Quite a bit to get to this week, both inside and outside of the game. First things first, if you are reading this it’s likely you heard about Verdant Village via PC Gamer. In case any of the writers there are reading this I just wanted to give another quick shout out and thanks for spotlighting the game. That sort of thing does wonders for an indie dev. So, thanks to them, and Tom Sykes specifically as he wrote the article. Anyway, onto business. As usual much of my work this week was bug fixing as expected. That stuff will be listed in depth down below. If a bug you reported hasn’t been addressed yet I apologize, but I’ll do my best to get to it soon. With the sudden increase in community activity this week I feel bad not getting around to everything quickly, but I promise I’ll get to everything eventually.

In any case I usually dedicate this part of the log to actual things people might care about. Bug fixes are nice, but ultimately kind of boring. This week I got paths and walls in place in the game. Some of you noticed that they were available to order already (which was a mistake on my end) but if you tried placing them nothing would happen. That is no longer the case. So, feel free to scatter those around your farm. They may need some tuning in terms of how much they cost to make so let me know on that.

Other than paths and walls I added custom key bindings. I don’t remember the username, but someone mentioned that they were left-handed thus making it hard to play with the normal setup. Being right-handed I never even considered that so I bumped it up on my list of things to do. If you look under settings you can see a key bindings button. You’ll know it when you see it because my artist is currently working on other things so I had to use my own (meager) art skills to create it. While the related UI may look a little ugly it should all function accordingly. Key binds are saved on a per save basis so if two people are playing different saves on the same computer they should be able to set their bindings separately.

This leads into something else. Along with custom key binds I made an option to use keys instead of the left and right mouse buttons. Now before anyone requesting this gets too excited there is a caveat and a pretty major one at that. As the game was designed to use a mouse all UI, things like stores, your inventory, chests, etc all still require the use of a mouse. I will be getting around to this, but in order to make the UI work with just a keyboard there is going to have to be some major code added. So just bear this stuff in mind if you decide to go this route. Also, the keys that handle mouse actions are bound to “J” and “K” by default but can be rebound.

Aside from this there is something I did today that might be noticed by some, but most likely not. I redid the movement engine for the player both while walking and while on a horse. Without going into crazy detail, the old system was performing in odd ways on occasion so this will hopefully rectify that. I don’t expect there is any way to get your character stuck, but if you try hard enough you might be able to make the wrong animation play. I tested as much as I could, but if you notice something weird let me know. Another small thing that has been requested. The signs outside of shops (specifically the general store, carpenter, and livestock store) can now be interacted with to see the operating hours. This will eventually be true of other buildings like the blacksmith and the inn, but I need my artist to modify the buildings to have signs first, so that will come soon, promise.

Last thing before the change list. I don’t expect this to affect anyone but I’ll mention it in case. I made a change to the game today where it will now load all sprites in the game into memory when you start. To explain briefly in order for Construct 3 to display a sprite in the game it first has to be loaded into memory. If you do not have a system like this then the game will load the sprite into memory only when the game has to create said sprite. What this means from a user perspective is if the game has to load a large sprite, say your inventory screen, the game might hitch for a second while it pulls the image into memory. With this new system the game preloads everything whether it needs it at the moment or not. So, if any of you have seen hitching in the game this should get rid of that. The trade off is that the game is constantly using more RAM since everything is always loaded. However, like I said I don’t think this will affect anyone. Before the game was using about 100MB for images at any given time. After this change it sits at around 180MB. Ah, the benefits of pixel art.

One other thing, this is likely the first time most of you will patch the game. Your save should carry over, but if you encounter any loss of data please let me know and I’ll do what I can to get the issue taken care of.

Another thing I should mention and I’ll tweet about this as it’s going to happen. I was talked to do a podcast by some guys from “Indiehub”. I’m not exactly sure what they’re going to ask me but if you want to listen to be babble about Verdant Village for a while it will be streamed on Sunday. Like I said I’ll tweet before anything goes live. Below is their youtube link if you are interested.

Indiehub: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCn6-F1COquKotfx27w7p_dg

Last, last thing. I gave a shoutout to PC Gamer at the start of this, but I also wanted to say something to all of you. As a guy who looks at game development as a sort of dream job, I’m extremely pleased with how things are going in terms of the community. So, I just wanted to give a quick thanks to everyone who’s been playing, talking in discord, reading these logs, reporting bugs, liking on twitter or whatever. I appreciate you all more than you know, and I hope I can make this game into something you’ll love. Alright enough with the sappy stuff onto the changelog!

