First of all, thanks so much everyone for playing Iron Village! It's been great to see how well received the game has been, and I'm looking forward to building onto it some more!
Some stats if you're curious:
- Over 500 sales
- Over 3600 outstanding wishlists (I see you all waiting for the summer sale 😂)
- 391 unique users
- Median time played of 53 minutes
- 17 reviews, 88% positive
It looks like we haven't had any critical errors (although you may have noticed the release version was 1.0.01, not .00 🙃), so this release is more full of minor goodies and tweaks rather than major fixes. Here's what's coming out:
- In 1.0.00, there was an issue with loading saves with Royal Palace construction sites. Basically, it was expecting a progress bar to be present, but there wasn't one, so the game wouldn't finish loading. Both parts of that have been fixed now: the progress bar is there, and loading games won't freak out over a missing progress bar.
- The next bit was an upgrade to Godot 4.4, the main feature of which was typed dictionaries! This is a technical detail, but basically pre-4.4 the lists of resources for building costs were actually two separate lists: one with resource types (an enum), and one with resource counts. I've finally been able to refactor that into one list with both, and in the process I found a couple of typos in costs, so that should all be fixed.
- Fixed an issue in the late game where placing buildings, roads, and demolitions would cause a noticeable lag. This was because the game recalculates the navigation mesh whenever a new building changes how villagers move around, and the way I was calling it would force the game to wait for those calculations to finish. That doesn't happen anymore, so the game can continue running smoothly.
- Invented the modern technology of doors. Villagers will now open and shut doors when entering/leaving buildings, complete with sound.
- Fixed an issue where the incorrect minimum approval rating would show - basically, the game was showing the minimum approval for the level you're on, rather than the next level.
- Slightly decreased electrical demand of trains. Electricity can be difficult to produce quickly enough for the new locomotives, so hopefully this helps ease perpetual shortages.
- Made double-wide roads render better. Technically, making roads two tiles wide doesn't really widen them, they still act as two parallel roads, but I've rewritten the road tiling logic in a way that at least makes it look like one big road, rather than some sort of net.
Anyway, I've got things sketched out for the first big update, 1.1. Unless this update breaks something horribly, then 1.1 will be the next update. However, I have plenty of things I want to talk about in dev diaries later, so stay tuned!