Just like that August is over. I say that a lot, but I really feel it this time. This month was hampered slightly by other events. To be brief, I attended a wedding in Europe which meant I lost about 10 days of work. And since that person is potentially reading this right now, I should clarify that I don’t regret my decision to attend at all, however it did mean a little less got done game wise.

So, let’s jump into it because despite the loss of time there are a few updates to give. I believe at the end of the last update I mentioned that the dialogue system would be next in line. I’m happy to report that, bar a bit of UI tuning, that system is complete. This is another situation where that sounds like very little, but its actually a fair bit of progress.

Before we get to what’s new though I should preface with the old. If you’ve played the current version of the game you’ve probably talked to an NPC within it. I mean I really hope you’ve talked to at least one person. Even if you haven’t though you’ve seen the intro cutscene so you should be familiar with the dialogue system to a degree.

The dialogue system was created pretty early on in development and suffers from (like many other things) a lack of forward planning. At the time I made it I didn’t quite realize just how much was going to be steeped on top of the system. This resulted in a lot of bits being tacked on as time went on. So below is a basic image of the old system.
It serves its purpose although you might notice right off the bat that the clock is still visible which clutters the UI. Aside from that the major visual difference you’ll see is the large blank slot on the left side of the screen. This is used for buttons to navigate any menus within the dialogue system, except for when it isn’t. Below here you’ll see an image of a quest.
As mentioned above there are two buttons on the left one to show the list of quests, another to exit the conversation. Then, because I guess I was feeling experimental that day, you can also click on the text “Beginner Carpentry” to start the related quest. To my knowledge this is the only system in the game that requires you to click on text like it is a button.

If you’ve been reading these dev logs for the last few months you’ve likely heard me talk about UI consistency and the lack there of in this game. This was one of the major things I wanted to address in this system. Not to mention there would have eventually been a “Topics” button to navigate another set of choices. And the fact that the way you leave the UI is through a button that says “Exit” rather than the usual red X button.

Before we get into all that there are a few other things to mention however. As I said briefly the old dialogue system was made pretty early on and as systems were added in (quests, cutscenes, tale conversations) more and more was tacked onto the system, straining it greatly.

For instance, at the start of this I mentioned that if you’ve watched the opening cutscenes you are familiar with the dialogue system. That’s sort of true. It looks the same, but in reality there are two separate dialogue engines in the current game. The first handles regular conversations and then a second one had to be concocted specifically for cutscenes because the original was too convoluted to be applied in a cutscene. I don’t think I need to explain how bad that is in terms of design.

Another instance of bad design was related to the blacksmith. If you’ve ever upgraded a tool in the current version of the game you might remember that the blacksmith says a line of dialogue when you start an upgrade. He also has a unique line of dialogue when an upgrade is in progress and a specific line when the job is done and you pick up your tool. This is a simple interaction, but because of how the dialogue engine was written the whole thing effectively had to be uniquely dealt with.

Whenever you start a conversation in the game it checks to ensure the conversation isn’t one of those three specific blacksmith lines. If it is one of those lines the game basically shoves the entire dialogue system aside and has a hard coded set of instructions to handle the interaction. TLDR, not well made.

Aside from this there were smaller issues. As mentioned, things like quests weren’t originally considered so weird UI elements like the text buttons were made. There was originally a rumor system that was scrapped early on, but remnants still remain in the system. There were other conditions that dictated character dialogue which were dropped. Things like characters having multiple portraits for different emotions and switching through them during conversation wasn’t originally intended. And while tales would get that functionality regular dialogue never got it due to complications.

Speaking of tales, those were an idea that spawned much later. Tales for reference are the longer more character driven conversations that each character will have. A simple comparison would be the heart event conversations from Stardew Valley if you are familiar. Tales also involved player responses, another thing that wasn’t planned on.

Despite what you might think I don’t bring all this up to simply expose my own missteps. I hope that pointing these things out in some way helps people to understand why I decided to reconstruct this game from the ground up. Also, on the off chance that any other game developers are reading this I hope it serves as a cautionary tale. Plan your games out kids, take it from someone whose game plan was basically, “eh, how complicated can it really be?”.

So, I’ve spoken on what’s wrong with the current system, which is basically everything. So what has changed? Well, from a visual perspective not a ton although there are some noticeable differences. Most of the work is behind the scenes to make the system far more robust in general. So here is a simple image of dialogue to start.
As you can see, not a ton changed aside from the lack of button space on the left. Also the clock isn’t just weirdly still hanging in the background. One other minor change you might notice is the arrow in the bottom right. It will shift up and down slightly and basically just indicates that the line of dialogue is complete and can be advanced. For those unaware dialogue types itself out character by character instead of just appearing all at once. So onto other things, below an example of the new conversation menu.
The flow is a bit harder to understand with just still images. To explain, the player will initiate conversation with an NPC. Doing so results in a simple line of dialogue like you saw two images ago. Once you reach then end of that text you’ll be shown the resulting menu you see above. This allows you to pick further conversations via topics or quests.

The visuals likely speak for themselves, but at a basic level this UI is meant to be more inline with other UI in the game. Clicking any button will launch you into the respective topic or quest. Topics and quests are indicated by a specific icon, and as before quests will change their icon based on it being new, in progress, or ready to turn in. Finally, we have a response menu that you’ll see below.
This is where you’ll have to excuse the UI a bit. As mentioned near the start some adjustments to how it looks and button size still need to be done. This response menu allows the player to do things like accept quests or, in most cases, choose a response during a conversation.

So that is dialogue in a nutshell. To keep it brief all the things mentioned above have been addressed behind the scenes. There is now one unified dialogue system for in game and cutscene events. The UI is more inline with the game. There are allowances to alter portraits in dialogue, and you can pick dialogue responses in conversation.

Aside from that the dialogue system in general is implemented. Everything you have seen is working as intended. So you can talk to NPCs, accept, decline, and turn in quests. You can also start topics and pick responses within them.

The only thing that hasn’t been done, which is likely next is that there is no visual way to track quests at the moment. The quest log is likely my next project. However, this should just be a mostly simple matter of visualizing data.

Aside from dialogue there is one other thing to address from this month. That would be quests. If you’ve played Verdant Village for any length of time you’ve probably done some quests. In general these are basically just tasks to fetch particular items for NPCs. Quests usually unlock something for you, furniture schematics, new systems like archeology or alchemy, or sometimes new areas. And so we come to the point of interest, recipes, specifically of the cooking variety.

Cooking is sort of an oddball system. However, to put it simply, I personally find that getting a recipe isn’t that great of a reward. Cooking is such an optional thing in these games that I think there are large swaths of players (myself included usually) who never cook anything.

Having quests, honestly a large number of quests, give a recipe as a reward I think feels bad. As such I’ve decided to basically take these quests out. Instead, a new system will be put in place related to an NPC. Effectively this system will be you bringing him ingredients and that will reward you with the recipe and the cooked item. Ultimately, I think this will trim a lot of fat from the quest system and hopefully make quests more enticing.

That said, I know that’s a large chunk of quest content. I don’t think I’ve said too much about it, but I wanted to note here that there is something that will be added to supplement quests. I never got around to adding it in the current version, but I’ve always referred to this system as “secrets”. These secrets don’t involved dialogue with NPCs, but are effectively little quests you can find naturally in the world. Unlike actual quests they don’t involve collecting items on a list but rather solving puzzles (sometimes by bringing the right item) but generally they are a little more interesting than just a quest checklist to fill.

Hopefully that inspires a bit of hope in that regard. I don’t like to just take things out. In this case I’d say cooking quests are just being altered a bit instead of disappearing entirely, but I know it might not seem that way to everyone.

Anyway, I think that’s everything, thank you all for your patience and interest, it really does mean a lot to me. I will have more updates at the end of the month as usual.

Tomorrow is the start of August so let’s jump right in. This is one of those months where a lot happened, but it was condensed into just a few systems so on paper it feels a bit sparse. As usual, I’ve basically been continuing with the reimplementation of various systems in the game. I was also trying to do some research into future systems and tuning up things where I thought it was needed.

So, let’s start at the beginning. Last month I had most of the end of day recap in place. As a quick explanation when the clock hits midnight the game will pause for a moment and show you a variety of information about the day that just passed. You can check the previous post for details, but its generally things like money earned from shipping, animal and crop statuses, etc.

