Goats
A new addition is the Goat livestock animal:
Goats are now used for leather (hide) production instead of pigs:
Butcher now accepts both pigs and goats, but produces only the relevant item from each.
Previously, leatherworking would allow butcher to also produce leather from pigs. Internally, this meant there were 2 production chains - one before and one after the leather tech unlock. I initially thought this would be a cool mechanic that "tech unlocks extra processing". However, in hindsight I really don't like how butcher does this automatically and what this means for balancing and predictability. So I decided to split the leather and meat production to separate animals. Plus, I like there being many different animals.
Speaking of...
Geese
A new Aviary building is now available:
It functions pretty much exactly like Ranches, but for bird/poultry animals.
Currently the first and only bird available is a goose:
Geese are "processed" at the new Poulterer building (which is the equivalent to Butcher for Ranches):
This currently produces Feathers, which can be taken to the new Upholsterer building:
Here Feathers, together with Linen Fabric, will produce Pillows, which is a new housing reserve item, which contributes to the comfort need.
Two new techs for Aviculture and Bedding accompany these:
One thing I thought about is whether live geese could be plucked for feathers multiple times like sheep. I think it's a cool way to differentiate animals, but in the end I decided that I will likely add something like chickens for eggs instead in the future, which would work like that.
I had planned to add something like pillows for a while now. For now, they just serve as another comfort item. I haven't fully decided yet how best to assign all the different items to villager needs, mainly because I'm adding them one at a time like this.
One thing I want to reflect upon is that it's getting increasingly difficult to name buildings. For example, "upholsterer" is a real historical term, but it's not specific to crafting bedding - it's more about furniture upholstery. But I cannot find or think of anything better. And I really don't want to have every building in the game called like "pillow maker", "feather maker", "goose maker", etc. So I agonize over naming things and in the end take some liberties. And still I have items like "raw fish" and "cooked fish" because I could not think of anything better that is descriptive enough.
Feeders
Ranches and Aviaries now have a new Feeder auxiliary building that should be built somewhere around the pens (as seen in above ranch/aviary screenshots).
A worker will currently automatically refill it:
Without food (or feeder at all), animals will grow and produce harvest much slower. They won't completely stop to avoid a deadlock in-game.
Individual pens now show a "productivity" bar based on feeder availability as feedback:
Animal feeding is something I have wanted to add for a long time. So this is the first step. I have not yet implemented any additional requirements for it, like actual food items. But the eventual plan is to have animal food requirements, probably hay or something like that.
Building production display
While adding butcher's leather/meat processing, I finally decided to take a look at how the HUD is presenting these items as inputs-outputs. For an existing example, here is tailor:
It's not entirely clear what this means. I mean, it's not impossible to understand that each input item goes to corresponding output. But this presentation can surely be improved.
So my first quick attempt was to group inputs/outputs exactly and show them corresponding to each other:
And this works fine as long as there are only exact input and output pairs. But when one considers something like smokehouse, there can be other input items used by both inputs:
This does not work with my initial approach to grouping (where does the charcoal go?) So instead I introduced "separators" between items that help "combine" the items:
Hopefully, this reads as "meat or fish with charcoal produce roast or cooked fish respectively". I'm not entirely sure this made it much clearer. But that seems to be the fate of some features - it would take way too long to redesign this completely.
Goal HUD display
Another HUD part that I've disliked for a while is the goal display list. It's supposed to be a sort of tutorial for each new unlock, especially at the start of the game. And it would be great if it had a cleaner presentation. So I changed how it displays entries to be more visual and less text-heavy:
Since icons are basically the cleanest presentation-wise, I also added a bunch more counters for intermediate products for most goals (which one would fulfill anyway).
Main menu parallax
Something I've wanted to do for a really long time is animate the main menu background, which I finally did:
This has two parts - a parallax layer setup for the landscape and clouds that scroll past. The layout for the pieces looks something like this:
Patch note window is now also minimized by default to allow more of the background to show:
This was a really cool feature to implement. I think I spent half the time in Photoshop just getting all the parts for it ready. Also, I didn't realize just how finicky it would be to get the "reflections" moving correctly. But I think the result is worth it.
