Hello, dear Greenfeet friends! May the grass be soft under your steps!
Here's the development progress for the past month. This is a synthesis of my weekly blog posts.
Fuel System
Campfires now consume items tagged as "flammable." Of course, some items are more desirable than others. Generally, you'd prefer to burn a log, but in desperate times, why not burn a wooden plank or even a wooden statue?
Auto Tools
Thanks to playtest feedback, it became clear that the tool system was too complex to use. Manually managing equipment required too much micro-management and was hard for new players to grasp. What's more frustrating than a tree left uncut while the axe is lying right next to it?
Now, the Greenfeet will automatically equip themselves with the best tools for the tasks at hand. You can still specialize workers by setting restrictions: for instance, preventing a lumberjack from using a pickaxe.
User Experience and Readability
To make the game more readable and accessible, many small improvements have been added.
For example, the menu has been redesigned to be more hierarchical and organized.
The "Cut" and "Harvest" commands have been merged into a single "Gather" command to avoid accidentally destroying plants. Cutting down a bush instead of simply picking its berries happened way too often.
A new job evaluator has been implemented to clearly explain why a task cannot be completed by any Greenfeet. For example, it might be due to the lack of a necessary tool or the task being unreachable.
What's Next?
I'm now fully focused on producing a public demo for the game. The deadline has been set to mid-february for a demo candidate, and it should be publicly available in march. You can already gain access to the game in its current alpha state: simply join the Discord server and follow the instructions there.
Stay tuned for more updates, and don't forget to wishlist Greenfeet Haven on Steam!