It's been a little while, but figured it was about time for Minicology to get a new devlog :)
First things first! I'm preparing to launch a Kickstarter campaign for Minicology in the next few months. Follow it here!
This is super exciting, and I've been very very busy putting together the alpha for streamers - and eventually backers - to play!
While the base of the game is here, and (in my personal, biased opinion) fun to play, I'm hoping to use funds (and beta testers!) gathered from the Kickstarter campaign quite a lot further. If you've been following Minicology's development, you know the pitch - take care of a tiny planet, cultivate plants and animals, etc etc.
I'm hoping to take this quite a bit further over the course of the next year: adding in the ability to explore a whole mini-verse of procedurally generated tiny planets, along with some other fun stuff like mini-dungeons and new weather systems enabled by space exploration. This is, of course, a pretty big change in scope - but it enables a much larger mid-and-end game and should extend Minicology's playtime into dozens or hundreds of hours :).
I've been playing around with proof-of-concepts for this over the past few months, and you can check out the results of the new planet generation over on the steam page. Stay tuned for more sneak peaks of the planetary exploration features
Now on to patch notes!
I've been putting in a lot of work to update Minicology's graphics. We've got a whole new set of background art, and most of the plants and bosses have been given a makeover.
Additionally, we have some other new features
- New UI animations
- Space Urchin Invasion - this serves as a nice combat warmup for new players. Urchins will eat vegetation if left undisturbed - so make sure to deal with them quick!
- Shooting Star event overhaul - catching three shooting stars will attract a mysterious new friend. Buy replacements for your crafting stations and more from him!
- New basic tree - just one more bit of variation between worlds! New wood varieties for each tree are on the way as well.
- Armor now displays on players. Equip it and show off your hard work!
- Players now take fall damage and 'wall damage' from hitting floor and walls fast enough.
- Animal AI has been improved so they exclusively target entities near their spawn point. This should lead to significantly fewer instances of your planet's fauna committing mass suicide by jumping into pits.
- Craft the new Firebolt weapon from fallen meteorite - this weapon is the first of several mid-game 'energy weapons' that take battery power instead of ammunition.
Bugfixes:
- Fixed bug where bugs could devour entire trees in a few bites
- Fixed syntax errors in cooking generation. (adding several lavender to a dish will no longer repeatedly generate descriptors)
- Fixed misc saving and loading errors