Demo v0.20.0
Souls system
Added souls obtaining for area upgrades. After areas update game started to revolve more around not only upgrading your skills, but also upgrading playable environment by adding more trees, rocks and food. Now it's additionally encouraged by receiving new type of currency for that - souls. Later they will be used in prestige area, where you can obtain upgrades that will remain with you between play runs.
Prestige bonuses
After obtaining of certain amount of souls portal near player spawnpoint will open. After you enter the portal you will teleport to the special prestige area, where you can spend earned souls on permanent bonuses that will persist you between runs:
- Loot bonus - adds additional loot item after finishing a tree or a rock. Works better for smaller objects
- Loot multiplier - multiplies loot after finishing a tree or a rock, doesn't multiply bonus. Works better for bigger objects
- Souls multiplier - multiplies souls obtained in core game from upgrading areas
- Damage multiplier - multiplies strength of chopping and mining
- Food spawn speed - decreases time needed for food to regrow
- Objects spawn speed - decreases time needed for trees and rocks to respawn
Further plans
After two big updates (0.19.0 areas and 0.20.0 prestige) that create the basic picture of gameplay I'm not thinking of adding game breaking features in the next month or two. My top further priorities in close/mid perspective:
- Quality of life improvements - more tutorials, better sound configuration not with turn on and off, intermediate animations and so on. Just making the game more polished in a good way
- Rebalance - I tried to actually calculate the meta gameplay progressions with spreadsheets and stuff for souls upgrades with how many can you earn by the run with certain multiplier bonus, so the progression can be smoother. However it might still ruin core gameplay with hitting trees and rocks. So hits might become stronger or weaker, and trees and rocks might give more or less loot. This kind of rebalance
- New areas - the idea of progression by type of material is a classic thing for the genre: ores in Minecraft or Starbound, woods (regular and hardwood) in Stardew Valley or minerals type progression like in Humankind: Odyssey (that's a masterpiece). So my game has the same idea behind it. I planned to make areas with basalt and obsidian months ago, but I decided to make the gameplay a little deeper before I start expanding the game horizontally. Now I think the game is ready for new areas with new trees and rocks to be added
- New unique unlockable mechanics - Even though the woodpecker took a lot of time to implement I think adding unique mechanics after maxing out the area is a good thing. Sandstone desert is already made for further updates with grindstones temporal buff, but more areas might come with more mechanics.
P.S.
It's a small game from pretty niche genre, so I didn't have much expectations from the community. That's why I'm grateful for each thread in the discussions section. Feel free to write about how you feel about the game. This kind of feedback is really valuable for solo developers like myself