Now, I know this isn't gameplay. Cool game main menus are cool, but that's all they are - they don't serve any functional purpose. So if I were to reflect a little bit on this whole indie dev process and what features I do or don't do. This project has grown quite large, especially for a one-man "team". It's not uncommon that I would work for a week and not see any visual in-game changes. It's very hard to keep motivation and not wonder "is this a feature I even need?" Mostly I find myself working on features based on player feedback, on bugfixes, optimizations, etc. that have a lot to do with making the game better overall, but not necessarily cooler. But I do believe a good game has a lot to do with presentation.
For example, the fisherman's hut icon is now a fishing pole (instead of a fish):
Will anyone have noticed if I hadn't mentioned it? The reason I added it is so that the goals for hunting and fishing have better display:
But will anymore know I spent like 3 days trying to fix sprite atlas packing, which turns out was just something Unity broke...
So I guess what I'm saying is that sometimes I implement something simply because I think it's cool and no other reason.
Miscellaneous
I added buttons for item global distribution proportions so players that want to micromanage each item can have an easier starting point:
Micropedia now lists bonuses for each season more clearly:
I should mention that I try to keep up with Unity engine updates. I have seen what happens when a project is so far behind the latest version that upgrading is essentially impossible. But that also means that pretty much every update Unity breaks something. This time is was atlas packing, which I had to replace with a custom implementation.
Full changelog
Changes
• Ranches now require Livestock Feeeders, otherwise animals will grow and produce harvest very slowly
• Add Aviculture technology unlockable after Hunting
• Add Aviary building with Bird Pen and Bird Feeder auxiliaries
• Add Goose unit as a Poultry animal raisable at Aviary
• Add Poulterer building with Poulterer's Pen, Poulterer's Abattoir and Poulterer's Table auxiliaries
• Add Feathers item produced at Poulterer from Geese
• Add Bedding technology unlockable with Aviculture and Linen
• Add Upholsterer and Stuffing Table
• Add Pillow item produced at Upholsterer
• Pillows now have the corresponding Reserve in Residences
• Supplies Shop now provides/sells Pillows
• Comfort is now affected by having Pillows
• Rename Butcher's "Abattoir" to Butcher's Abattoir to differentiate from "Poulterer's Abattoir"
• Add Goat unit as a Livestock animal
• Rename Ranch's "Animal Pen" to "Livestock Pen"
• Ranches can now also herd Goats in Livestock Pens
• Butcher now also accepts Goats for input (in addition to Pigs)
• Butcher now produces Hides only from Goats instead of Pigs, which now only produce Meat
• Goats are unlocked with Leatherworking tech and Pig processing is no longer affected by it
• Add Livestock Feeder auxiliary building for Ranch
• Livestock Feeder and Bird Feeder buildings (for Ranch and Aviary respectively) now feed nearby animals, otherwise they will grow and produce harvest much slower; these will be restocked by the workers periodically (but don't currently require any additional resources)
• Add goals for new technologies
• Building selection UI will show a "Productivity" section for Livestock Pens and Bird Pens, which is currently based on having enough feeder buildings
• Better building inspection item display separation for buildings with input-output recipe "pairs"
• Additional infoline variations now combine correctly
• Goal display entries now show icons instead of text; each condition has its own tooltip with infolines
• Many goals now also include intermediate items, mostly for clarity
• Add custom icon for Fisherman's Hut
• Season entries in Micropedia now show their bonuses
• Add buttons to quickly set all values in item global proportions distribution panel
• Q key now acts as a pipette/selection tool (previously Shift-click)
• Patch note window is now minimized by default only showing latest patch name and current version (main menu no longer shows version text)
• Main menu background is now animated - layered landscape parallax follows the mouse white clouds scroll past
• Update engine and internals
• Add missing worker counter to top HUD tradesmen overview tooltip
Fixes
• Fix optimized internal periodic updates not using the correct timer, resulting in tiles changing very slowly (tiles would not decay in winter at all)
• Fix certain animal shadow sprites
• Building with stock that aren't actively consumed showing "0 sec" remaining instead of "not being consumed"
• Fix clicking food HUD top section twice causing an internal error
• Fix weather effects playing in background even with background sound disabled
• Fix error when back/forward-navigating tutorial entries in Micropedia
• Fix rare error when UI state changes at the same time as mouseover tile during previewing road build ghosts paths
• Fix error when storage building "collects" dropped but reserved items that aren't properly relinquished
• Fix units with queued or in-processing paths in loaded games not processing them
• Fix rare error when selected building is destroyed but the input mode relies on it
• Fix broken save upload
Balancing
• Domestic animals (i.e. Livestock) now live 50% longer in the last "growth stage"