Alright, patch time is here and there is much to discuss. As I think I stated in the last monthly update this took a bit longer than expected, regardless we are here now. Simply put this patch has tuned up livestock a bit and made room for future additions as now the systems are set up.
By tuned up livestock I mean a few things. First, you can let animals outside now. Where you normally look at the status of your animals you can now select an option to let them outside. Doing this will tell the game to calculate a pasture for the animals in that building. Pastures are formed as you would expect. The game will look at the space outside the building and qualify tiles as pasture until it runs into walls or other solid objects like buildings or trees. So basically, throw down a fence, or other things to block an area off and you’ll have a pasture.
I didn’t want to just directly mimic other games so I modified this system a bit. Using stardew as the example you grow grass in that game, but I always found it sort of inexact. In Verdant Village there are now more than a few new crops two of which will grow through Spring, Summer, and Fall, and give repeated yields like berry bushes. Animals you let outside will eat these crops to feed themselves assuming they are planted in the pasture.
As you might recall I said there are a few new crops. That’s because only two of these crops feed animals. The others serve two functions. Two crops are also dedicated to allow for breeding animals. Feed an animal the crop when they are an adult, they get pregnant, totally just like real life. A few days later they will give birth, or lay an egg which will hatch.
The other set of crops is there to add some variety that I thought would make livestock a bit more interesting. Not everything is in yet, I have a couple other ideas that I want to add eventually, just a matter of time and priority. For now, chickens and cows each have two different forms that can be attained by feeding them certain crops. I won’t spoil that bit I guess, but you can expect a few other things like this in the future once I get more time on my hands.
All that said, quick hint, if you want to find these crops you can can’t just buy them, I suggest checking the fields to the left of your home.
Aside from that there have been some bug fixes and small QoL stuff done as well but the majority of work was just the animal systems. The details are, as usual, listed at the end.
Now, onto the meat of this post. As some of you may remember at the start of December I decided to try a new update schedule. The idea was once a month I’d be putting out a smaller patch. The idea was to keep updates consistent while I worked on combat, the next big system, in the background. So we are two months into that and I’m finding that I may need to modify it a bit.
Long story short, time is hard to come by as an adult. I don’t want to work on the game less, that isn’t the problem. If anything I want to work more, but unfortunately I have to sleep and work a full time job. So, how things currently work is that I work on the smaller patches during the weekdays and combat on the weekends. Problem is that while the weeks are fairly consistent the weekends are not meaning the time I spend on combat gets shorted quite a bit.
The best solution I’ve come up with so far is basically a switching schedule of one month small patch work, one month combat work. So basically every other month there would still be a patch. It’s not ideal admittedly, but I think if I don’t dedicate a realistic amount of time towards it, combat is never going to happen.
I try to be transparent about all this stuff given that anyone reading this has probably already bought the game. As you’ve already given me your money, I think you have a right to know what I’m thinking/doing. While I don’t think anyone is going to lose sleep over something like this I’d be happy to further explain the thinking if anyone wanted more info.
Okay, last thing, I know, lots of things. This is something that’s been tumbling around in my head for a while. I don’t usually ask for feedback, I’m not sure how much I’d get anyway. However, while I still hold creative control over the game this was something large enough that I wanted to pose the question.
The game world for Verdant Village is big, to put it bluntly. I don’t mean that as a compliment to myself I just mean that compared to other games of this genre most are more compact than this one. Now, I don’t want to get rid of zones that I have or have planned, that isn’t the issue. The issue I’ve been bouncing around is that the scale is wrong for this game.
To give a brief history, the reason for the size of the environments in this game stem from me as a child playing Harvest Moon and wanting more world to explore. When I started making this game the large zones were created by design to fulfill that. Problem is, well, turns out people who make games are smart, and there’s a reason zones in those games didn’t stretch on forever.
Probably the most simple reason is that it just elongates travel time. While a game like Skyrim for instance might benefit from huge environments that is in part because it has the graphical fidelity to back up that scope. People want to just walk around in those games because it is pretty and interesting to just move around and find things.
