Hi everyone! Happy new year! We wish you all the best for 2022! This year is going to be special for us as we plan to release the full version of DevLife! So hopefully this is the last roadmap before that happens :D
Today I will walk you through all of the plans and share some details mostly about the update coming in Q1 2022. Our goal is to deliver two content updates in the first half of the year and then go silent for a while as we work on the final release later in 2022. I hope that those updates will be finished closer to the beginning of each quarter rather than its end, but we will see how things go.
Interactive Events:
In the first content update in 2022, we will of course add new Interactive Events this time revolving around animals and diseases. Your characters will be able to obtain various pets and you will need to take care of them but also face things they do when you are not around. Additionally, you will be able to give them names to make them feel more like a part of the family.
As for the diseases unfortunately you and your employees will be able to catch various sicknesses that will force you to take a few days off work. There also will be some more serious cases that will require expensive treatments and will not always end on a positive note...
More Furniture:
Just like in the previous update we will add some new furniture that will allow you for more customization of your workspace. Some of them will be new variants of the existing pieces but of course, a lot of them will be completely new.
Reworked Tooltips:
In preparation for the final release, I've decided that the current tooltips system needs to be reworked in order to support sophisticated links and connections between characters that we want to add in the full version of the game. It would be very easy to lose track of who is who in the world and that's where nested tooltips come into play.
The whole system is very much inspired by Crusader Kings 3 just like the character's traits were inspired by the previous installment of the series. In texts and on various objects you will find links to tooltips that will show you more about the thing you are hovering over. Of course, those things will have their own links and tooltips and that's why they need to be nestable. Let's take employees in Interactive Events as an example.
As you can see on the work in progress screenshot above by hovering over the name of the employee in the event you will be able to see more information about them. For example their stats and traits. Let's say you want to read the description of an active trait of your employee. In the new system, you can move your mouse over the icon in the tooltip which will get you a new tooltip with the description of the trait! It's that simple!
Of course, not on the implementation level :P I'm trying to write this system in as much modular, versatile, and expandable way as possible so I can use it in future projects and maybe even release it as a plugin on the Asset Store. We shall see about that because it would require making some documentation and a few changes in the code. But if you would like to see a technical breakdown of the whole system in a separate devlog, then be sure to let me know ;)
Game Optimization:
The last important aspect of the first update coming in 2022 is various game optimizations that I've learned over the curse of my daily job as a game programmer in the last few months. Just to name a few things I plan to move saving of the game and overall operation on files to a separate thread, rework rebuilding of the UI layout, and optimize some other things in the code that probably most of you reading this would not understand 🙃
Anyway, that's all from me for today. You can of course expect more details about other updates coming to DevLife later down the road, but for now, thank you for your time reading this post. Once again we wish you all the best for the new year and we hope you will get to enjoy the full release of DevLife! :D As always if you find any new bugs or have suggestions about the game, you can leave them at our Discord server or on mestoegames.com/bugsreport ;)
Stay warm and stay safe!
Roman and Roman Studio Team