Early Access Recap - Month 1
It's been a busy first month in Early Access. Here's a recap on what's been completed.
Roadmap Goal Reached
100+ Build Pieces - DONE!
New Content
106 new build pieces for sandbox game mode
Walls, roofs, and roof ends of wood, thatch, and stone for village buildings
Palisades and towers
Interior and exterior stairs
Dedicated storage for stone resources
New resources and items
Wild Einkorn (a grain product) that can be harvested for straw
Straw bunches to craft thatch bundles for construction
A variety of Rock formations that can be broken down into boulders and small stones, or carve out caves and tunnels for shelter
Boulders can be harvested into flat stone and stone blocks to be used in construction
Rockbreaker - a new tool for smashing rocks and foes
Straw Bed - simple bed made from straw you can sleep on which improves injury recovery and increases comfort
New jobs and products
Harvester - Wild Einkorn/straw
Handcrafter - Thatch Bundles
Stoneworker - Boulders, Flat Stone, Stone Blocks, Small Stones
Other Notable Changes
Moved the savegame data location including a data migration tool to preserve old save data
Reworked the Store page to better reflect the current game experience
Several improvements to the tree felling and bucking systems
Increase base speed for player actions and crafting
Developer Blog Post - Behind the Scenes
For those interested in some of what goes on from my perspective, check out this Dev Blog Post going over some of the steps I take when setting up new rock formations for harvesting.
Bug Fixes and Quality of Life Improvements
Multiple hotfixes released, dozens of bugs fixed, QoL improvements, and some minor optimizations across multiple different systems and features. Bug fixes will remain an ongoing priority, please keep the feedback coming!
What's Next?
Trade and immigration, along with a heavy dose of bug fixes focused on villager pathing and jobs.
Trade
This is about trading with the ship merchant, Tirk Grumman. This gets Tirk and his crew finally leaving the beach and going about their normal trade routes.
Aboard his ship you can negotiate trade deals and place orders for various goods, as well as the type of new villagers you would like to attract or hire.. for a fee of course.
This also adds trade between characters so you can finally speak with your villagers and access their inventory, as well as loot corpses.
Immigration
New villagers will start to arrive by ship to grow your population. This gives you an opportunity to gain specialized skilled workers to open up new industries and production, or even new heroes to expand your adventure party options!
Bug Fixes and Polish
I'll be catching up on a backlog of bugs over the next month or so as well as adding some polish to several game mechanics.
Steam Winter Sale
Dungeons & Kingdoms is 15% off during the Steam Winter Sale. Get the game for a discount and join the community to help shape the game moving forward. We want your feedback!
New Builds
Full game build 0.592
Demo build 0.593
Highlights
Add new resources for breakable rock formations, several new rocks near beach
Add new simple tool - Rockbreaker (1053)
Add new resource Harvestable Boulder (5018), Flat Stone (5009), Stone Block (5008)
Add new job Stoneworker for simple stone harvesting
Add 30 stone build pieces
Other Changes
Reduce character radius for navmesh for better pathing accuracy
Add additional resources to Gatherer job to be able have more filter control
Improve rigidbody limiters to help with flyaway objects on collision
Add rough stone block (5008) as harvestable alternate resource from boulder (5018)
Add player actions for harvesting flat stone (5009) and stone blocks (5008) from boulders (5018)
Fix boulder (5018) having static child model causing placement issues
Reduce model size/scale for flat shaped stone (5009) so it fits better inside new harvestable rock volumes
Remove carry properties from harvestable reed and einkorn items (5016, 5017) as these are only for harvesting from wild resources, not picking up as products
Include resources layer as walkable ground
Add solid background image to equipped player hotbar slots to improve visibility
Fix and update some item and weapon icons and descriptions
Change handcrafting job order to have chisel first, add Rockbreaker to list
Fix issues with the cursor showing and/or causing player control to not work properly
Add new conditions to DEV UI player reset function to cover more scenarios
Configure small stone (5004) to always be excluded from navmesh cuts/updates
Autogenerate MoveTo workspot targets for all game units, helps with finding the best position for workers to harvest, handles reservations etc
Add gameunit setting to improve worker rotating to targets
Increase default NPC auto-recovery distance from 3 to 4