Hey everyone,
Just wanted to check in here on Steam. We know not everyone follows the Discord, my Twitch channel, or our monthly newsletter, so we’re posting an update here to make sure you’re kept in the loop as development progresses. In this post we’ll cover: a quick look at farming, a couple new helping hands on the team, and a look behind the curtain at some refactoring we’re doing.
Farming
You might be aware that we’ve been steadily working away toward this update for some time. With tweaks and adjustments, we’ve finally settled on how farming should feel in Swords ‘n Magic & Stuff. Our dedicated testing team has been hard at work testing the balance and crops. Here’s a picture from one of our testers who planted everything that will be available when the Farmlands update drops! If you look closely, you might be able to guess what each crop is.
New Additions
We’ve brought two new people to the team, both of whom are long-time community members. Exciting!
Our first addition is ddrosler, who’s writing quests and doing narrative design. He's already hard at work adding quests to the new Farmlands region, and so far they’re refreshing and fun. He previously submitted countless quest ideas to our #ideas channel on Discord, where you may also recognise him as one of our moderators. You'll have to wait until the update to experience his quests, but it will be worth it!
Our second addition is Soupytwin1, who’s creating textures for player and NPC outfits. He's already shown his talent by posting custom outfits on Discord in the #fan-content channel. He made well over 60 outfits before we even added him to the team. Here are a few of them:
Refactoring
When we committed to taking extra time to work on this major update, the team and I took a careful look at the performance of the game now and projected into the future. When building a systems-heavy game like this (especially right before we position ourselves to implement a handful of new systems like cooking, housing, etc), it's important to do everything you can to anticipate performance issues before they arise. As such, redesigning and refactoring systems is something we have to do from time to time.
The combat system is the first of the systems that needs work. Combat has changed a lot since launch. As features are added, removed and tweaked, the underlying code gets messier and messier. Odd bugs start to crop up, things start to feel less smooth, and the idea of adding more of our planned features like combat abilities starts to become daunting. So rebuilding this from scratch around the current design and with planned features in mind will save us countless hours in the future.
Similarly, our initial approach to the game's item database was to use a single data table. This is a pretty standard way to handle things, but as the game grows (and grows) things start to get messy. There are no problems yet, but pretty soon this will start to impact game load times. We're going to change our approach here to use soft references to items in the database which are only loaded as required.
While all this goes on, it's more or less business as usual for the non-programming side of the team. The new zone is steadily coming together, and we're more than excited to share it with you.
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So that’s it from us for now. We’ve decided to make a habit of posting here monthly to keep you all informed, but if this wasn’t enough information to whet your appetite while the update is cooking you can watch me develop the game in real time over on Twitch, where I stream twice weekly. Keep an eye on my Youtube channel – there might be another devlog in the next couple weeks or so. And I should mention that Joe (our animator and AI programmer) has been streaming a TON lately over on his channel. See you around!