also, further performance improvements! I'll keep working on those.



Patch Notes
* New color palette
* Added underwater camera
* Fixed villagers disappearing but their clothes remaining sometimes at certain distances
* Performance improvements

[Kassoon]

The first in big visual overhauls is here, with the whoooole world looking a bit smoother.



The first in big visual overhauls is here, with the whoooole world looking a bit smoother. Slopes and elevation changes have been replaced with half blocks and half slopes where appropriate. Grass has also been tweaked a bit to be a bit more subtle.

Procedurally generating half blocks in a grid-based voxel world is a lot harder than it sounds. While it's pretty simple to know when the world's elevation is in between 1 or 2, knowing when and how to place the half slopes is a lot more complicated, especially when it's a slope connecting a half block to a full block. Since, technically, there's a block there, so I don't necessarily know ahead of time that it's at an edge of normal-to-half. All while still being as performant as possible, as world generation and terrain loading are by far the slowest part of the game. Also, everything needs to move down a bit when spawning on a half block (this wasn't as hard).

Anyway, there's some big improvements coming soon to faces and I'll be working on making nicer buildings.

Patch Notes
* Smoothed out world terrain even further with more gradual slopes which should look less like "rice paddy" tiers

[Kassoon]

I'm seeing some new faces around here lately.



Also villagers will now make requests. Occasionally when chatting they may ask you to do something for them. If you do you'll get a reward and they'll like you more. Use this secret technique in your real life to get new clothes and seeds. They may also ask to come see your house, so make sure you clean up!

Also a bunch of bug fixes. Thanks to those that are reporting them via email, itch, various forums, the website form, carrier pigeon, and tiktok memes. Whatever medium is easiest for you.


Patch Notes
* New female face
* Added villager requests. Villagers may sometimes make requests when you talk to them. If you fulfill the request your relationship will improve and they'll give you a reward.
* Fixed a bunch more errors