The start of this month was spent finishing up this system, or at least finishing it to the point that it can be done. At least one addition is guaranteed and others may be tackled if they seem worth it. As with last time you’ll have to ignore some of the art as it is currently temporary.

The first section that was added was the player stat section. There was no old equivalent to this so all I have to show is this version. Basically, the page will display how much xp you gained for various tools and professions as well as how far away you are from your next level.
The idea with this is sort of two-fold. First its nice to be able to just get a quick look to see how close you are to leveling up. Aside from that I find it can be nice in games like this to be shown small goals you can work towards. These games tend to be pretty open, letting the player pursue whatever they want. While I obviously don’t want to railroad anyone I think its sometimes nice to be shown something you can work towards if you need a direction to work in.

The other thing about player stats that you might have noticed me mention before is professions. If you’ve played the current version of the game you are probably familiar with perks. For those who aren’t, there are currently two things you can earn to improve your character. Tool skills, which you get by using your tools, and perks. Tool skills effectively just reduce the amount of stamina taken when using a tool.

Perks are more interesting in that they augment certain parts of the game. Things like gaining more resources from alchemy, a chance to cook double of something, instantly breaking rocks when mining, getting more honey from apiaries, etc.

When I was implementing the player stats section in the recap I looked back through these. I’m trying to give each system a once over as I put it in to make sure its up to par. My determination on perks was that the idea was alright, but the implementation was sort of scattered. Several of them were odd, some unexciting, and most importantly there were many systems that had no perks associated with them at all.

I decided that something of an overhaul was needed. So the perk system will be replaced with professions. The goal is to categorize things a bit better and give more of a sense of progression within a particular activity. Each profession has 5 levels with each level unlocking something or giving a benefit of some sort. I’m attempting to avoid spoilers here so I’ll give farming as an example. Without stating too much you’ll unlock fertilizers, a new type of thing to farm, upgrades, and automation throughout the five levels.

I don’t want to oversell this however. Some things you will unlock are slightly changed versions of some of the old perks. That said most of this is new and builds off the changes that are happening to systems in this new version.

In total there are 17 professions each with 5 levels so 85 unlocks (opposed to the 44 perks in the current version). Basically, if there is something you can do in the game its probably a profession. Examples would be Smith, Farmer, Rancher, Alchemist, etc. There are a few in there you might not expect as a couple of new systems are in and some things were expanded and I felt a profession was needed.

I should state that none of this is implemented yet. It is entirely planned out however much of it relies on interconnecting systems. Because of that it serves to get a base version of the system in and then build onto it afterwards.

That is it for that section. A lot of stuff happened but there is obviously still more to do. Now, after that massive tangent, we can move on to the second page that got added to the recap. This again has no counterpart in the current game but the recap will now display your current shipments. Again, UI isn’t finalized, but you should get the idea from the image below. This should serve as an easy reminder for what is ready to pick up and what isn’t.
Now, if the recap shows shipping objects you can probably figure out the next system that got added. Shipping is now back in the game. This probably doesn’t sound like a ton, but shipping is basically a huge database and UI task. So, while it might look like a simple screen there is a lot going on under the hood that made it a somewhat arduous task. Since the current version of the game has shipping I’ll start with pictures.

Old Version
New Version
As with the other UI changes I’ve been talking about, the idea is to bring things in line and homogenize the UI. The old UI is very button focused, something that can be annoying for controller players cause there’s just so much moving around through menus. Instead, much like the other UI, sliders have been put in. In addition to that I wanted to try and simplify this UI a bit. The old version is icon overload because you can see the required resources for every item that is visible.

The new version only displays the required resources when you click on one of the items you can order. There’s a slight change in the button UI for each orderable item to indicate if you have the resources or not as well so you won’t need to click on a button just to see if you have what you need.

In addition, once you do select an object you can see what is needed to order it. The required resources are listed along with how much of that resource you have. How much of a resource you have will appear in red or green depending on if you have enough. Hopefully all of this combined will show you what you need at a glance. Also, item icons can be hovered to see the name incase you don’t recognize it.

That is shipping in a nutshell. Of course if you can order items you also need to be able to receive them. This is also implemented and has been changed in terms of looks to something that I think is a bit more functional. Again, we’ll start with pictures.

Old Version
New Version
The old version effectively acted like a chest that you could only take items out of. Anything you ordered would eventually appear there and you could grab it. This had a few problems, the most obvious probably being that you could run out of space. Probably unlikely, but it could happen. The other issue was that it just didn’t look very nice.

On top of this the idea to show how long it would be until your item arrived wasn’t thought of until later. Because of that a UI was sort of just stapled onto the side. Its pretty basic and looks about as tacked on as it actually is.

The new version is more straight forward and combines all the info into a neater package. Basically, anything you order will appear in the list. The list can be scrolled and has infinite space so no problems can arise there. The gauge that you see on each item indicates how many days it will take for your item to arrive.

As stated before, there are some obvious pieces of UI that need to go in. Once those pieces get cleaned up I think it will look fairly nice though. If nothing else I think it is functionally a lot better than it used to be.

The last thing is something that I’m still working on although it is coming along quickly which is good. Especially considered how much of a nightmare the old code was. The system currently being made is the dialogue system. That probably doesn’t need to be explained, but basically anything involving talking to an NPC, giving a response, picking topics, starting quests, etc.

Currently you can walk up to an NPC talk to them and go through the conversation to the end. Nothing fancy, but like I said the old code was nightmarish compared to what currently exists. Its all organized much better and everything is a lot cleaner. The old dialogue system ended up being stitched together in many ways because the scope of what it needed to do grew as the game was developed. Since I know what is required from the outset this should be done a lot better.

The other things that got done this month were smaller. Some code was optimized between larger things. Lore for the world is still being written, so much lore. I’ve gotten to the point where the timeline is basically in place for larger world events so bar small things I’m basically on to detailing local lore. As I think I’ve mentioned before there is going to be something akin to a main story for this game. You can entirely ignore it ala Skyrim, but it involves a few hundred years of history in the region so some lore is required.

Lastly the battle system went through some more considerations. It has been fluctuating here and there and will likely continue to until I start development on it. Its too easy to change things when there is no code to prevent me from doing so. Still, I think the small changes and tweaks being made to it are a net positive. A system like that has the potential to really ruin or make a game so I want to do the best I can with it.

Alright, I think that’s it. As usual I’ve probably written too much based on the length of this doc. Thank you all for reading, I’ll have another update in a month as usual.

We’ve reached the end of the month again and so as usual I have an update on what’s been going on with Verdant Village. For the first time in a while I feel like I’ve actually made progress. If you’ve been reading these dev logs you probably know I’ve been working on custom house interiors for a while. This month was the first time since I finished that system. So, I actually have a list of things that got done, which always feels better than just saying you’ve done work on one huge system.

Best to start at the beginning though. So, in order I first cleaned up the tool tip logic just a bit. There are a number of systems that are in place but might be missing a minor piece of code to polish it. I tend to program large swaths of a system and then make some notes before doing a second pass a little later to spruce things up. I find its better to give a system a little bit of time to breathe. Doing so lets me look at it with fresh eyes so I’m more likely to find things to polish up.

As for the tool tip logic it wasn’t much, just a simple subsystem so that the tool tip will never appear off the edge of the screen. Simply put, if you hover something that makes a tool tip close to the right edge of the screen the tool tip will appear to the left of your mouse and vice versa. Then apply that logic to the top and bottom of the screen too.

Next, was something far more important. When I got sidetracked on making custom house layouts I was actually going to start making the construction UI. Now that I’m finally done with custom housing, I moved back to the construction UI. For starters, below is a screenshot of the old UI.
Now below this is an example of the new UI.
Sprite work on the new stuff is still in flux a bit. Anything you see could be tweaked, but the general layout is set. I think the best way to explain the changes is ‘streamlining’. The current live version of the game has a lot of buttons. I think I decided this because I play these sorts of games on mouse and keyboard (which based on what I seem to hear from others means I’m weird, but I already knew that). So when making UI I tailored it towards that sort of control scheme. The problem is, since the game will support controllers too, menus like this are really inconvenient. Having to navigate across even just four options is honestly not great and some UI is even worse than that. There are some pieces of UI like the inventory where streamlining might not be possible for a controller, but the problem should be alleviated where possible.