While the graphics are acceptable, I’m under no illusion that Verdant Village is as interesting to simply move through as an Elder Scrolls game. This leads me to two thoughts. First, I’d like to update the world graphical a fair bit. I think there are things that could be added and modified to make the world just more interesting in general. In the process of doing this I am considering condensing the game’s areas. Like I said, I don’t want, or plan, cut out zones but I’m thinking it might be good for the game to shrink things down a bit. A perfect example of this is the fields to the left of your house. They were made that size because I wanted some sort of sweeping field but as anyone who has walked through them more than once can probably attest, they take forever to get through. And this is coming from a dev that 90% of the time cheats a horse in when they start and it still takes forever. I’d like to shrink down things like that to alleviate some pain points.
Anyway, as I said at the start of this tangent, I wouldn’t mind having feedback on this sort of decision. Its hard to get a true idea of what people think but if people just came out in mass and said “no I love walking around everywhere” that would probably sway my opinion. Otherwise, this seems like a good deal of work, but worth it to make gameplay tighter. As mentioned briefly this would probably result in some graphical changes. Not a complete redo, that would be insane, but some changes to make things more visually interesting in the world.
Alright, that was long, sorry to write a small essay here. As I said before I like to be transparent about what’s going on behind the scenes. If you have any opinions on what’s been mentioned I’d be happy to hear them. Below is the full changelog as usual. Regardless of what the patching schedule turns into I will continue to post these once a month to keep everyone in the know. Thanks for playing, more to come soon.
Verdant Village V0.4.8.5 Full Changelog
Additions
- Added the ability to breed animals
- Added the ability to let animals out to pasture
- Added two additional forms for both cows and chickens
- Added new crops/forage items to facilitate animal breeding and transformation
- Added 3 achievements based around new livestock features
- Added 3 tutorials related to new livestock features
Quality Of Life
- Made minor changes to mineral node spawns in the mines to hopefully prevent them from blocking a player in when they enter/exit a room
- Preserves Pot sprite and collision was been modified slightly to better fit on the grid
- Created a failsafe for if saving fails so the game doesn’t just softlock
- The shift click command to buy a set number of items should now accept numpad button presses
Balance Changes
- Crops that are fully grown no longer need to be watered and will not wither regardless of time
- Tweaked livestock and fowl movement algorithms slightly to prevent them getting stuck on things
- Increased regular truffle sell price to 40g from 20g
- Increased selling price of goat milk to 180g from 120g (this is to balance out better against cows)
- Reduced cooked item sell prices from 1.4x the sell price of ingredients to 1.25x the sell price
- Irrigation pipes have been altered so that they can be run under buildable walls (this allows you to water pasture crops automatically)
Bug Fixes
- Fixed a bug where NPCs wouldn’t stop their walk cycle and face you when you talked to them
- Fixed a bug where interacting with a cow or goat to milk them would alter their shadow temporarily
- Readded collisions for fowl. I don’t think they were ever supposed to not have collisions so I’m calling this a bug, or I was unhinged when I coded it that way
- Fixed music on the intro screen so that it now plays
- Fixed automatic full screen, the game was always meant to try to jump to full screen but an engine bug was preventing it. You can still play windowed mode by selecting it from settings
- Fixed a bug where entering and leaving a secret room in the mines and then using the portcullis would leave the mines map on your screen
- Made a broad change to the inventory system to hopefully snuff out the rare softlock players have hit occasionally
- Fixed a bug resulting in two different achievement bugs due to misnamed data entries
- Fixed a compendium bug where seed entries didn’t list the seasons they could be grown in
- Fixed a bug where shift clicking to buy multiple items at once wouldn’t charge the player
- Fixed a minor visual glitch for chests where they moved when being opened/closed
- Fixed a bug where secrets rooms in mines may not spawn in the correct biome style
- Fixed a quest for Sven that was supposed to give you 5 iron bars but instead gave 5 braziers
- Fixed a bug where stack text would show the ‘1’ if the stack had a single item in it