Hi everyone,
This past week has been spent with us focusing primarily on the gatherer and fruit tree dynamics. While John had already finished the tree by last week, the tree was not functional at the time of our post. As of now, the tree is functional. Players can harvest bananas themselves, the fruit regrows over time, and we have a functioning Gatherer’s Hut which collects the banana automatically. With this change, players will be able to gain much more food early on (compared to the Hunter’s Hut), which should speed up the early game a little and make it less repetitive. At the same time, the number of trees available to the players will stay limited throughout the game, making it a much less scalable option for food production in the mid and late game.
Developing the Gatherer and fruit tree mechanics have been an all-encompassing task in the past week, primarily because I wanted to take the time to improve my code. The mechanic is largely based on an existing mechanic used by the Sawmill (find trees, send a worker to them, collect resources, return to the building), but when I initially created the Sawmill, I expected for this mechanic to be used only by the Sawmill. As a result, the code was not sufficiently scalable and I decided to improve it to make it more flexible and robust. Consequently, it has distracted me a little from my work on the pirates, but I am very pleased with the current state of the mechanic, and I am expecting that any future bugs will be much easier to find and fix. As mentioned last week, we will also be using the same system for the Stonecutter, so the work needed to implement that is largely done already.
To round out the banana groves, we also added a smaller banana tree that won’t have fruit, but which adds some density to the banana areas. Finally, we also added a new function to the sawmill to enable/disable cutting of fruit trees by the Sawmill workers. The animations used for gathering are currently still the same as the ones for cutting down trees, but we are planning on overhauling animations more broadly once we replace the villager models with an updated version.
We will have to change the current tutorial a little to accommodate the replacement of the Hunter’s Hut, and will go through some more testing before I upload the new changes for everyone!
Until next week!