Time for another update. It’s been an interesting week here, having never launched something on a site like Itch its been a new experience. Feedback for Verdant Village thus far has been fairly positive with the expected reports of smaller bugs and such. Overall, I’d say I’m happy with the way things are going. The main focus now is to improve and expand on what already exists.

While I wanted to throw more content at the game this week, I was somewhat held back due to patching. More specifically, I was held up by the creation of a patching system. The initial launch had no such feature included because there was no need. Also, I was more concerned about the launch than writing code for future development, perhaps not my best idea.

Which brings us to this week’s release. There is now a patching system in play for Verdant Village. It should be capable of adding new zones, NPCs, quests, and other data into the game. In addition, it should be capable of altering any pre-existing data. What this basically means is if you’ve already got a save you shouldn’t have to start over just to see a new patch. Something that I’d say is rather important in a game like this since progress can take a while. If you load up a save that is registered under a previous version of the game the patching system will automatically bring you up to date when you load the save.

Aside from that I did manage to accomplish a few other things. There will be a full change list below but I’ll mention the larger stuff here in brief. First, the castle has been modified greatly, picture below. I basically rebuilt it from the ground up after looking at the design and deeming it terrible. I’ve also got plans to expand it a bit with a few other rooms later on, because its my opinion that a castle should feel appropriately large, and it will give me room to hide secrets and things eventually.

Second, another zone has been added to the game which at least from a programming perspective is dubbed “the ravine”. Unfortunately, while the zone is complete it is inaccessible at the moment. I’m missing a rather crucial sprite for the zone that connects to it so for the moment you won’t be able to reach it in game. With any luck my artist will have that done this following week and I can connect the zone to the game world.

Third, is something that isn’t extremely important but helps with the atmosphere of the game a bit. All the NPCs who exist at the moment now have schedules for rainy days and will act accordingly when it rains.

Lastly, another thing that took a chunk of my time was something that happens behind the scenes as well. NPCs that move around the map will occasionally interact with certain objects (sitting in chairs, sleeping in bed, etc). These objects were previously identified for the NPC by a static ID that is given to them upon their creation.

This presents a problem because the game world is no longer static. Various people have already played, created saves, and (hopefully) interacted with the world. As a result, they have added and destroyed objects and consequentially changed the IDs that objects have. With this in mind I can no longer guarantee what ID an object will have when someone turns on the game and loads their save. Since I can’t guarantee the ID, I can’t reference it directly in the code.

As a result, a new system has been made that dynamically assigns an ID to any object an NPC could potentially interact with upon its creation. This ID is then linked to a permanent key that can be referenced easily. This way regardless of what a player has done during their playtime any NPC will always be able to correctly reference the object it needs.

If you survived all that technical jargon, I’ll tell you what that means for you as a player. Basically, you hopefully won’t witness NPCs teleporting around the world or perhaps sitting on thin air somewhere.

There’s still plenty to do obviously, but I appreciate the feedback I’ve gotten and the interest anyone has taken. I think I said this before but I’ve been working on this game for a significant period of time now so it makes me happy to know some people out there are having fun with it. Hopefully next week there will be something more substantial to show off. In other related news one of the fans was kind enough to make a wiki for the game. I’ll likely be trying to put some time into it this weekend to spruce things up, but if making wiki pages is your things feel free to help out, or just see what’s going on, link below.

https://verdant-village.fandom.com/wiki/Verdant_Village_Wiki

FULL PATCH NOTES (V0.11)

-Added the ravine zone to the game (currently inaccessible)

-Recreated the castle interior

-Added Rain schedules for each NPC in the game

-Created a patching system to handle this and all future patches without loss of player save data

-Fixed a bug that allowed entry into the house in the north eastern corner of Amberglen

-Fixed a bug that allowed entry into the tower below the castle

-Fixed a slight misalignment of a house and door in Amberglen that caused a small visual glitch

-Fixed a small issue with zone dimensions that caused a few objects in the upper rooms of the inn to not load

-Altered pathfinding algorithm to work with patched versions of the game and volatile identifiers

-Fixed a bug with trees that regrow outside of your farm, where if the player were to chop down a tree, then dig up the tree that regrew there prior to it gaining a trunk, it would never grow again.

-Fixed bugged dialogue with the forge repair quest where turning it in would freeze your game

-Fixed a bug where you could use the forge prior to repairing it despite its appearance

-Fixed a visual glitch where the player could appear below the staircase leading to the second floor of the inn.

-Fixed a visual glitch where the steps at the entrance to the swamp wouldn’t alter their appearance in winter.

-Added a link behind the itch icon on the start screen (it did nothing previously)

-Reduced the amount of blue tint the game’s lighting system throws in the evening as it was somewhat heavy.