This week was a little slow if I’m being honest. I spent about a day and a half trying to get fence gates to work. I’m honestly not sure if I’m just dumb or if the system needs a redo. Due to the complications that arose gates were not added this week. In truth some modification to the art may be necessary in order to make them work, but one day we’ll have gates.

As for other things it was some bug fixing and some other smaller systems that made it in. First, Alice now has all her schedules so she should function differently based on the season and weather. Besides her I’ve also added another NPC to the game, his name is Mattias. Just like Alice last week he only has one schedule at the moment.

Mattias relates to something that will actually affect everyone. He will be related to a lot of the fishing stuff in the game. Up until now the player has started with a fishing rod. This is no longer the case. You will now have to complete a quest from Mattias to get the fishing rod. Also, while it will probably be a bit annoying for some of you, your fishing rod has been taken away. So regardless of how long you’ve been playing you’ll have to complete his quest in order to get it back. This is mostly just so you don’t have two since tools are indestructible and therefore, you’d be stuck with the duplicate. Mattias’ house is the one north of the general store, near the pond in town if you are looking for him.

Aside from NPCs the dock below your house got a rework. I scrolled past it on the map while doing something else and realized it was pretty lazily made. Also, the shape of the area wasn’t conducive to future things. As for actual systems I’ve added flowers to the game. As in flowers you can plant on your farm. They are mostly for decoration but you can make a small profit off them. That might change later but we’ll see. At the moment all flowers grow in all seasons and they survive winter. I was debating about some of this stuff to myself this week. These sorts of things may change but for now this is how they are. Another note, you need to water flowers until they are fully grown but then they can be left alone. All flowers are available from Lylah for now, I think eventually I’d like to move them to a different store though since her’s has tons of stuff already.

The other notable system is transparency to trees. This system will probably be expanded in the future. I pretty much put it together today so it likely needs to fine tuning but as far as I can tell it works. I didn’t see any significant increase in CPU usage increases, however if you see significantly worse performance I’d like to know.

Everything else that happened this week was bug fix related. There weren’t too many but the most important ones are that Simeon should not disappear anymore. There was some issues with him due to silk farms in the last patch. Patching in new buildings is a bit strange but it should be stable now. The other important fix is I hope, fingers crossed, that I’ve fixed the issue where trees instantly grow post patch. Everything else I’ll list in the changelog below.

Verdant Village V0.2.3 Full Changelog

-Added all schedules for Alice.

-Fixed the spelling on “Omelet” because even though google seems to think it is “Omlet” it is actually not, or maybe it is, apparently no one really agrees on the spelling or something but I’m calling them “Omelet” and no one can stop me.

-Fixed the issue with Simeon not appearing anywhere in town for a few days post patch.

-Added transparency system to the game, currently this needs some fine tuning. It only applies to trees at the moment but should be expanded out to at least buildings in the future. I don’t expect any performance hits from this but if you experience them inform me.

-Believe I finally fixed the bug where trees grow completely after a patch. From the looks of it, during the duplication of animations I forgot to set animation speed to 0, thus preventing the animation from playing. Excuse me while I go tear my hair out, I need a haircut anyway.

-Fixed a bug where looms wouldn’t abide by sped up time, as in you slept a loom would not gain progress accordingly. This change was fairly fundamental to how looms worked, if you had a loom pre patch that was spinning you may have to pick up and place the loom again in order for it to work properly.

-Flowers have been added to the game, for now they will grow in any season and don’t ever wither based on the season, this may change in the future.

-Clarified haggler perk to mention that you have to sell items in stores to receive the benefit.

-Added Mattias’ house.

-Redid the dock area below your farm to make it less boring.

-Fixed starting cutscenes and re-enabled them.

-Added Mattias to the game, he only has a spring schedule at the moment.

-Added a quest for Mattias to get the fishing rod. For anyone who has been playing prior to this your fishing rod has been taken away. You can do the quest for Mattias to get it back.

-While I still don’t really know what caused it, I hopefully fixed the recipe glitches with omelets and chocolate cake.

-Should have fixed the bugs regarding the new room and your player/objects you place disappearing under the back walls.