Even ignoring the controller issue the old UI wasn’t terribly great in my opinion anyway. In general, there are too many buttons and, in my opinion, too much text. This might sound strange but UI design should (I believe) always be concerned about new players. When you are familiar with a game you can connect the dots most times. Its when you are new that readability is most important. In the case of the old construction UI basically everything violates this, some bits more so than others.

To start, the buttons at the bottom to navigate the UI aren’t clear. The left and right arrows I would say are the only passable thing, although still a little unclear. The X button to close out the menu can probably also be understood, but it runs the risk of causing confusion because the live version of the game just throws UI close buttons in random places a lot of the time, so you can’t be sure what it does. A simple example of this concept is that in Windows the close button for a window is always in the top right. You’ll always know where to look for it and what it does. That kind of consistency is extremely important. Finally, the check button next to the X suffers from not having a clear purpose. Again, you can probably deduce what it does, but its left to interpretation.

The next issue is the text that displays what you need for construction. There’s too much text, and while everyone knows what wood, gold, stone, etc are, players may not know how to identify it in game. In game all items are icons, not text. Therefore, a purchase that requires these items should show the items, not a word describing the item.

In addition, the old UI only indicates when you have enough of the item with a green check. It doesn’t indicate when you don’t have enough of the material or gold. This leaves ambiguity which should really be avoided in every UI.

Finally, the buttons on the right. Not only do these add to the button count, but it also isn’t clear what each one does. The worst case being the difference between upgrading buildings and building new buildings. These buttons create two separate lists which unintentionally hides away options from players. Someone may just not notice the buttons and completely miss all the extra options.

Now, the new UI I think addresses most of, if not all, of these concerns. The name of the shop has been added which, while not that important, gives a bit of context for what you are looking at. Instead of having navigation at the bottom there is a simple list of options with a slider. This not only shows more options at once but also simplifies viewing and selecting. Instead of an ambiguous checkbox for starting construction there is a button clearly telling you what you are clicking on. The X button is also in the top right, which is where it will be on all UIs.

The buttons on the right of the UI have also been done away with. Upgrades are listed among the buildings getting rid of the need for two separate lists. Moving and deleting buildings has been condensed into one mode and therefore one button “modify buildings” which simplifies the process.

Lastly the required items for the building are displayed using the sprite rather than text. The amounts of each tint red or green based on if you have what you need to construct the building. The time to build is also given its own cost entry so that the detail doesn’t get lost in a paragraph of description text. Finally, something that can’t be seen in the screenshot is that if you hover any item sprite you’ll get a tool tip telling you what it is, so even if you haven’t seen the resource before you can at least get an idea of what you are looking for.

I’m sure it could still be done better, I’m hardly a game design expert, but I think this is a marked improvement over what was there before. This sort of make over is what can be expected for all the UI in the game. I don’t want to just remake what was already there in a new engine, that would be a waste of time when so much could be improved.

But enough about the construction UI. On top of all the changes all the code has been put in place to make it function appropriately so we are done there. The next thing to address was the actual buildings themselves. I’d already made coops and barns work because I’d implemented livestock a while back. Obviously, you can’t have animals without a place to put them. However, the other buildings hadn’t been setup. So I made wells and silk farms function. That still leaves fisheries and stables, but both are being put on hold for different reasons. The fishery UI needs to be completely altered, looking at the old UI I think I might have been in a fever dream when I okayed it. For stables the plan currently is to massively overhaul how horses work including things like stats, multiple horses, etc. So I didn’t want to jump into that before I was ready to tackle the whole thing.

During the process of setting up silk farms I had to account for them changing how they look during different seasons. This is in the live version of the game but it was really more of a tacked on feature because the engine was restrictive and I hadn’t setup buildings in a way to easily change their sprite during season change. This system is now actually appropriately implemented which means things like snow on the roofs of buildings in winter and other such things.

Finally, we come to shipping. This was the last thing I worked on this month and am still working on. Although that’s a bit deceptive because shipping really covers, selling items, ordering items, receiving items, and technically mail since its in the same UI. As expected, working on one system quickly spiraled into multiple systems.

To start, you can now sell items via the shipping chest. It functions in the same way a regular chest does but at the end of the day all the items in it will be sold. This is all in place and working. Of course this led me to what I call the ‘End of Day Recap’ screen. Part of selling your things is that the game will tell you what you sold at the end of the day and how much you made.

So as with every other system I took a look at what I already had. In the live version of the game you get a simple screen that breaks items up into categories, which I don’t think are ever explained to the player. I forget the reasoning for this but I think it was something to do with displaying too many items on screen that led to that implementation.

In any case, very basic, and honestly not that insightful unless you remembered what you put in the chest and could reason out what category it would fall under. Even still you’d be left with a lump sum of profit and not really know what sold for a lot and what didn’t.

Now, fair warning, the below screenshots are very much work in progress. The logic is all working, but the art will be changed in time. My artist is currently busy making furniture sprites, oh so many furniture sprites, but I’ll eventually get her onto this. The important thing is the functionality.
This screen in the recap will show you each item you sold, along with how many of it and how much money each item stack sold for. There will also be a total at the bottom but I didn’t get around to it quite yet.

However, that isn’t all. I did some thinking (as I’m prone to doing) and decided that this recap could really be a lot more useful. To tangent slightly, one of the bigger deviations in this game from other harvest moon type games is that you don’t have to sleep. You can just keep going through midnight if you want. As I recall there’s literally a perk called insomniac for staying awake 7 days straight. When I made the decision to make the game this way I didn’t really think about how it might change things. I’m not going to take this away and force players to sleep every night but changes need to be made to support this concept.

To put it simply forcing a player to sleep each night effectively forces a routine. Every day the player is going to start and end in the same spot. This, combined with repetitive daily tasks, creates an environment where it makes sense to have a list of things that you do each day. Good examples would be, watering crops, feeding animals, etc. Because a basic routine is so ideal most players have one. Because you have one it keeps you fairly tuned into everything going on.

However, if you aren’t forced to sleep each night the game can tick over to midnight and you could be on floor 37 of the mines looking for 5 more iron ore cause Sven is too lazy to provide materials for tool upgrades himself. Suddenly you’re in a completely different situation. A new day has started, you have things you need to do but you are in a strange starting situation.

The idea of this new recap is to give you a gauge of where things are at and help you get a snapshot of everything so you can plan a little bit more at that moment and formulate a plan for the day if you need to.

So, the recap now has tabs. The first being profits from shipping, as discussed above. The second is crops. Shown below, as I said above none of the sprite work is final.
The crops tab will show you the current status of every crop you have planted. How much water does it have, and how long till it is fully grown. This way you know if you’ve missed watering something, or maybe you need to run back to harvest. This may get more in depth if other things are added to crops as well. There are things like fertilizer and growth powders. If I decide to add more stats to crops you can expect them to be shown here. Next is a far more complicated one, animals.
As you may remember, animals got a lot of changes. Mostly, they were made far more complicated as a way to combat them being basically just an easy infinite money source. They produce goods of varying quality based on their happiness. Happiness is dictated by what they eat, if they have a pasture, grooming, immunity, diseases, etc. While all these things can be seen in a coop or barn you can now see them in the recap. The big green gauges are fairly self-explanatory, just an indicator of where that stat is. You might also notice the little green and red circles next to each icon. These indicate other bits of information such as, is the animal fully grown or not, what tier of pasture can they access if any, are they pregnant, do they have a disease, what food did they eat last, etc.

I understand that this is a lot of stuff to keep up with so I’m hoping this will serve as a simply way to condense all the info and make it a bit more digestible.

There is one final tab at the moment which is player stats. I don’t think this is exactly needed but I thought it would be a nice little page of information to see how you progressed that day. The plan is that it will track progress in tool proficiencies, perks, challenges, etc. Similar to what you see with crops and animals you’ll have indicators of how much XP or progress you gained in each particular thing that day. Again, probably not needed but I think it might help if a player is looking for a direction they can look at their stats and maybe see that they are close to getting a perk or stat increase and then focus on it.

