Today I want to talk about what I’ve been working on and what you can expect in the future.

Over the past month I’ve been working on two things primarily: Villagers and Graphics.

Graphics:
Since releasing the graphical overhaul, our graphics guy has had a chance to play the game and he made quite a few suggestions on how things can improve. Simpler mountains and grass. More tree variation. These are just a few of the many small changes. Here’s a screenshot of what he’s done so far.

Villagers:
-Added new occupations. There are now 12 to choose from:
-Miner - Mines and sells various crops.
-Builder/Lumberjack - Chops trees. Builds houses.
-Farmer - Farms and sells various crops.
-Adventurer - Hunts monsters and sells weapons.
-Hunter - Hunts and sells meat.
-Mage - Casts and sells spells.
-Apothecary - Brews and sells potions.
-Armorer - Forges and sells armor.
-Jeweler - Buys and sells accessories.
-Barber - Cuts and styles hair.
-Electrician - Buys and sells electrical parts.
-Banker - Stores your money.

The greatest addition is probably the builder. If you don’t feel like building your town all by yourself you can purchase blueprints and let the builder build it for you. If you don’t feel like waiting for him to build it you can pay extra and buy prefabs from the builder so you can place it instantly. Don’t like his designs? No problem! Just create some new designs from scratch and turn them into blueprints.

The future:
I’m currently rolling all future releases (including what I’ve been working on) into one more early access build. There are somewhat major changes that will impact quite a bit so it just makes sense to wait and roll everything out all at once. Here’s what you can expect from the next release:

Version 0.9
-Wall overhaul - This is a big one. You may notice that walls in Tile Miner look a bit odd. I’ve changed them quite a few times actually. Right now when you place a wall it essentially places 9 tiles. A single wall tile surrounded by a bunch of interior walls. The reason behind this was to make the dungeons look a bit more like the original Zelda. This is great for dungeons but not so great for housing. It also makes things a bit more confusing when the player is building. We want to simplify and make things look better.
-Music - We already have the music completed. We just need it implemented into the game.
-Dungeon rooms - Right now there are about 30-50 dungeon rooms. I’d like to have 100+ in order to give the dungeons more variety.
-Dungeon traps - These will be magic traps that shoot spells at you once they charge up.
-Polish - This is the one that will be the most time consuming. We’re nearing a final release and we really want the game balanced and feeling almost 100% complete before the next update. The only thing that will be missing from 0.9 will be the final dungeon. With this polish phase many of the speed, damage, and crafting recipes will be adjusted. This will take a while and at some point we may ask for play testers to help figure out balance issues.

The big question: When will this release come out?
All I can do is estimate. Polishing the game throws out many unknowns. We could find that we really need more enemies, potions or plants. These things could turn into creating new features entirely. We won’t know until we start diving in. I’d like to think that overhauling the walls, adding the music and doing all of the dungeon stuff would be complete by the end of June. So I’d hope this would be out in September. But right now this is a rough estimate. I’ll keep you posted on my progress as I go.