Merry Christmas Eve! 3am here and the build and update are complete. Today I’ve pushed the final holiday update to the beta branch! Finally Samphi has a second tree! This has required quite a few big under the hood changes so there’s a few things to go through and a couple of things to watch out for all those brave souls who use the [beta] branch. I’m rambling, let’s get to it.
Jumping right into the meat of the update, we have a new tree. I’ve wanted to do this for a while now to bring some diversity to the wood blocks in the game. We already have the light oak tree, so I’ve added a darker pine tree. Here it is:
And as it’s Christmas we have to have a festive version right? Here’s what the pine tree will look like over the holidays:
I’m not 100% happy with the art, but it’s a solid start! So what does having a new tree mean? Well for starters we have 4 new items:
- oak block
- oak wood
- pine block
- pine wood
And we’ve lost:
When you cut a tree before you got ‘wood’ and you could craft it into ‘walls’. As you can see that’s now been broken down into specific wood types and blocks. The old ‘wood’ item is now the ‘oak wood’ item, and that’s what’s used for all crafting recipes. Currently, ‘pine wood’ is only used to create ‘pine block’ with a crafting table. These are simply a building block with a different color. You can see them in the image below as I use them for my roof:
Since ‘oak wood’ is way more useful than ‘pine wood’, only 1 in 4 trees will be a pine tree. This value will likely be tweaked as we find more used for the pine wood. So that’s the new tree! Hope you like it and the new wood variety not only makes the landscape more interesting, but also gives you more building materials to play with!
On a final note, tree type is currently not saved, so if you reload the game, trees that were once oaks may now be pines and visa versa. This will be rectified in an upcoming update but I don’t think it’s a priority for now. :)
Now onto an update that has no affect on gameplay at all, but … IT’S CHRISTMAS. Chests have been re-skinned as present boxes!
Really doesn’t affect anything, but I love little things like this so enjoy opening all your presents! :D I’ve also fixed up the chests as there were bug with how they were opening and closing, so they should now be working fine!
So I completely forgot I own YoYo Compiler. This is something that just compiles your code better and does more strict checking of your code. Ran it, and oh my god the errors! No idea how the game was even running before, there were code errors everywhere. They were all cases where things have changed but the changes weren’t carried out across the whole code base. For example, I change the name of a font and forget to change it somewhere. (The cause of a bug in the last build)
Anyway, I’ve done my best to put things back in line and from initial testing everything seems fine, but I have no idea if there will be further ramifications! With the new wood variant quite a lot of the back-end has changed including save data! I need to convert your save data from the old ‘wall’ item to the new to ‘block_oak’ item!
I’ve written that into this version, and will keep it in for the next few releases, a few months, so hopefully everyone’s data get’s ported to the new version then I’ll remove that and tidy the code up. I did a bunch of testing and it seems fine, but if you have a really big important level you may want to make a copy. To do so just go to your AppData/Local/ folder and copy the Samphi folder somewhere.
TL:DR – Back-end has changed a bit and save data will be converted. It’s been tested, but you might want to backup your save data.
Okay, so here’s a full changelog for 0.2k which is now in the beta branch:
- Gave chests a festive makeover
- Fixed issue with chests not opening/closing correctly
- Added a new tree* (See breakdown above for more info)
- Added a few more tips to the main menu screen
- Fixed some inconsistencies with textures when custom_textures was enabled.
So I think I’m going to take a week break from the updates over the holidays. This will only effect the next update, what would be on the 30th, and instead I’ll be back on the 6th. I have a list as long as my arm of code tidying jobs that I’ve been putting off as they affect gameplay 0%, but they’re important. I’m going to take advantage of a break in the updates to get all this done before the new year. We can then start 2017 with a tidied code-base ready for whatever awesome features 2017 has lined up!
I feel like 0.3 is close, but I still have a few major-ish things on my list that I’d like to get in before we roll over, including:
- Player Animations
- More Sounds
- Background Update
Player animations is a huge one, however, as we know, art is where I struggle, so that one is going to be tough! It will bring so much to the game though! It detracts form the experience when you’re chopping a tree and the character is just stood there still.
So come back on the 6th on January and we’ll see what’s happening!
Well that’s me done for the year. Thank you all dearly for the support over this last year. I started working on Samphi years ago and the idea of ever getting on Steam was just a complete pipe-dream. It happened quite fast and now, reflecting on it, Samphi is on steam and there’s an awesome and supportive community around it … It’s a bit surreal. So thank you all a MILLION for your support and I look forward to us moving forward with the game more next year. :)
Have a WONDERFUL holiday and I’ll see you all in 2017. Ciao!
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