Weekly progress #54

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

You might have noticed there was no blog post last week: I had to skip one to focus on a physical event I attended last Saturday in Toulouse. This was all thanks to Toulouse Game Dev, the local association I joined a few months ago. It was a fantastic event with a surprising number of attendees! My booth was busy from start to finish, and I received tons of valuable feedback about the game.

I took Monday and Tuesday off to recover from an intense week. Preparing a build to showcase and talking to people for eight hours straight was exhausting (but in a good way!). Now, I feel super motivated for the future.

Following feedback from many playtesters, I’ve shifted my priorities this week and will continue to do so next week. The discovery bench mechanic was well received but caused some confusion: many players assumed it was the main crafting system when its sole purpose is to unlock recipes. So in this week's playtest update there is a new discovery bench UI that makes it more obvious to the player that this is a "recipe discovery system".

I also noticed a flow issue where players could spend too much time in the discovery bench view. I’d like to strike a better balance, ensuring a natural rhythm between building the settlement and discovering new things.

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

Version 0.1.3a052d25

Additions

• Added: Ability to go back to main menu.
• Added: Clothes display in greenfeet equipment view.
• Added: Game over screen when all the greenfeet are dead.
• Added: Craftable torches.
• Added: Hard stone workshop that provides the "Strike" action.
• Added: Greenfeet will now move out items that block other jobs.

Changes

• Changed: Removed hover effect on unexplored areas and replaced it with a pointer cursor.
• Changed: Reduced spatialized sounds volume.
• Changed: Sharp stone recipe.
• Changed: Reworked discovery bench UI.
• Changed: Changed wording for some of the tutorial lines to be more explicit.
• Changed: Crafting during tutorial is now faster.

Fixes

• Fixed: Fixed discovery bench menu entry glowing for discovered items that have no crafting use.
• Fixed: Loading savegames crashing if snow is present in the current game.
• Fixed: Performance regression during snow storms.
• Fixed: Ambient music stacking multiple time when saving/loading.
• Fixed: Wrong rendering of tall grass when season changing from cold to warm.
• Fixed: Multiple issues in the region system causing ghost regions and ghosts jobs slowly killing the game.
• Fixed: Random issue causing the greenfeet to be invisible when the game starts.