I think it might also be a good idea to expand on this sort of thing in the player pause menu as well. Basically have this information available to the player anytime they pause and obviously have it update in real time. This way if you have a ton of stuff to keep track of you can sort of check your work as you do it. I feel like with all the systems it could get overwhelming if you choose to dabble in a lot of stuff and having a way to track it will help.

Okay. I think that’s it. I went on for a while here but I like to explain the choices I’m making here. Any feedback is obviously appreciated. Things I think are good ideas can obviously turn out to be poor ones as clearly evidenced by things like the old construction UI.

One other minor thing that I don’t think will be a big deal but I thought it worth mentioning. I’m still writing lore for the world on the weekends, or dear so much lore, so much lore that is probably irrelevant to a farming game lol. I’m thinking of using this world as a setting for games in the future so it wouldn’t all be wasted, but that’s beside the point. I just wanted to mention that some characters may be getting reworked a bit to fit into the lore. As the world gets fleshed out I’m finding that the characters will need to be altered a bit to match. I don’t think any of the characters that exist are particularly well characterized at the moment but I thought I’d make a broad statement saying that they are all subject to change. Realistically I see this as a good thing. The whole point of making lore was to make the world feel more natural. If I’m feeling characters need to be changed that means there is lore that can color each of them in a more interesting way. So just a heads up there.

I’m not exactly sure what this month holds. I’ll be finishing the recap, and then shipping first. After that I’m not sure what I’ll turn to next. There is plenty to do of course, it might be NPCs or it may be something more mundane like setting up saving and loading. Time will tell. Anyway if you made it all the way down here thanks for reading and sticking with me through this very long process. I hope you all are having a good summer, I’ll be back in a month to ramble on about other game design things.

Hello all, I can’t believe it’s already June. In retrospect I suppose I thought my May would be fairly quiet, but it really turned out to be anything but that. I should probably expect that sort of thing at this point in my life, but somehow, I’m still being surprised that things come up and take up time.

As mentioned above I had a few things happen that slowed my work a bit, however I did still get things done. Namely the interior design portion of things. I really can’t express how glad I am that its done. I don’t like to get stuck working on systems for long stretches of time. I don’t really mind it from a working perspective, but it just makes progress seem so slow when you look back and realize you’ve been working on the same system for weeks.

So, what is the interior design system I hear you ask. The short answer is that it’s the system that allows you to modify your house layout in game. Incase some preface is needed, in games of this genre (that I’m aware of at least) you’ll generally get a house at the start of the game which is usually something like a one room shack. Over the course of the game, you’ll usually upgrade your home and effectively make the interior larger. Generally, this expansion comes in the form of static upgrades to the interior layout. The important take away is that each player will end up with the same floorplan after buying all the upgrades.

What spawned this idea was that I thought it seemed like a missed opportunity in this kind of game. Assuming you aren’t min/maxing many players I think have fun with decorating their house and setting it up how they like. This system just takes that process one step further and allows you to setup the rooms and walls as you please. To put it briefly the floorplan of your house is now entirely modular down to the individual tiles. You can have as many or as few rooms as you like. You can also make them each whatever shape you want.

This entire process replaces the previous system which was just static upgrades which added rooms on. However, I think I’m likely going to keep the cellar as an option which will just be a static room. There might also be an attic upgrade you can get which will be the same type of thing.

As for the main floor you build these rooms in the same way you would construct other buildings on your farm. You’ll talk to the carpenter, pay a fee, and then be brought to a screen what you can draw in the room as you please. The only stipulation I haven’t decided on yet is if I’ll make new rooms cost resources based on the size you make them. This seems like the proper way to go I think. Probably a static gold cost but then a varying amount of wood, stone, etc based on the size of the room.

In addition to creating rooms you can freely modify and delete them once they are created so if you change your mind, want to renovate, add more doors, etc that option is also available.

I said I would try to show off something from the system when it was done so I do have a few screenshots. I started to make a gif to show the process of making a room but it takes so long to do the gif was too massive. I’m admittedly not the most creative person when it comes to designing floorplans but the point is really just to show that you can setup your house however you want. You will have to excuse the lack of furniture and the pixilation. Zooming out in the engine to show the entire room at once is currently a bit weird and smushes stuff together but I think the general point comes across.

Because I do feel bad about not being able to really show everything all at once with interior design here are a few mockups from my artist as well for furniture and decorations she is working on. You can expect that once everything is said and done you’ll have something more like this rather than a bunch of empty rooms.

Aside from this system, which took most of the month (again, so happy it’s done now) I have gotten a bit of time to work with other things. I’ve built most of the construction UI at this point which will allow you to both use this system and actually place things like coops and barns. Looking at the UI has made me think that a bit of a color scheme change might be in order, but that would be a minor art fix if it happens.

Once that UI is in place I’m going to get shipping implemented which I don’t think should be too hard although I do want to make some graphical changes to the UI. Once that system is in place I’m going to get furniture setup. To clarify, furniture placement is already 99% in place. The only things that are missing are all the items and sprites and a couple of stipulations for specific furniture types. Adding sprites is tedious, but not difficult. The stipulations should also be pretty simple once a general algorithm is made.

Once furniture is working I’ll have to jump back to the interior design system a bit to make it properly handle furniture in situations where you would delete a room or modify it in such a way that furniture placement becomes invalid. This should also be a mostly simple process as I’ve set up the system to account for furniture already. I just, ironically, don’t have any in game furniture to place outside of chests.

As you can probably tell, many things start to intertwine in games like this. I try my best to make one system at a time, but things like this pop up on occasion where you have to put something on hold while you figure out another system. The further in I get the less it happens, but this is a particularly egregious case.

I don’t have much else to say at this point. Combat sprites are steadily moving forward in the background. Most of the enemy sprites are made with just a few modifications required for some of them. I don’t usually post those because it feels like the sort of thing that should be discovered in game but here’s an example of one. This creature is still in progress and is admittedly pulled from D&D but I always thought they were a cool enemy. I think most of the other ones are a bit more original though.

With any luck now that I’m past interior design things should speed up a little bit. That system was very labor intensive just in terms of all the things to code. Most systems in the game are much more light to program. Hopefully I’ll have a bit more to talk about next month as with any luck June will be more dedicated to working on smaller systems.

I’m also tentatively hopeful that this version might go onto steam soonish. This is a very non-committal statement but a lot of the basic systems are starting to come together. At this point you can farm, fish, chop trees, mine (although the mines don’t exist yet), build buildings, and raise animals. On top of that most of the general functionality of the world is in place. Things like day/night cycle, seasons, inventory management, shops, and some other stuff I’m probably not thinking of are in.

All that said there are still things missing. In order for the game to be a game I’d have to design the world, which is actually a lot easier than it sounds. I also still need to add a few systems. Furniture and shipping as mentioned above, NPCs and dialogue, quests, basic skill levels, and you know a way to save and load your game. Thing is none of those are particularly complex to add. Its not like this will go live next week or something, but this hopefully gives a bit of insight into where I feel I’m at. A lot of the complex stuff has been done at this point, there’s still tons to do but most of it isn’t I guess ‘hard’ to make.

In any case, I’ll cut this off here. I have plenty of game related work to do today anyway. Thanks for taking the time to read, and, as always, for your patience. I’ll be back with more updates at the end of June.

It is already the end of April, which is rather alarming. I feel like the month just disappeared but that’s nothing new. I was hoping things would be a bit different by the time we reached the end of the month, but it is what it is. As such this will probably be a shorter update.

As you might remember from the last update there is a change happening to the player house interior. For a brief refresher, in most games (that I know of) like this you can upgrade your house to expand the interior. Generally speaking, this means another room is added onto the layout, or perhaps an existing one is made larger. The point being that every player ends up with the same house layout.

I thought this was something of a missed opportunity so I took it upon myself to try something different. What me of the past didn’t account for was just how complicated this would end up being. I tend to convince myself that complex systems won’t be too hard to code, its admittedly a fault of mine.
I was hoping that I’d be done, well, before the month was out, or at the very least by the end of the month. As you can probably guess by reading this, that didn’t happen. However, I am close. I expect maybe another week will be needed to get everything finalized.

