Greetings, Magnates!
It's been 5 months since the last devlog, but that doesn't mean the game is abandoned. Oh no.
My absense is explained by the simple fact that I needed a break. Being an indie game developer isn't easy; it comes with a lot of stress and concern. The actual coding is the least of it all. It's more about living up to expectations, not failing super hard when it releases, worrying that noone will notice and buy the game, that not enough effort was put into marketing and so on and so on. And I just needed to get away from all of that.
I'm still dead set on finishing and releasing this game, don't worry.
In the mean time, I've been working with an artist. First of all, there are new assets for everything. Tiles, buildings, items, visual effects. This is a great step forward in terms of more broad visual appeal.
The new assets are double the resolution they used to be, and with an actual artist on board most of the buildings now resemble what they actually are. Miners looking like miners, smelters looking like smelters etc. Very happy about that.
Following that, we worked on new Steam assets (screenshots excluded; they still need to be updated). They look much better now and should hopefully start to drive a bit more traffic to the store page for the game.
I present the latest changelog below, which is a list of changes that happened before I went on a break. I'm allowing myself to continue this break until the new year. Come January I expect to be back in the groove.
Changelog
- New assets for everything.
- Changed world generation; rocks are gone, replaced by stone deposits instead. Water has rocky shorelines now. Water isn't surrounded by sand/beach anymore, instead sand generates in deposits. Flowers are gone, they didn't serve any purpose anyway.
- Water tiles are animated now.
- Pumps will now work on moist soil (dark dirt). That should make pipelines less annoying.
- Redid the liquid distribution system; liquid volume will now try to distribute evenly between all connected supported buildings.
- Had to undo a previous design choice; distributors and intersections can no longer feed into each other.
- Started work on visual effects for buildings.
Until next time!
Fey at Rising Tail