This week was more focused on a couple of large things rather than some smaller stuff. If you want to skip to the end there is a change log below. The first and probably biggest thing is the save system. I won’t go into too much detail, but essentially Verdant Village was using a built-in save system behavior up until now. As some people have experienced sometimes you would open up the game, look for your saves, and find them all gone with no rhyme or reason. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure why this was happening myself. It also seems that the devs of the engine don’t care to address it. It could have to do with asynchronous data management, but that seems unlikely. The point is that this is a bug that is unforgivable, and something that can’t be allowed in an incomplete product, let alone a finished one.

As a result, I built a new save engine. This one is custom made and avoids using both the built-in functionality that was utilized prior and it avoids asynchronous data. On the user end you shouldn’t notice any difference. I have also made the system so that it should pick up your old save and cleanly transfer you to the new system. I tested this with my own saves and a few friends and didn’t have any issues. Fingers crossed that this holds true for everyone else.

Aside from backend systems the other big thing this week was alchemy. If you’ve played the game for a while you probably noticed that you need dye for some stuff but couldn’t get it. This week I looked to rectify that in my attempts to get anything referenced in the game, actually into the game. Basic alchemy is available to the player. The only recipes you can learn at the moment are the dye recipes however. Alchemy is planned to be a pretty large system, but I have a lot of other stuff to work in so your alchemical repertoire will probably grow slowly for now.

Other than that, not too much happened this week. As you might guess remaking a save system and another core system took a fair amount of time. Mattias now has all his schedules and Quent (one of the alchemist characters) has been added to the game with one schedule, along with his home’s interior. There are also two quests one for Quent and then a resulting one from Alice.

I’ve been doing a bit of thinking this week and I think I’ll be moving on to smaller issues for now. There is a festival on Steam coming up and I’d like for this game to be as polished as possible. For the time being I think I’ll be focusing on fixing bugs, polishing systems and balancing for the next two weeks. There’s plenty of stuff that could use another pass, lots of things missing sound or not having complete sprites, etc. There may be little additions made, but I probably won’t be doing anything crazy in the foreseeable future. I think that is it for now though, hopefully you all don’t have any issues with the patch.

Verdant Village V0.2.4 Full Changelog

-Remade save system to replace the old one that would occasionally drop saves. This should not affect your current saves.

-Fixed a bug with the lighting engine that occurred on the first day of play.

-Made it possible to walk on the dock again.

-Fixed a visual glitch with the dock, as well as a glitch that displaced it in winter.

-Added remaining schedules for Mattias.

-Added Quent to the game.

-Tree transparency now works when on your horse.

-Modified tree transparency to lower down to 40% instead of 60%, also heavily modified exactly where a tree will start to become transparent relative to the player.

-Fixed a few bugs with trees not setting to the proper seasonal version and having strange visual glitches when being chopped down.

-Fixed trees in town so that they will also utilize the transparency engine.

-Modified the “Smithing” section of the daily recap to “Alchemy”, smithing wasn’t in use anyhow.

-Added Alchemy to the game, talk to Quent to get started.