Jolly fellow ranchers! As of now a whole month has passed from the Early Access Release and we’ve come already a long way together. Our community keeps growing and Corral keeps getting better and better, I couldn’t have made it possible without you guys and gals!
Today I’ll be talking about what I’ve called The Great Rooster Bubble and the steps I’ve taken to solve it. .
A few days ago I started to notice reports about corral stagnation became much more common, usually inquiries about the brood’s growth had simple answers like some minor bug or a minor adjustment to the mating rates for chickens, even to the chicks growing rate. But this time, as the playerbase started to multiply so did the mysterious cases of corral stagnation. Initially I was under the impression that it could be a major undetected bug but thorough revisions and hours of playtesting proved me wrong, practically, there was nothing out of place. It would seem that this was somehow something that players could see, but not me.
Turns out the error was way up the chain, not with the code, not with the engine, not even with integration but with the design. Thanks to a close friend’s commentary and a forum post from an engaged community member, the pieces started coming together. The issue was rooted in the players being unable to differentiate between roosters and hens and in consequence, selling the roosters as produce. Removing all roosters from the corral, without any 2nd generation chicks with the possibility of turning into roosters themselves, players would be effectively stagnating their corral irreversibly as roosters couldn’t be bought from the Farmer’s Digest and 1st generation chicks from store bought hens cannot become roosters.
I was blindsided by the issue; according to myself, roosters, which have a long curved tail, are easily distinguished from hens which don’t. Well... Turns out it isn’t true, roosters were being misidentified for another breed of chicken because there was not a single additional indication that these long tailed chickens were males, they weren’t even called roosters in-game. It wasn’t obvious for anyone but me. This was a textbook case of developer tunnel-vision, where I forgot to evaluate the feature from the player’s perspective.
Having realized this, I scrambled to provide an immediate solution to this issue. As of last Friday a patch was released that named chickens natively by their sex. And with today’s update players can acquire whenever they want a White Leghorn rooster via the Farmer’s Digest (the purchase of pure breed roosters was not allowed due to it being a future feature related with the chicken pageant system). This measures will prevent corral stagnation from ever happening again.
I want to thank the community members that signaled me to this issue and contributed to the fix. It couldn’t have been fixed so quickly without you. This is the perfect example of why Corral is perfect for Early Access, it can only grow to its fullest potential with help from its amazing community.
Squawk away!
