This week was a bit different in terms of development. A lot of the normal stuff happened, but at the same time I took the first steps towards Steam this week. As some of you may know Valve is bringing back something called the Steam Games Festival this year. In short it seems to be a festival to feature any game coming out in the next year. It also seems to be a replacement for E3 since that was cancelled. In any case, I’ve registered Verdant Village for the festival. In order to do that I’ve had to compile a Steam page as well as a trailer, which I thankfully have a friend to help with. That has taken up some of my week meaning a little less work on the game.

Today was the deadline for submitting, as the actual festival gets closer I’m sure I’ll mention things again. This is basically just to put a demo out onto Steam and with any luck generate some buzz. Eventually there will be an actual release onto Steam that, at the moment at least, I’m guessing will be around the start of July. This release would be early access. Whether or not it happens will entirely depend on the state the game is in at that point. If I find that it still needs work, I’ll delay the early access version. On to more interesting things. There was some stuff that got done this week. As usual I’ll list some bigger things up here and then have a full list below. First off, something that I don’t think effected a lot of people, but I knew hit me once or twice. There was a bug where you could go to load your save game and find the saves screen empty as if you’d never played before. I can’t say for certain if this was the cause, but there was a race condition in the game’s code when you started it. Because of this, if your computer wasn’t quick enough, it may fail to load the relevant data before moving on which would cause saves to not appear. The game now waits until all data is loaded before proceeding. Most likely there won’t be any visual change due to this.

One thing that I should mention before anything else. On this patch archeology progress is being reset. I’m sorry about that, but there was a corruption in the data that I was only made privy to at the start of this week. The way that the data got corrupted made it irrecoverable unfortunately. If you unlocked archeology you will still have it unlocked. However, you will have to find an assemble any keystones again. In the hopes of making this a bit easier if you finished the quest to unlock archeology a chest should spawn near Ethan’s tent at the digsite full of artifact fragments. Sorry it’s on the opposite end of the map, but I wanted a memorable place to put it that wasn’t on your farm since I can’t be sure of where people have placed other things. Apologies for that.

NPC patching has also been looked over. If you’ve been playing Verdant Village for a few weeks you might have seen me say that NPCs will be acting strangely the first day after a patch. This was due to how new NPCs needed to be added into the game. I have gone through and made a more efficient system for this so that no NPCs should be affected when a new one is added to the game. This patch will obviously be the first widespread test of this so cross your fingers.

On the subject of NPCs Alice has been added to the game. She doesn’t have all of her schedules yet but she is there. Her profession is a tailor. This, as you might guess, opens up some things for the player. She has three quests available at the moment, but I’ll let you figure that stuff out yourself. On the same note Simeon now has another quest available so you can renovate your house a bit more. Aside from that I added a set of unique fish to the swamp. They don’t change with the season but it should at least provide some variety for that area. On a similar note there is also a special set of forage objects for winter. The normal plants always seemed a bit off to me so I added these in. The only thing that holds over through winter are spice plants.

Last thing, there was a bug that some people have seen with trees, where basically trees would instantly grow after a patch. Despite looking fully grown they could not be chopped down, instead they had to be dug up like seeds. While I’m not sure if this was the cause there was something else going on with trees. Normally, a tree will not grow if it is too close to another tree. There has to be at least 2 tiles free in every direction from the tree in order for it to grow. There were two bugs here, first after a patch this setting would go out the window and any trees that were already planted would grow regardless. The second was that this was in effect for all trees, not just the ones on your farm. Which meant many areas wouldn’t regrow their trees. Both of these have been fixed. This involved some pretty hefty tampering with the tree growth system. Everything seems stable in both old saves and current ones but I wanted to make people aware incase trees spontaneously combust. I suppose we will also see if this factors into trees instantly growing. There is some other stuff as well but I’ll list it below, I think that’s most of the major things and this is already pretty long. Hope you all have fun.

Verdant Village Full Changelog Version 2.2

-Made a minor modification to prevent a race condition that may have caused saves to be hidden from the load screen.

-Altered NPC patching to hopefully prevent further complications when patching in new NPCs.

-Added Alice to the game (she does not have all of her schedules however).

-Updated Tree Tap and Sap sprites.

-Fixed livestock status screen misspelling.

-Added looms and cloth crafting to the game.

-Added three quests for Alice.

-Added silk farms to the game.

-Archeology has been reset due to a bug in the data recording, you’ll have to regather all artifacts. If you have gained the archeology skill you will be given a small chest near Ethan’s tent at the digsite containing 200 of every artifact fragment to hopefully alleviate the pain of this.

-Added one quest for Simeon.

-Added unique fish to the swamp.

-Fixed a bug where Ethan (or anyone else) would be anti-social once they sat in a booth at the bar.

-Fixed a bug with the broken doors in your home opening and close like they were possessed.

-Fixed a bug related to closing chests not toggling a particular bool which could result in any number of UI oddities and breaks later on.

-Fixed a bug where you could infinitely milk baby cows.

-Fixed a slight alignment bug with moving wells.

-Altered collision masks slightly on tilled land to allow for buildings to be placed immediately next to them.

-Fixed a bug where small pottery would not z order properly.

-Fixed a bug where it would still snow inside buildings. This should also remedy some oddities with how certain ambient sounds play based on being inside or outside.

-Fixed a bug where tilled ground that was watered at the end of a month would appear watered on the first day of the new month despite not actually registering as watered.

-Went on an exciting escapade through the tree growth code and have hopefully sured up issues such as trees outside your farm not regrowing, trees on your farm regrowing despite being in close proximity to other trees, and trees instantly growing completely yet still having the interactions of a newly planted seed. As with many things there is also the chance that, despite my testing, trees will now spontaneously combust due to my tampering with the code, only time will tell.

-Fixed a bug where some decorative objects would create the wrong sprite when trying to pick them up with a full inventory.

-Altered path placement code to allow you to place paths under buildings as there were some annoying collisions built into things.

-Added a specific set of forage objects for winter to match the season. These will only grow in winter and will disappear once the season is over.

-Added signs to tell the hours of shops to all shops in town.