Another quick update for progress on Verdant Village. We’re getting closer to an actual patch. Feels like I’ve been saying that for a long time, but my artist is getting closer to catching up on things. So hopefully sooner rather than later on that.
That said, this month was focused pretty heavily on QoL and bug fixing for me. Because of that I won’t go into detail on everything that was done, it doesn’t make for the most interesting read usually. I would like to talk about some changes in a broad sense though. Most of these changes come from an extended playthrough I did recently. As a solo dev I’m usually too busy just making the game to really give it a long form playthrough, but I figured it had been a while and was worth doing again.
I discovered a number of things that I found really inconvenient from a gameplay perspective. The first, and most glaring issue was stamina. I had nerfed the stamina cost of using tools a while back which I thought had solved the issue. The idea at the time, as I remember, had been that stamina costs would be high at first, but once you skilled up a few times you’d be capable of using tools without much issue. As it turns out, this is not the case. Going to the mines just to mine like 15 rocks and then being out of stamina was painful, especially before fixing the stairs. This sort of problem transferred to pretty much everything, when it takes like a fourth of your stamina bar to water crops, something is wrong, and I can’t believe I didn’t notice this sooner. As a result, stamina costs have been altered pretty drastically to hopefully allow for a smoother gameplay experience.
Another thing I found incredibly annoying, there are several things on your farm that allow you to craft items, the cooking station, alchemy station, forge, ordering items, etc. Having to actually have the items in your inventory in order to use these is really annoying. The cooking station somewhat circumvented this because it looked at all the items within your house at least. However, I felt that still wasn’t enough, so basically everything on your farm will now look at everything you have, including what is in chests and pull from them as needed.
For bug fixes, there have been more than a few small ones. There is one I feel I should mention however as it will affect people more the longer they play. In short, there is an invisible object in the game that is spawned by objects that go transparent when you walk behind them. In other words, trees spawn this object. And trees despawn and respawn each time you enter/exit a new zone. This invisible object was not being handled correctly. As a result, they just accumulated in the game endlessly. Thankfully they are at least invisible and don’t do much but if you play long enough, they will start to lag the game. Once the next patch comes out this will be fixed, and any extras of this object will be erased from your save.
Back to QoL stuff, there were some other changes that were made as well. Things like the second bag quest being easier so you aren’t stuck at 15 slots for so long. Building material costs were reduced slightly in many cases. Trees will now regrow more quickly. Right clicking stacks into chests that can’t fit the entire stack will now place as much as possible inside instead of just doing nothing. Sugarcane has been changed to a crop that can be grown year-round like wheat so sugar won’t be as difficult to come by. There is now an interior to the windmill and you will have to use it to grind up certain things, namely flour, sugar, and spices.
There’s still a whole bunch of other things that I’d like to alter, but as I haven’t actually done them yet it seems like I probably shouldn’t mention them. Like I said at the start, hopefully an actual patch will happen soon. Once the art is all caught up, we should be ready to go. In any case, thanks for being patient, and I hope you all are enjoying the game in its current state at least.