Weekly progress #48 - Happy new year!

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

I hope you had a wonderful holiday season with those who are dear to you! And I also wish you all the best for this year, 2025!

I took advantage of the Christmas holidays to spend time with my family, my partner, and my children, which was truly refreshing! Christmas was quite enjoyable as it brought me a lot of chocolate, a USB MIDI keyboard for creating beautiful music for the game, and an amazing wooden version of Greenfeet Haven's blue rabbit (a big thanks to my sister Jade)!

I couldn't resist working a little between Christmas and New Year, and I got back into my usual rhythm starting Monday. So, there have been some updates in this week's build. As explained in a previous weekly update, I spent some time studying the Wave Function Collapse technology, which is a probabilistic algorithm (non-generative AI) used to generate multi-dimensional grids based on provided examples. It was fascinating, but unfortunately, I don't think I'll have the time to integrate it into Greenfeet Haven. While there's a clear potential, the cost/benefit balance wasn't favorable given the priorities: I need to have a demo ready by mid-February. Maybe in a future update, then.

With that in mind, I returned to working on the exploration aspect of the game, manually implementing some random algorithms to generate points of interest. The goal is to make the map less uniform and enhance the sense of discovery when exploring. Here's an example of a clay deposit:

The most observant among you will notice that there are now resource deposits. These are fixed elements that can be harvested using the "Gather" order or good old zone automation.

A significant amount of work has also been done on animations to make the visuals more cohesive. All transitions to chairs or beds are now animated, as are objects being picked up.

There are plenty of other little details for you to discover on your own by launching the alpha version of the game (ping me on Discord for access), or by browsing the full patch notes below.

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

Version 0.1.036496d6

Added

• Added: Passive notification for problematic jobs.
• Added: Name display under a greenfeet.
• Added: Animations for sitting and lying in bed.
• Added: Exploration preparation phase. Greenfeet will now walk to the region to explore.
• Added: New gatherable non-vegetal entities like clay piles and big rocks.

Changes

• Changed: New grabbing and dropping animations.
• Changed: Exploration settings are now shared to all sectors.
• Changed: Tools are now consumed the same way food is when exploration starts.
• Changed: Explorable sectors reduced to the area available for the upcoming demo.
• Changed: Simpler inventory display as base work for a future major improvement.

Fixes

• Fixed: Preview shadow being rendered if the selected entity is destroyed.
• Fixed: Passive notifications preventing from clicking the menu.
• Fixed: Health bar having the wrong offset.
• Fixed: Savegame taking a lot of disk space.
• Fixed: Plants damage animation not triggering.
• Fixed: Broken lights after loading a save.
• Fixed: Action placeholder blinking when drawing a selection box.