Hello, dear Greenfeet friends! May the grass be soft beneath your feet!
Work has resumed at a normal pace this week! A significant change has been made to the game to address three major game design issues, all related to the crafting system. Until now, experimentation took place directly in workshops: you simply selected ingredients, scheduled a crafting attempt, and waited for a Greenfeet to handle it. Playtests revealed the first two issues with this approach:
- The gap between the action and the result was too large. Most of the time, you would schedule a crafting attempt and then move on to something else. By the time a Greenfeet performed the action, the result would come back as a notification, but you were already "mentally elsewhere" by then.
- There was always a temptation to brute-force the system by testing all possible combinations. This was even more likely since it was possible to queue up multiple crafting attempts.
Lastly, the third issue had been lingering in my backlog for some time:
- Structures and furniture elements were not subjected to the same discovery system as objects.
If I'm speaking about these issues in the past tense, it's because I’m hopeful that today's update offers a definitive solution. The discovery-through-experimentation system has been moved to a dedicated space called the Discovery Bench. This is an interface that lists all known objects and allows players to test combinations with instant results! If successful, the item is not crafted, but its blueprint is added to the workshops capable of producing it. This should resolve the first issue regarding the timing of actions and consequences.
Structures and furniture elements are now also part of the Discovery Bench system, addressing issue #3 regarding consistency. Lastly, the Discovery Bench interface includes a hint system that activates when an incorrect recipe is submitted. Using a visual code, it indicates which elements are correctly placed, unnecessary, or misplaced. I hope this system will make brute-forcing less appealing, thereby solving issue #2!
There are also a host of improvements and bug fixes that you can find detailed in the patch notes at the end of this post!
That's a wrap for this week. Thank you for reading!
Version 0.1.9dc7809a
Added
- Added: Greenfeet will now attempt to recover from obstacles and inconsistencies in paths.
Changes
- Changed: New progression system with the Discovery bench windows.
- Changed: The Encyclopedia has been temporarily disabled.
- Changed: Added hierarchical display to the inventory.
- Changed: Greenfeet now occupies a whole tile.
Fixes
- Fixed: Fixed food not showing in the inventory screen.
- Fixed: Scroll accumulated while hovering an UI.
- Fixed: Trees not appearing while loading game.
- Fixed: Fixed terrain variation visible above artificial floors.
- Fixed: Fixed another batch of depths issues.
- Fixed: Fixed altered tiles being slightly less crossable than others.
- Fixed: Broken links between furniture after loading a save.
- Fixed: Recovering from interrupted animations when the game is loaded.
- Fixed: Wrong visual offsets for an item grabbed from storage.
- Fixed: "Strip" and "Unroof" actions not applicable to tiles without walls.
- Fixed: "Strip" and "Unroof" actions altering terrains and structures.
- Fixed: Starving greenfeet stopping eating to go eat another food.
- Fixed: Activities reservations not cleared when the activity is done.
- Fixed: Mushrooms not being clickable and not despawning when harvested.
Known issues:
- Issue: The crafting tutorial is broken and will be patched in the update next week.
PS: don't forget you can wishlist Greenfeet Haven on Steam, so you don't miss when it's out!