As some of the details were a bit up in the air during the last update I’ll explain a bit of how this works. Instead of getting quests to upgrade your house like in the current version you’ll instead have an option to construct a room via the same shop you would use to build a coop or barn.

When you choose to build a room you’ll be taken to your house interior and expected to cobble together a layout for said room. This layout is constructed by basically painting floor tiles with your mouse or controller. As you paint tiles the walls and ceilings adjust accordingly. This process is capable of creating a room of any shape and size as long as all the floor tiles you place down are connected. There is only one stipulation at the moment involving the placement of interior columns close to the top of the room. I’m going to go back and see if this can be adjusted though.

Once you lay out the floorplan for the room you move to the next step which is placing doors on the walls of your room. You can place as many or as few as you want. Although you do have to place at least one because…well, I mean, you have to have a way in. After doors are placed, you finalize the room and are done. There will be a period of time where the carpenter will build the room out and then you can use it like any other. As far as pricing goes, I haven’t decided on a static price or one that varies based on the size of the room. Since you could technically just make one massive room the size of the whole house it seems like it might be a better option to make the price vary to keep balance intact.

Each room will be capable of having its own wallpaper and floor tile pattern. There will also be an option to modify any existing room which functions the same way creating a room does. While I haven’t coded it yet this should be able to account for furniture existing in the room. I have an outline for this that I believe should work. I think I’ll likely add a step to room modification as well that allows you to move existing furniture so you can just do everything at once if you want.

I think this is going to end up branching into coding furniture a bit as well. The ability to place down furniture already exists in the game but it was done basically as a way to allow placing a chest so I could test that. There is likely some extra stuff that needs to be addressed to complete the system. For instance stipulations to let you place things on walls or on top of tables.

That’s sort of the direction things have been going this month. I’m really hoping that I’m correct and I’ll get the rest of this sorted over the next week so I can move on. There’s plenty to do and I hate to just get stuck in on a single feature. At the same time, I suppose its quality over quantity.

I was going to attach a short video showing the system off a bit, but I think I’ll probably wait until next month. The house interior is still in testing mode meaning I’d have to stage a lot of stuff just to show things. Better to just wait until the system is complete I think.

Aside from that there has been some formulating on a few other topics. The one that has seen real growth however is the lore. I believe I mentioned last time that I would be taking weekends to write world lore for the game. For those unaware I work on programming the game Monday through Thursday. My weekends are always pretty scattershot in terms of how much time I have. Since it was hard to get any meaningful amount of time dedicated to coding on the weekends I thought it would be better to handle writing during that time instead.

I can report that things are going well. I’m really not sure how much of this lore will be used but I think its helpful regardless. I won’t claim to be a great author but I think even if you aren’t going to directly reference all of your lore just having it can inform characters in the world and help to make them feel more complete.

I believe I’ve said before that I never really cared about the characters or worlds in these types of games. I’m hoping to avoid that with this game. Hence why there is also something akin to a main story. You won’t be forced to interact with it in any way, but it will be there if you want to pursue it. I guess its sort of like Skyrim. You can do the main quest if you want, or you can just do whatever you want. I’m hoping between this and everything else that the world will be a bit more gripping.

As for what was actually written, lots of kingdom lore honestly, along with some of the larger events in history. There are 5-6 separate nations depending on how you look at them each has their own lore, practices, themes, history, wars, etc. I’ve been thinking that whenever I finally finish this game I might just keep making games in this universe. Sort of just setup this base world and use it for different projects.

Anyway, my only other thought was if I should be sharing any of this lore. I don’t know that it would make sense in these posts. I could always start up another monthly post more dedicated to just dropping lore bits. I have no idea if anyone would find that remotely interesting, just an idle thought I had. That aside I’m also not sure if it would be good to just drop lore like that instead of working it into the game for people to just discover naturally. One of the things mentioned a long time ago by a player was that it would be interesting to be able to interact with things in the world like bookshelves to get bits of lore. I do plan to add that feature so there should be plenty of places to insert lore.

So several things to think about, but that’s hardly new for me. For the moment, I think I’ll cut things off there. I’m sorry that there isn’t much to share. The custom house layout system turned out to be quite the undertaking. With any luck I’ll knock the rest of it out in short order and I can move on to other things for May. Thank you as always for your patience, hopefully a month from now I’ll have a variety of things to talk about.

I’m slightly early this month cause of the weekend, but here we are. Things didn’t go as expected this month. Not in a bad way, but I wasn’t really expecting to work on what I did. I think in the last update I talked about maybe moving towards combat. I nixed that decision pretty quick, but we’ll go in order.
The month started with finishing up livestock. That ended up taking longer than expected honestly, about half the month if I recall. That was effectively the system that just kept on giving. Every time I thought I was done there was another thing to add.

The majority of what I needed to do was replicate what had already been done across all other animals. At the start of the month basically only chickens functioned. Since then I’ve added in ducks, geese, cows, goats, sheep, and pigs. On top of these there are 1 to 2 forms for each type of animal which I won’t spoil. So they needed the unique aspects of their functionality made too. Along with this there was the entire effort of making the barn as prior to this month only the coop existed. The barn is mostly the same, but has a few unique differences like animals giving live birth rather than having eggs that hatch. Also little player interactions things like being able to milk a cow or shear a sheep.

Lastly, the UI for animals had to be setup which was its own system in general. There are a few small things that weren’t added, but they rely on other systems that don’t exist yet. For instance, naming a newly born animal isn’t set up. They are just given a default name at the moment. The actual implementation of this system is pretty simple though and will be added once the surrounding system goes in.

So, animals are done. Which makes me incredibly happy because it took forever. The last update I put out I said I might move to combat. Problem with that is that the UI isn’t quite there yet. While I could do it with temporary UI it would just end up taking more time when I have to go back and update it to the proper UI.

Because of this combat was out. While I was trying to determine what to tackle next I decided to update some of the existing UI. I’d been working with a few old UI assets as I was starting on this remake but I’ve since gotten updated versions. I took the time to apply these new assets which involved a bit of adjustment to each other them as sizes were slightly different.

This brought me to the construction UI, which is where the remainder of the month went. For those unaware when you want to construct a building like a barn you go and talk to an NPC and a unique UI shows up to let you select a building to construct.

When testing the animal systems I effectively had made a dummy event to trigger the building process to get around the lack of a UI. I did this because at the time I didn’t have the new building UI yet. I have it now.

However, while scoping some things for this UI I went to see how many buildings could be constructed for some data I needed to populate. This got me thinking, which is usually a bad thing, and a precursor to more work. Specifically, I thought about the upgrades to your house. In the current version of the game there are a couple of quests that serve as house upgrades. The quests are basically just you supplying the resources for the upgrade. I’m not sure why I decided on this in the past instead of just having an upgrade option in the construction UI.

As you can probably guess I changed this. The house upgrades will now be done via the construction UI. However, there is more to this. My specific thought was about how every player will end up with the same floor plan, which feels like a waste. In a game that’s basically about living on and improving your land it seems like you should have more say in what your house looks like.

So I said, ‘screw it, why not’, as I sometimes do, and started making a new system. It isn’t quite done yet but the framework is mostly there and far enough along that I don’t think I’m going to revert back on this idea so I feel okay mentioning it. In the new version of the game you won’t have specific upgrades, outside of a basement, and maybe an attic (haven’t decided on the attic yet). Those two things will be a set room. As for the main floor you will be able to design the layout to your specifications.

I’m not 100% on limitations yet, like if I’ll give a cap to the number of rooms you can have. I think it won’t be needed as the total size of the house interior is still set in stone. As it stands you will go to Simeon, likely pay some sort of flat price for a room and then you’ll be shown your house interior. I’m trying to make the system as simple as possible. At the moment you basically just paint floor tiles with your mouse (or controller) and the code is smart enough to form the walls around those tiles.

Along with this you’ll also be able to go back and modify or delete rooms when you want. The only stipulation there is that you may have to manually remove the furniture from a room before you can delete it, but I have an idea on how that may be avoided, we’ll see.

The other thing to mention is that while I can’t guarantee it. It’s likely possible, but I haven’t attempted it yet so I can’t say. I’d like to extend this sort of system out to the farm exterior as well. So when you start the game you can either just take the standard layout or you can craft your own. Like I said, no guarantees on that but I figure it would be a cool thing to add. Probably have some sort of feature to allow for exporting the layout as well so people could share if they wanted.

