Hi everyone,
First of all, happy Halloween! We unfortunately won't have any pumpkin themed changes in the game for the occasion, but you are always welcome to hunt for some of the scarier bugs to celebrate ;).
As I mentioned two weeks ago, a friend of mine has been pretty excited about contributing to the game and has been learning blender for a while. This past week, John taught him the basics of creating trees and plants, and we are excited to see how a second perspective on the plants will help with variety for new biomes and more engaging landscapes. As far as I understand, creating plants is a pretty difficult process, especially when trying to make them perform well, so it will likely be a few weeks or months before we see a payoff from this!
On my side, I have started working on improving the pirates, and so far, things are going quite well. In addition to what I mentioned last week, we have also been thinking about how to make pirates less of a jump scare. While I am currently working on the pirates investigating a threat when they initially hear it (to move around plants and trees toward the origin of a noise), this would still leave them being very silent, with the player potentially being unaware of being pursued. To change this, we are thinking of adding some sounds to the pirates themselves (rowdy behaviour, chants, shouts, or something similar). This will allow the player to hear them from further away, and potentially sneak around them when they are not ready to engage yet.
Finally, I have been working on some bugs (especially issues with Opal Reef), and I have also gotten around to creating a seed inventory in the book! The seed inventory will show you how many seeds you have purchased and how many are still available, and I have also updated some of the tooltips accordingly (the “not yet implemented” tooltip for the seeds was very confusing to many, as the seeds were working fine, but the tooltip itself had not been properly implemented yet).
I will upload the bug fixes and new seed inventory once I have fixed the last bugs on my list, before getting back to the pirates!
Until next week!