Weekly progress #46

Hello, dear Greenfeet friends! May the grass be soft beneath your feet!

This week was entirely dedicated to improving the game's readability. Although there is still much (really, a lot) to be done in this area, the game is slowly heading toward an acceptable level of quality. I would like to thank all the playtesters from the past few days who reported bugs, suggested improvements, and shared their enthusiasm and encouragement!

Three major updates are arriving this week:

The bottom menu has been reorganized. There are now subcategories for constructions, and the "cancel" and "remove" actions have been grouped together. This marks the third and (hopefully) final iteration before the demo release.

The job evaluator, which checks task feasibility, has been improved. Previously, a task could be marked in orange with a warning if a greenfeet couldn't complete it, which was potentially misleading. Now, the icon and text are even more visible, and the alert only triggers if absolutely no greenfeet can carry out the task.

The weekly planner has been replaced with a daily planner. This was a tough decision but should feel more familiar to fans of this genre. One positive outcome is that the planner view is now directly displayed in a greenfeet's overview, allowing players to see everything at a glance.

Next week will also focus on improving the game's readability. Some tasks couldn't be completed this week, and I had planned other major improvements for a second phase. One complex topic to address is the crafting interfaces, as well as crafting itself—but more on that next week!

As usual, you can find the full details of the updates in the patch notes below.

Thank you for reading this post, and have a great week, everyone!

Version 0.1.d1bb7f8c

Additions

• Added: Arrows that lead to the current selection if it is offscreen.
• Added: Name of the zones the greenfeet use as house in their preview.
• Added: Cause of death in the notification.
• Added: Job evaluator that analyzes undoable jobs and explains why.
• Added: Greenfeet's schedule in the greenfeet overview.

Changes

• Changed: The bottom menu has been reworked to be more hierarchical.
• Changed: The remove action is now grouped with the cancel action.
• Changed: It is now possible to remove floor, walls and roofs separately.
• Changed: Improved the look of item tags in tooltip and descriptions.
• Changed: Improved the look of progress bars, adding borders, glow and blink animation.
• Changed: Modernized the job preview panel to match other preview panels.
• Changed: Replaced weekly schedule by a uniform schedule.

Fixes

• Fixed: Fixed greenfeet hair's lightmap wrongly offseted.
• Fixed: Closing the preview panel keeping the selection active.
• Fixed: Task restrictions being ignored.
• Fixed: Task restrictions "bleeding" into other zones. A greenfeet allowed to do task X in zone A could do task X in zone B.