So yeah, that sort of took over my time as I had to iterate on the system a few times to get it to where I wanted it. Once I finish it I’ll likely go back to what I was supposed to be doing and put in the construction UI.

But wait, there’s more. I hope you read that sentence deadpan because that’s how I thought it for some reason when typing it. I also enjoy writing in my spare time. Which may make you ask, ‘cool, but why do I care?’. Well, I’ve switched my priorities a bit. I was working on world building for a book on the weekends but decided to put it aside for the moment. I should probably mention that I barely get anything done on the weekends, most all the work for this game happens on weeknights.

In any case, I put a pause on the book and have instead started directing my attention to doing all the writing for this game instead. This isn’t too important but I thought it might be worth mentioning. If you’ve been following these update logs for a while you may be familiar with my, lets say indifferent, attitude towards the dialogue in most of these games. Or rather the amount and depth of it.

My personal experience is that I’ve never cared about an NPC in any of these games. Maybe that’s a personal problem but generally I feel that there just isn’t enough there for me to get invested. The worlds are usually pretty simple, the characters are generally also pretty simple. Now, I’m not trying to write Bauldur’s Gate 3 or something, but I think there is some sort of middle ground that can be hit where you can tell some compelling stories and have a bit more depth. Of course all this hinges on my writing ability.

In my experience the first step to making compelling stories is to have an interesting world, so I’ve started doing that. There is a site called WorldAnvil which I happen to subscribe to. If you like to write, or maybe DM for DnD or find yourself in need of a resource to track a world you are designing it’s a pretty neat tool.

I’d been using it for my personal project but I’ve started detailing a world for Verdant Village on there which I’ll be able to work from. It isn’t going to be some sort of Tolkien level world building, but I’d like to have a firm world laid out that I can then use to influence the character writing and events. I actually already have a fair amount of things laid out in a word doc and am currently transferring and expanding it.

The real important thing about this process is that it spaces out the writing. It should keep me from burning out which is what I wanted to avoid. If I had to write all the dialogue and story for everything in the game all at once I’d likely lose my mind. This will let me tackle it at a steady pace. The plan is to full write out one character at a time once I get the world in place.

All that said, I do actually have a picture today. It’s a rarity I know. I don’t tend to think that pictures are worth the time it would take to grab and put them in but maybe I should make more of an effort. In any case, below is a world map for the game. Or rather continent map I guess. The world hasn’t been fully charted yet in the lore so this is what people know as the world. Another tip, if again you are into DMing or writing yourself. The map was made with a program called Wonderdraft, pretty easy to use and you can make some cool stuff.

Anyway, I’ve gone on enough here for the month I think. Big things are in process, as usual. I’ll be back in another month for another update.

As usual its time for another dev log. I did a bit of looking and actually it has been a year since I announced I would be remaking the game in a new engine. I didn’t think that I made the announcement at the end of February 2023 but apparently, I did. Looking through a few of the subsequent logs though it seems I didn’t really start coding until May. So, its sort of been a year, sort of not.

I’m happy with the progress so far, but obviously I wish things were going faster. However outside of giving up sleep I don’t think there is any additional time left in my days. The progress of the game is sort of hard to judge, but I think I have more done than it feels like. It just seems strange because the world doesn’t exist at the moment. Its just a few test rooms where I just implement systems. I remember when the old version of the game was like that and once I actually built the in game world it felt much more complete.

This month in particular was dedicated to animals, and basically wholly animals. I’m close to done at this point, but not quite there. The remaining work should be pretty low effort though. For a quick summary of what was done I’ll make a short list of the notable stuff below.

• Animals now naturally catch disease under certain conditions
  
• Chicken coops have a new internal structure that collects eggs
  
• Fowl now spawn feathers that you can collect
  
• An entire system to make pastures work is now in place (This is so much more complicated than this one sentence implies)
  
• Animals can now actually die and that is managed properly
  
• Animals can be hatched or born depending on what type of animal it is
  
• A new animal status screen has been made to display animal stats as there is now more to track with animals
  
• Because there are multiple things that affect an animals happiness each day a system has been made to record what effects them and how much they are effected
  
• Animals can be sold
  
• Animals can be relocated from one building to another
  
• Animals now appear outside or inside depending on pasture settings for the building
  
• Added the ability to trash items
  
• Fixed a few bugs

So basically, everything revolving around animals was done this month. I’ve also setup the Silo UI. The last things to do are make silos distribute food, which is easy, and then these things need to be replicated across all animals. At the moment, chickens are the only things that work. That may sound like a huge deal but all animals function off the same parent object. So basically, I have to copy and paste code and then make a few minor changes to the specifics on each one. This is all pretty simple and shouldn’t take more than a few days I would think, if that.

I don’t like that animals have taken as long as they have to setup, but looking back I guess it makes sense. I believe I’ve mentioned this before but most systems in this game are fairly simple, mine a rock, make a potion, cook an item, etc. All these things don’t involve much in terms of system design. These types of games are often the combination of a lot of very small systems rather than a few large ones.

Animals are more of a cascading problem though. Before you can even have an animal, you need a building for them. This is in and of itself a giant system to build, move, upgrade, and destroy buildings, not to mention handling all the internals of each. That was what took up most of January if I recall. Then once you actually have a building for animals you have to be able to buy them, name them, store all the relevant data, handle feeding, disease, grooming, health, happiness, product creation, pastures, selling them, transferring them, aging, player interactions, etc, etc. So, it makes some sense that it took a while, I just don’t like it when the end of the month comes and it feels like I did one thing.

Pastures were the biggest difficulty of this month. They were probably the system that took the most time to make. Effectively a system was needed that calculated where you put the building and (without lagging the game) found all the tiles that surrounded that building to form that pasture. Then store that data in a usable way and allow for on the fly adjustments if a player changes the pasture layout. All that said, I’m happy with how it turned out. Its far more stable and compact than the system that exists in the live version of the game.

The only other real change to mention is the structure in the coop that holds eggs. Anyone playing the live game will know that eggs just sort of drop on the ground and you pick them up. I didn’t really like this. Feathers make a bit more sense as fowl would just drop feathers on the ground in real life (I think). I’m not a farmer but I believe chickens lay eggs in their nests, not just randomly on the floor. With the amount of tasks you have to do for animal care increasing I thought this might be a nice little addition to make daily chores a little easier.

Most of the other things that I mentioned were fairly self-explanatory. As mentioned before, I have just a few things to clean up with animals, most of which is just replication for more animals.

Then of course I have to decide what to do next. This is something I’m a bit unsure of. A lot of the UI for the game is currently in flux as I’m having a lot of it redone to make it more consistent. Since I don’t have all the sprites finalized setting up UI is, well, not entirely pointless, but it is sort of annoying. Anything I setup without the finalized UI will likely require me to go back later and adjust a bit. It isn’t hard to do but its just an extra step when I could just wait to have the sprites and then do it right the first time.

This is a bit problematic because a lot of systems rely on UI. At the moment I’m debating between building out the world, or maybe getting some of combat in place. I’m hesitant to do too much world building as there are also sprites being made for the overworld and I think it would be better to do that work when I have all of the assets at my disposal. However, I could start laying out zones in basic ways with temporary sprites and notes.

I’ve likely mentioned this before, but I do want to put out versions of this game again prior to a 1.0. I think getting that feedback helps immensely so I don’t want to just make this entire thing in a vacuum and then let it loose. I’ve got a sort of unofficial list of things I want in the game before I put anything out onto Steam though. Combat is on that list because its something entirely different from the other systems and I want to make sure its enjoyable.

I think it will likely be implemented sort of piecemeal along with the mines. While there is combat related stuff outside the mines they sort of serve as a more traditionally leveled area where it gets more difficult as you go deeper. So likely in one of the first uploads of this new version you’ll maybe be able to go down 2 levels or so (remember there are only 10 very large hand crafted floors instead of 100+ random ones). I’ll likely also add some sort of level cap that I’ll raise as more mine floors get added. This way I can focus on balancing combat in smaller chunks rather than trying to get the whole range of combat right at once.

