Welcome
Hey there! Hope you're enjoying the festive season! Here's this month's update on the development of Dreadwinter. There's a lot of things added to the game, and some festive stuff too!
Characters
All of the key characters in Lunara, the main town, have been added to the game! These are the people you'll be seeing as you go about your daily life, and there's quite a lot of them now!
The Taikoji family is a set of characters I'm quite proud of ːsteamhappyː
There are some additional characters I would like to add later on, and I think there are some improvements to be made to some of the older characters, but the important part of having them in the game is done.
Cafe Expansions
You can now build expansions in Dreadwinter! The expansions were already added to the game, but there wasn't a way to actually unlock them, until now.
There are currently 4 expansions you can add, with those being:
A kitchen/bakery
Opening the top floor
Expanding the ground floor
Converting the basement added by the ground floor expansion
There are 2 ways you can access these expansions, either by paying enough money, or by achieving a certain customer level with your regulars. The result is the same, so you can go for whichever way suits your playstyle
Customer levels are gained by fulfilling specific requests made by a regular customer, which starts with a coffee, and progresses to more advanced drinks as you unlock the skills required.
Baking
By building a kitchen, you unlock the ability to bake desserts to sell!
The process is relatively simple, you grab the required ingredients from the fridge, mix it into a dough, and then bake it in the oven. Once it's baked, you can add it to your storage, and customers will randomly choose to buy a dessert alongside their drink.
You can do this at any time, whether the cafe is open or not, and ingredients are unlimited, so you can make as much as you like! I added an ingredient hotbar, that's separate from the item bar, so you can carry more ingredients at a time, which allows for more possible recipes.
I also updated the compendium (recipe book), since it was looking a bit ugly compared to everything else. It looks a lot cleaner now! There's a dessert section that I'm working on adding in, so you can collect dessert recipes alongside drinks.
Snowy Season
The snowy season has been added to the game! There's some more graphics I want to add, such as snow on the buildings, which will take a bit of time (there's a lot of buildings), but I'm really happy with how it looks right now!
Manual Saves
Finally, I've added the ability to save and load your game from almost any point. I say almost because there are some times where you won't be able to save, such as when you're running the cafe, and in combat, but everything else should be fine.
I haven't extensively tested it yet, and there may be some cases where it bugs out, so I likely won't be adding it to the demo. From what I've tested so far, the results are looking good, though.
Closing Notes
That's it for this update, I'll be taking a short break, and I probably won't be working on Dreadwinter until next year ːsteammockingː, but there's a lot more updates to come!
Merry Christmas, happy new year, and thanks for reading!
- Alex