Hi everyone,
I uploaded the promised bug fixes last weekend, and this week marked the first time that we only got one bug report! I don’t know whether to take this as a positive sign that there are fewer and fewer bugs to be found, or whether you have simply become so accustomed to them that you have stopped reporting. In either case, I will go over the list of reported bugs again to make sure that I haven’t missed anything, and please report any bugs you find so I can address them!
In addition to my ongoing work on the pirates, John and I have decided to also start work on implementing the Fruit Gatherer. One of our main considerations for Path to Prosperity has always been to make the game as strategic as possible, and part of that strategy was meant to lie in supply lines for your outlying bases. The problem with this at the moment is that you can simply place Hunter’s Huts in the outlying base and they provide free food for you from nothing (where farms at least need a large upfront investment and a flat area of land). With the Fruit Gatherer, we are hoping to avoid that by making the starting food more limited in late game, as well as tying it further to land use (your gatherers will have to go out into the jungle to collect food for you).
One of the main reasons why we haven’t implemented the Fruit Gatherer so far was the lack of easily identifiable fruit trees. To address that, John has started to model clearly identifiable banana trees with yellow (or green if unripe) bananas on them. Once these are finished, we will implement the Fruit Gatherer and remove the Hunter’s Hut from the game (though we will follow up with a Ranch to get meat back at some point in the future).
Once we have implemented the Fruit Gatherer, we will also implement a similar system to change from the Quarry to a Stone Cutter, who will harvest (and destroy) the various boulders around the Island. Both the locations of boulders and the locations of fruit trees will be partially set per map, and partially randomised, which we hope will add to strategic decision-making in expanding your base, creating supply lines, and in setting the locations for your mining bases.
Please let us know what you think, and don’t keep those bugs to yourself!
Until next week!