Aside from balancing I have a general goal of complete systems. I’m trying to make it so that anything a player would see in the game is done. A good example of what I want to avoid is the health bar in the current game. In the live version you have health, food and potions can give you more health, there are buffs for combat too. Despite all of this there is no combat and not even a way to lose health. That’s jarring. Maybe not to someone who has been playing for a while or is watching the development but someone coming in would likely just find it confusing.

The other obvious example of an incomplete system is NPC dialogue. In the current version NPCs have the bare minimum dialogue. I’d like to write everything for a character all at once to keep them consistent in tone. The one caveat here is that while I might write everything all at once, some of the dialogue for each character will be dependent on other things in the game happening. So, while it will be done it may not be accessible right away. The general rule of thumb though is to have things be as complete as possible when they go into the live version. I’d like to avoid uploading a version of the game and having to say “hey, there’s this part of the game that makes no sense right now because I haven’t implemented the other system that feeds into it”. To bring this all back to topic, adding combat is necessary to avoid that issue.

I think that’s mostly it for now. I feel like this was more of a ramble than a dev log. Unfortunately, there isn’t much to articulate about animals unless I start going deep into code talk. I figure this stuff is a bit more surface level, but its probably more informative about what is going on with development. The other option is me explaining the use of recursive functions to trace the tiles that make up a pasture and compiling them into an array of structs that can be easily referenced for calculations. Seeing as that sentence was boring even to me, I have my doubts about it keeping other people’s interest.

So, thank you all for your patience. As time goes on I’ll hopefully have more definite info on when you can expect an actual upload of this version of the game. I think I said this a long time ago but what I might do is upload it as an opt in beta so people can try it if they want but retain access to what currently exists. I’ve also said this before but just as a reminder, if you own the game now you’ll own the new version too, no repurchase required. Alright, I’m going to go finish animal systems. I hope you all enjoyed February 29th, it only comes around every 4 years after all. I’ll have more updates in a month.

Hello all, it feels like it’s a been a bit since a wrote one of these, but I suppose its just that a lot has happened. As usual it’s the end of the month so its time I regale you all with what’s been going on with Verdant Village. To be completely honest, I’m looking forward to February because January turned out to be rather busy with some stuff getting in the way of development. Thankfully, February looks a lot more boring, which means more time to get stuff done.

So, as I sort of just mentioned less got accomplished this month than I would have liked. The holidays sort of ran over into the first week of the year. I was then out of town for work for a week, and what would a going out of town be if I didn’t catch some sort of cold afterwards for like a half week.

Anyway, I’m not here to make excuses (although I sort of just did), but I wanted to give a bit of perspective as this wasn’t exactly a normal month. Still, I did get some stuff done. As I remember it, the last update I was getting started on raising livestock. For those that may have forgotten livestock are also getting an overhaul. The last update will explain in more thoroughly but the TLDR is that animals now have a few factors to their care like grooming, types of feed, pastures, and disease. These all feed into an overall happiness level which determines what an animal produces each day.

It should also be mentioned that originally there were plans for monster attacks, which you would have to essentially upkeep a magical ward to prevent. If you let this ward fail animals would potentially be attacked, even inside their respective buildings. I got some feedback on this last time and as a result it has been dropped. I thought about ways to maybe modify it. Most people seemed to be okay with the idea of attacks happening if animals were caught outside, just not when they were inside. Problem with that is that there isn’t really anything to keep an animal from going back inside at the end of the day. Even in games like Stardew it really only happens if the pathing for the animal is messed up or you purposely block them. Adding a system where you have to manually bring animals inside would also be pretty tedious I think. Given that you aren’t forced to go to sleep ever this would end up just being a different version of something that forces you back to your house at night.

I suppose it could be done and then you could later automate something that brings animals inside for you but that seems, how do I put it. Like a needless complication, I guess. Because effectively a system would have been made at that point where having to do it manually would be annoying, so most likely players would just wait to get the automation element before letting animals out and basically just skip the whole thing. Hopefully I’m making sense here. The point is that for the moment at least, there is no risk of attack, animals will just go outside and inside without issue, on their own. Changes could always be made in the future though.

Alright, I’m nearly a page into this and I haven’t discussed anything I’ve done yet. For a quick overview I’m just going to drop in my internal list of things I did this month. I used to keep these when I was still updating the live version so I had a list of what had been done since the last patch. This is just what I did this month instead.

• Fixed several UI bugs
  
• Finished transitions allowing players to place animals into buildings
  
• Setup code around displaying what animals exist in what buildings
  
• Setup failsafes during animal purchase to prevent purchase when you have no space or building in general for an animal
  
• Made clock UI and hotbar shift to the opposite side of the screen when needed
  
• Created a system to handle collisions in the world via a tilemap
  
• Animals spawn and move around inside their respective buildings
  
• Setup system to place animal feed
  
• Animals now eat each day
  
• Animals grow from child to adult
  
• Animals can be fed treats once per day
  
• Added quality for specific items in the game, currently just crops and animal products however this might expand out later
  
• Fixed a bug that was persistent through the three chest organization buttons
  
• Animals now contract, spread, and self heal disease over time

Some of that is more self-explanatory, others a bit more vague, and others make a lot of work sound like very little work honestly. A good example of that is the system to handle collisions via tilemap. This is extremely important but I just hadn’t gotten around to it. To explain briefly, most objects in the world have their own collision built in. For instance, a tree, the player’s house, etc. However, there are other elements like cliff faces or bodies of water where because they are tilemaps rather than objects they don’t have a collision paired with them. This means there needs to effectively be an invisible layer placed over the map that acts as the collision mask. That is what was created. Very boring, also very important.

I don’t want to make this post a mile long and over explain things but there is one more thing from that list that I want to touch on, because it’s a fairly large change. You might have noticed near the end I mentioned that specific items now have quality levels. If you’ve played Stardew, or maybe Graveyard Keeper you’ll be familiar with these. For those unacquainted let’s say you get a chicken egg in game. It is no longer just an egg, it will have a quality attached, in the case of Verdant Village, bronze, silver, gold, or adamantium. This quality level at the moment simply dictates value. Items have a base selling value; a higher quality gives a multiplier to that value. For instance, a silver quality might make it worth 1.5x the normal value.

I hadn’t planned on doing this, but I found that I couldn’t think of a better alternative for livestock. As mentioned before livestock have a happiness level that is dictated by several other factors. This happiness level determines what the animal produces each day. In my outline prior it had much more variance. There was no quality so instead higher happiness would alter things such as, having a higher chance to spawn the product at all (yes in that version you could just have an animal not produce when it should have). It could also make animals produce products faster, for instance sheep could grow their wool in less time. Or in some cases you could get situations were instead of getting one chicken egg per day you would get two.

I still like some of these ideas, however there are a lot of problems with it. The first and probably most important being inconsistency. Having a chance to be taking care of your animals and still just not get any products one day because of random chance would feel terrible. Aside from this there was a logistical issue with lowering the time it takes to spawn a product. Sheep for example might take 5 days to grow their wool at low happiness but only 3 days at a high level. While I could do some math behind the scenes and make the numbers work it would lead to inconsistency. The player doesn’t really have an idea of when the sheep will finish growing its wool as the happiness level might fluctuate meaning the wool grows at a different rate each day. This means it could be 3 days, could be 7 days, but its hard to tell without meticulously checking the animal’s stats each day to know what happened.

All this is to say that the old method was fairly vague and I think a little too convoluted for its own good. Adding quality to the items allows for something much simpler where the better the happiness value, the higher the item tier. Simple one to one values. In the case of something like sheep where it will take multiple days to get one item I’ll use an aggregate of the happiness during the growth time to determine the quality of the resulting item.

As I said, I think that’s one of the larger changes that has come out of this. I think the reasoning is sound however. Of course while thinking this I of course considered other items as well. Currently crops have gotten the same treatment. I think they can support the same sort of structure and it feels odd to only have quality on animal products. Crops will gain quality based on fertilizer or alchemic items you put on them. More may be done to affect that in the future but for now that’s all it is. I did have a brief thought about adding quality levels to seeds so you could effectively breed better seeds but I’m not sure how complex I want to get. At some point complexity becomes annoying, so we’ll see.

