Hi everyone,
After uploading the pioneer wagon to the experimental branch last week, I got a decent amount of feedback about what worked and what didn’t work - as well as some bug reports, some of which I already addressed.
To start with the most important: I finally switched the seed market from being balanced for competitive gameplay and the score victory to being more usable for cooperative play and the artefact mode. Previously, you only had access to a very limited amount of seeds, which increased in cost the more you purchased, and needed to unlock access to additional seeds by submitting money. After last week’s changes, artefact mode players are given a much, much larger pool of seeds to get early on, and the cost of seeds does not increase. This makes it much more viable to add farms for a reliable food supply into the mid-game.
To go with this change, the pioneer wagon now requires vegetables to be built, rather than fruit, which gives players far more control over how quickly they can get the resources they need for the wagon. Additionally, Pirate’s Peak now has more banana groves in the starting areas, meaning that both players are able to build their initial base without having to rely on sending fruit back and forth and having to rush into farming straight away. As a result, the early game and stepping into the mid-game expansion are much smoother than before.
Among the fixes was the solution for an issue with different stone groupings spawning for different players in multiplayer, a fix for a crash caused by pirate AI (I may also have introduced a smaller problem along the way, which I will solve shortly), a fix for an animation issue, and many more. All of these were uploaded to the experimental branch last week, so you can already test them out.
On the progress to finalising 0.8, I am in the middle of creating chapter entries for the tutorial, so rather than having to play through the entire tutorial from the start, players will get the possibility of starting the tutorial at any chapter they like. This will fit neatly with the change to chapter 5, which will introduce the wagon to new players.
Until next week!