Twitter: https://twitter.com/ExodusSoftware

Discord: https://discordapp.com/invite/TJ7FtQ3

Verdant Village 0.15 Changelog

-Added placeable paths to the game

-Added placeable walls to the game

-Custom Keybinds can now be set from settings (Art for this is not final also see above about using the keybinds instead of mouse buttons)

-Added storefront operating hours to the signs outside the carpenter, general store, and livestock store, other stores will also get this treatment when I get some art made

-Redid the player’s normal and mounted movement, shouldn’t notice any changes on the player end

-Fixed a bug where poultry was showing as fish fillets in shop menus

-Fixed a bug where raindrops and snowflakes may not have disappeared completely when the weather normalized

-Fixed a bug where the rain SFX may not had stopped after the rain did

-Fixed an issue where the old chapel (west of the lake) wouldn’t Z order properly and would appear on top of the player at times

-Fixed a slight UI visual glitch when you placed a building on your farm

-Changed the spelling of “Croppie” to “Crappie” because I don’t know how to spell

-Fixed a bug where if you went to delete a building there would be no indication of the building you were hovering

-Fixed a small visual glitch when moving between areas on your horse

-Fixed a visual glitch with the fences near the Narbell Farm on the plains

-Fixed a bug where the pond near the player’s forge would let the player catch saltwater fish

-Added unfinished area checks to the old chapel to avoid confusion on if you can enter or not

-Fixed a bug that allowed the player to move their character while sleeping

-Fixed a bug that allowed you to chop down palm trees

-Fixed a but that would restrict access to some buildings after a patch

-Fixed a bug that made sweet dough require sweet dough as an ingredient to make it. It now requires regular dough

-Redid pinning behaviors on all systems in the engine (behind the scenes, should see any change from a player perspective)

-Fixed a bug where if you dropped a quest that you had acquired from a signpost (such as the forge repair quest) and then went to talk to the NPC you would have turned it into (Sven) the NPC would display the quest in their quest section. Clicking this would break the dialogue engine

-Changed all drinks to no longer require heat to create, thought about it, doesn’t really make sense

-Fixed a bug in the mines that would allow some objects to not reset their state in certain cases, causing instances of objects that looked like they should be on the second or third tier of the mines when the player was only on the first tier

-Fixed a bug where catalog recipes you had unlocked wouldn’t transfer between patches (this should fix anyone’s broken save if they patch up)

-Setup trees so that if you chop them down and they fall in the water the wood will now be relocated to the stump of the tree

-Fixed a bug that would allow your fishing bobber to overlap with the edge of the water for a strange visual

-Added a short tutorial prompt for the carpenter mallet

-Fixed a bug that could disable player movement if you entered and exited a building too quickly

-Fixed a small bug with lighting in the coop interior

-Altered shovel sprites in the mines to be placed more appropriately, also altered the collision mesh around them to make sense.

-Added a fall, winter and rain schedule for Ben (prior to this he simply used his spring schedule in those seasons so no worries if you are already in that season)

-Added two braziers in the top floor of the mines to hopefully illuminate the relevant things in there more

-Added an interaction to the grave on the Narbell Farm

-Fixed a bug with pickups hovering left to right erratically in special circumstances when they appeared

-Fixed the spelling of the crop “Chili” was previously “Chile” because I’m dumb

-Fixed a spelling error in Ben’s opening dialogue (here to her I believe)

-Fixed a bug where place-able stone walls would require wood to order them

-Fixed a bug that allowed you to right click items into a pre-existing stack in your chest which would in turn let you ignore the stack limit of that object, and ultimately break the stack causing it to revert to 1 of the item

-Fixed a spelling error on one of the grave interactions

-Fixed a bug where deleting decorative objects in your house such as a table when it had a small item on top of it, would allow the small item to remain and reappear in the next patch

-Fixed a bug where you could harvest fruit from the orchard on the Narbell Farm

-Fixed a bug where you could still move the player while looking at animal statuses in your coops or barns

-Made the “C” button (or menu button if you change the binding) a universal close button, use it to close shop windows, inventories, conversations, whatever

-Fixed a bug with Remi standing behind a bookshelf like some sort of scary girl from a horror movie

-Fixed a bug where if you pressed movement keys in conjunction with using a tool you could permanently disable the player making you unable to use a tool ever again

-Fixed some collisions with rocks in the foothills area

-Added a system to prevent the player from eating when they have full stamina

-Changed a few quest summaries to be more informative

-Altered the bag quest from Lylah to require dark wood instead of light wood for some variety

-Made a change to the audio engine that will prevent loaded saves from jumping half way into a song that was playing when the game saved (should be less jarring)

-Created a preload system to hopefully reduce stuttering when opening menus and interactive with objects for the first time in a session. This may result in ever so slightly longer initial load times, but most likely not