Of course, I may add this on to other things as well. I actually made a note of systems that it might make sense to add quality to. Specifically, alchemy, brewing, cooking, jewelcrafting, and tailoring. That is entirely up in the air at the moment however. I suppose just don’t be too surprised if you see the system bleed into those. Hunting and fishing could also potentially see it although I’m not sure how quality would be determined outside of some sort of skill level or a luck variable.

Anyway, I’ve talked enough I think. This is already long by my standards. Its funny, I never feel I have much to talk about and then I exposit for about two and a half pages. As I said at the start, I’m expecting February to far better in terms of productivity. I’ve got some animal stuff to finish up still. I’m staring down pastures which will likely be the toughest part. Aside from that currently you can only buy chickens so I have to extrapolate all this code to all the other animals, but that’s mostly just copy paste with some minor edits. After that I’m between doing the shipping system, which I was going to do before livestock but I needed the updated UI (which I just got), or moving into dialogue. I’ll likely decide when I get to it. You’ll hear from me again in a month. I hope you all had a good start to the year, and if you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading.

To start things off, happy new year! It’s been quite a year for myself, and Verdant Village in general. I’ve said it before, but I can’t say I was expecting to be in the process of remaking this game at this time. A lot of the framework for the game has been laid since I started in a new engine earlier this year. We’re getting fairly close to the point where the more complex systems are in place and hopefully after that development will speed up a bit.

Now, as for what happened this month, I regret to say it wasn’t much. December is always sort of a weird month just because of the holidays. This year was busier than usual for me, and I also had the pleasure of being sick for a bit. I did make some progress on ranching, but admittedly this month was a bit of a wash. That said January should be far more normal, and I can return to getting things done.
While I didn’t get around to that much this month there are two major things that did happen, more so in planning than execution. The first is ranching. It’s the system that I’m working on at the moment and while in the process of setting things up I was taking a look at the actual gameplay systems and determined that I didn’t think much of them.

For anyone who hasn’t gotten to ranching yet in game I’ll explain. In its current state ranching is very simple, basically you just feed your animals each day and they will give you a product as a result. If you fail to feed them for too long, they starve. That’s basically it. There are some other minor things like automatic feeding, a pasture system, and a few animal variations like pink and brown cows as well.
All of this is alright as a base, but while I was considering ranching, I came to the conclusion that its sort of lackluster. Something I’ve tried to avoid in this game is systems that are nothing more than a button press. I prefer for there to be some nuance to everything so that this doesn’t just become a chore simulator. This is harder to do with some things, but ranching has plenty of opportunities for complexity. I’ve never raised livestock in person, but I’m guessing it requires more effort than just giving your animals food every day.

So, in that spirit, there will be something of an overhaul coming. In short, there will be more aspects to taking care of animals. Specifically, I currently have several systems planned, health, hunger, sickness, cleanliness, pastures, and wards. Each of these is pretty simple but I’ll explain.

Health is exactly what it sounds like, every animal will now have an HP value. An animal at full health is happier. Health can be affected by things like sickness or monster attacks.

Hunger is obviously how hungry an animal is. Feeding an animal each day will ward this off. However, there will be a few tiers of feed which have other effects. Treats will also be something you can feed animals. These don’t actually fill up an animal but can boost their happiness and HP to help them recover if needed.

Sickness means, as you likely guessed, that animals can get sick. There are a few different types of sickness, that cause damage and even death if they aren’t treated. Disease can also spread if it isn’t taken care of.

Cleanliness is just a simple system where you’ll have to wash or groom your livestock every few days.
Pastures are sort of multipurpose but ultimately a pasture serves to make livestock happier. A larger pasture will make the livestock in it happier.

Last is wards. This is related to monster attacks. Monsters can attack your animals each night and wards will keep your animals safe. They have a duration that they last so they’ll need to be replaced. In general, they serve to reduce the frequency and severity of monster attacks.

All of these things play into happiness. In other games like this, happiness tends to be something you build up over time. For instance, if you feed your animal each day and pet it the animal will like you more. This is usually a cumulative system meaning that once your animal is happy, you’d have to really just stop paying attention to it for its levels to drop. Generally speaking, I don’t like this as I think it sort of lowers the stakes for consistent care.

The plan for this system is that happiness will be a value that is determined each day based on the status of the animal. This happiness value will determine what you get from the animal. There are several tiers of happiness, the higher the tier, the better your rewards.

It should also be mentioned that these systems are meant to play off of and affect each other. For instance, not cleaning your animals lowers their immunity which makes them more likely to get sick. Letting animals into a pasture can make them happier, but they’ll get dirty more quickly. Being in a pasture will also provide the animal with food so you don’t need to feed them, but pasture feeding isn’t going to be as good as high-quality feed.

Aside from all these things all animals will have at least one to two transformations that you can change them into by feeding them certain special items. There are a few other things as well, but they aren’t worth really getting into. The hope is that with all these things raising livestock will be a bit more interactive rather than just a mindless task.

Now, if you’ll remember I said I had two major things to talk about. Last month I believe I mentioned that changes would be coming to the mines. The first is that it’s going to be closer to town. The world is getting a general makeover and one issue is that the mines are really far away. So no more winding mountain trails, or at least not as much of one.

That’s a pretty minor detail though. Much like ranching I’ve been contemplating the mining system for the game. Now, the act of mining itself is going to stay the same. The thing I decided to focus on was the mine itself. For those who haven’t played, or seen the mines, it is basically the same as other games of this genre. You enter and descend through around 100 floors. Each time you enter a new floor it randomly generates the layout to add some level of uniqueness to the area. The mines also generate a few different things like stamina drainers, keysprites, treasure chests, seams, lighting, buffs, etc.

The point of this was to vary the mining experience a bit each time you went in and give the player a bit of something to encounter. General combat encounters were also (and still are) planned for the mines.

Looking at the mines I sort of came to a conclusion about the whole setup that I didn’t really like. To put it bluntly, it’s sort of redundant and it’s stretching a fairly thin gameplay mechanic across a large swath of game. Along with this the random things you can find in the mines combined with the random layouts means that rewards are sort of just laying around.

The older I get, and the more games I play, the more I’ve come to the conclusion that random generation is something that really should be used sparingly and in the correct circumstances rather than a replacement for level design. I had thought the mines would be good for this, but I think that was incorrect. Looking at the mines as they are right now, I see it as basically having 100 very subpar levels. The poor quality is offset by the quantity. So, the new plan is to rectify this.

Currently my idea is that there will be 10 levels to the mines. Unlike the current mine levels these will be far larger. Instead of random layouts they will each be handcrafted. There will be a boss enemy at the end of each level to keep people from simply rushing to the lowest floor. The biome will change every two levels and what minerals and gems you find on each floor will change.

The mines will be designed cyclically so that the end of the level winds back around to the start. This way when you want to come back via the elevator you won’t have to traverse the entire level again. There will likely be other ways to hop around the level as well.

Probably the most important part however is that each level will be treated like something of a dungeon. There will be plenty of ore to mine that is scattered about however your progress through the level will be gated by smaller puzzles, locked doors, or combat encounters. Once you’ve reached the end of the level and defeated the boss it will unlock what I’d refer to as a mining room. This would be a large area full of rocks you can mine so once you’ve completed the level you can come back and mine in a more traditional setting without having to run through a maze just to find mining nodes.
That’s the general idea. To be clear, I used the term dungeon earlier which makes me think of Zelda. To be clear, this would not be something as extensive as that. There’s already enough going on without adding a Zelda clone to this game.

I’d be curious to know what people think of this, so if you have an opinion feel free to share it. My personal perspective is that I would rather have 10 well-made levels instead of 100 forgettable ones. Doing something like this would also allow me to use the mines for other things potentially since there would be a static layout that I could tie to other things in the game.

Anyway, this post is already very long so I’ll wrap it up. I have plenty of work in front of me which I’m eager to start. I do apologize for not getting a ton done this month. I’m keenly aware that people have already paid for this game and are potentially waiting for me to get on with it. Granted, I don’t think there are people waiting with bated breath on this new version. However, call me old fashioned, I don’t like to keep people waiting, especially when I’ve already taken money from them.

I’ll hopefully have more to report next month. As for now, I hope you all enjoy your new years celebrations and start off 2024 on the right foot.