It looks like its time for another devlog. This month I feel like a lot was accomplished. The tasks were a little more on the backend rather than new systems, but when you see what they are I would guess you’ll agree that they are necessary.

To start at the beginning, last month the dialogue system was implemented. While it was basically done I did have a few things to clean up at the start of this month. So, the first bit of time was spent fixing up a few UI issues, patching several bugs, and adding a little more functionality to the system. All of this was pretty minor and only took a few days, but I think the system in general has turned out nicely.

Next was the bit that took up the most of my time this month. I believe I’ve mentioned it before, but up until now there has been no save system for the new version of the game. As a consequence, there was also no load system obviously.

This system has now been fully implemented. I’m not sure if its worth getting into specifics here. I mean its basically what you would expect. Save the game. Load the game. Truly something the video game industry has never seen before.

Aside from the fact that you can save/load there are a few details though. First setting up this system involved setting up the entire load game UI screen, so that is also done. In the background of this project several pieces had to be reconfigured slightly to make saving/loading efficient and keep save files small.

At the moment, on my machine at least, saving is instant and loading only takes a few seconds. This time might grow slightly because as more systems are added more things need to be recorded or read from a save file. But I don’t predict any real increases to load times.

The other thing which may or may not be news is how you save. I honestly can’t quite remember if the live version of the game allows you to save anywhere. I think it might have been something I was working on, but realized that too much of the game was dependent on you saving at your bed.

In any case, the game will still save at midnight. However now you can save at any time in any place via a button in the settings menu. I know this was requested by several people in the past and I agree that it nice to be able to save when you want. The idea of only having the game save at midnight started way back with Harvest Moon. I’m not sure why that trend is still carried over in some games, even this one. Presumably Harvest Moon only did it due to some technical limitation.

Realistically, there isn’t any real reason to not allow people to save when they want in a game like this. The only other reasoning I can think of is to keep people from save scumming. For those unfamiliar with the term, that basically means to save right before you do something and if you mess up or want a different outcome you just quickly load the save. Sort of like quick saving constantly in Skyrim. That said, this isn’t really a high stakes kind of game. If people want to do that I don’t really see a problem.
Anyway, the last thing to mention with saving is patching. While a patching system isn’t in place yet the save system has been designed in such a way that when I do go to add it the process should be fairly straight forward.

For those unfamiliar with the term, patching is the process to update the game. This is mostly important for when I start doing regular updates again. People usually don’t like to have to start a new save each time a patch comes out. This system would allow you to transfer your save forward when the game updates. I did it in the previous version although there were more than a few issues during that process. That was partially due to the engine and partially due to my code and experience with such a system. Knowing what I know now I think it should be easier to tackle.

Moving on, because I’ve talked about saving more than probably anyone wanted, we come to sleep, the most exciting system. I added the entire sleep system this month. It functions the same as it does in the live version. You can sleep for up to 24 hours straight. Sleeping will restore your stamina and health, although health restores at a slower rate. The button to automatically sleep until your stamina is maxed is also still an option.

Most of the changes to sleep happened under the hood. A lot of it has to do with how the game actually runs at this point. To be brief, the old version of the game basically functioned as one giant level. The entire world was effectively partially loaded in at all times. An area would only fully load its assets when you entered that specific part of the world. This is a fairly common tactic in video games that is used to keep the required processing power for the game to a minimum.

The important part of this distinction is that in the old version the world and all its important assets like NPCs crops, processing buildings (like apiaries or fisheries) were always loaded into the world. Without going into a ton of detail (that I partially wrote and then deleted to save you all from boredom) the new version of the game does not operate as one giant level. Each time you enter an area you are specifically in that area and nothing else is loaded.

This can be done because everything is tied to higher level data structures rather than objects within the game world which are subject to loading in and out depending on if you are in the same area as them. All this is to say, things are much better now and sleeping which speeds up time, benefits greatly from these changes.

In addition, time functions a bit differently in the new code and It makes it much easier to manipulate things that depend on time, such as sleep.

I know that was a lot of technobabble but the TLDR is you can sleep, and from a backend perspective it functions much more nicely than it did in the previous version.

If you’ll remember way back before I started droning on about sleep, I said that making the sleep system took up, most of my time, but not all of it. I’m not particularly far yet, but I have started developing the cooking system. It will certainly be finished in October. For now, there are just a few basics in place for the UI and I’ve moved on to messing with recipe data.

Which does bring me to recipes. As I mentioned in the past, I’m going to change how you get them. Specifically, there won’t be any quests where you get a recipe as a reward. I think I mentioned this in the previous month’s devlog but in short I felt it wasn’t a particularly rewarding, uh…reward. Instead, there will be a separate system dedicated to learning recipes so those who want to focus on cooking can really do that and others can ignore it if they want.

That said, maybe you won’t want to ignore cooking because I’m planning to change some things a bit. To start, the actual process of cooking will likely remain the same. I might modify a few things but it will still involve having ingredients and the required heat to cook something. What I’m looking to modify is mostly what the various pieces of food do.

I think what I want to do is focus food more on stamina gain. In the past recipes gave all sorts of things. Anything you ate would regenerate stamina and health but some things would give you buffs as well. The issue with this in my mind is that it encroaches on alchemy as a system. From a design perspective if I had to pick something to give, let’s say, darkness resistance and my options where a plate of spaghetti or a shadeward potion I think I would pick the potion. It just makes more sense to have odd effects come from alchemical items rather than food.

This means food needs a bit of a rework in terms of what it does. My current plan, as stated before, is to focus on stamina. However, I think I’d like to add a bit more nuance. Food will obviously give you flat stamina. In addition, I’ll likely do things like stamina regeneration over time, or maybe reduced stamina usage on tools. All that is well trodden though. What I think I want to try is I guess basically a ‘well fed’ buff. Effectively this would allow you to eat and gain stamina over the normal limit. As long as you have more than the normal limit you would gain a buff. Maybe it makes your tools stronger, or you move faster, or something along those lines. This buff could also have tiers to some extent where the benefits gets larger the more well fed you are.

The hope is that something like this would allow food to have a unique place in the game’s systems. Then alchemy would take over things having to do more with combat buffs. Its all still in the beginning stages so things are subject to change but I think the idea is reasonable at least.

On top of this there are new recipes being added and some are being changed. My goal is to try and make it so that every ingredient has a few uses. For instance, cranberries have no recipes associated with them in the live game. I’ve added a few in the new version to take advantage of them.
I think that’s mostly it for cooking. There is just one more thing to briefly mention as I was thinking about it. I said forever ago that I was going to adjust the mines. Instead of 100 random floors there was going to be just a few but they would be much larger and more like a mini dungeon that players would have to navigate and then fight a boss to reach the next floor.

I still want to do this and while these areas will still having small areas to mine I was considering some things and I think I’m going to modify this a bit. What I’m currently thinking is to have the dungeon floors but between them you unlock basically just a big mining area with that level’s ores. This way once you get through the dungeon area you can just take the minecart back to a normal mining area instead of having to search the dungeon for ore veins. It’s a minor tweak but it popped into my head a week ago so I wanted to mention it.

I think that’s it for now. I’ll be back in a month as usual. I’m sorry there were no screenshots this time. The sleep and save system didn’t seem worth screenshotting as they both basically look the same. When cooking is finished I’ll probably grab screencaps of that. I’m admittedly not sure what comes after cooking. I haven’t thought about it too much but I’m sure I’ll figure it out soon. Thanks as always for your patience and reading this far.