This week, as stated previously, I dug into bug fixing, polishing, and altering the game to be a more ideal product. There are a lot of things that have sort of been swept under the rug or ignored while I was trying to implement core content. With the Steam festival coming up I decided that it was time to address this stuff in a more serious manner. While the game is far from done, I think the amount of content within it is enough to keep people who want to play occupied for a little while. That hopefully gives me some breathing room to address smaller issues and concerns. Also speaking of the Steam festival I got an email today saying that it was moved back to the 16th of June. The game is visible on Steam but not for sale yet, if you’d like to wishlist it or just check out the Steam page the link is below.

Shameless Plug Here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1236900/Verdant_Village/

This week was mostly bug fixing which I won’t go into too much detail about here. A full list of changes will be below as usual however. Aside from fixing bugs there were a few more overarching things to address. One system that probably saw the most change (at least from the user side) was the cooking system. Most food should now give far more stamina than it did before. I’ve also changed the stacking on several items to be more universal and provide for more food in your inventory. Food should now stack in sets of either 1, 5, or 10 depending on the object.

Other than that, the cooking menu, while it still needs a bit of a rework also shows how many of something you get when you cook it. Some items have also been changed to give more or less of that item. Many of these changes happened to recipes that aren’t in the game yet, (there are about 150 recipes but only like 25 are available right now I think) so there may not be tons of change visible to the player, but I can attest that I modified a lot of data.

Last thing with cooking is something I should have done a while ago. The sell prices of cooked food were a little all over the place. Mostly because I just set them to what I felt was appropriate (pro game dev skills right there). Cooked items now sell for the same amount as the ingredients used to make them. It may not seem immediately apparent if the item you made produces multiple items, like chocolate strawberries, but it should add up to be the same. In the future I’d like to have repeatable quests involving cooking, and I was thinking this week that it would also be cool to have some sort of system where you can sell food for about 10 to 15 percent more than its base price. Basically, make it possible to be a chef if you want. But that’s down the road.

The other major thing I did this week is started to recreate the GUI system. As some of you are probably aware there is a notorious bug where you open your inventory and you won’t be able to do anything or close it causing you to have to force close your game. This sort of change is aimed at fixing issues like that, as well as just making things a lot cleaner. I’ve been coding this game for about two and a half years, I think, I tend to forget. The point being I’ve learned a lot over the course of time. Systems that I made long ago are pretty rickety. I figure if I want to fix them, now is the time. This week I managed getting every UI homogenized. I’ve done testing on every UI and they all seem to work but be warned, there may be some odd behavior. It’s pretty hard to basically rip these systems out and replace them without losing any fidelity. With any luck though it will be a mostly painless and unseen process.

Next on the docket is to actually delve past that and redo some other major systems including, dialogue, inventory management (which is already making me sweat) and the description box system. There has also been a suggestion by one bright discord user on a new NPC system that would essentially make NPCs function algorithmically. In laymen’s terms that means they wouldn’t adhere to constant schedules, but instead do things throughout the day based on their likes and dislikes and basically act more human like, rather than robots on a set path. I can’t say for sure if I’ll go through with this idea as it is a massive undertaking, but I’m considering it. I have attempted something like this once before but couldn’t get it to operate. I am however a year older and smarter now, so maybe it’s more feasible.

Most other things this week are minor changes and additions that I’ll list below. In short, a few alterations to item data, some animations, some SFX, and a lot of bug fixes. Hope you all enjoy.

Verdant Village V0.2.5 Full Changelog

-Fixed a bug where post patch the player shadow would disappear under certain objects.

-Fixed a bug where green beans would not patch properly leaving an empty space.

-Fixed an issue where planted flowers would not patch properly.

-Chopping down a fruit tree will now yield one sapling of that type, essentially this allows you to move your trees if you want.

-Fixed a bug with Mattias phasing behind his cooking station.

-Fixed a bug where if you watered a wilted crop, you could then dig it up and the tile would become infinitely waterable for a day.

-Changed timing on seasonal change code. The game should no longer hitch at the end of the day recap when a season changes. There is now a screen with text that will be displayed while the changes occur.

-Fixed a bug with the “stack items” button in chests that basically would multiply items under certain circumstances.

-Most likely fixed a bug related to mounting and dismounting your horse while the game was at the end of the day, couldn’t actually replicate the issue however.

-Added all schedules for Quent.

-Significantly altered the amount of stamina gained from most foods.

-Altered the sell prices of all food that you cook. Sell prices are now equal to the cost of the ingredients put into them, bar any rounding done due to some recipes giving more than one object.

-Altered cooking UI slightly to show how many of an object you get after cooking it.

-Altered dismantling paths to hopefully weed out the last of the oddities that could occur.

-Made some alterations to rain code to make it more efficient.

-Fixed a bug with the keystone near the mines not actually unlocking anything, if you’ve dug this up already it will be remade.

-Fixed dialogue error with Ben’s introduction.

-Fixed a bug with the rain SFX duplicating in certain circumstances, this could have been the cause of an audio glitch. There may still be more things to cause this glitch, if you still run into the audio stuttering and clipping please report it.

-Fixed a bug with doors where they would open and close repeatedly if you stood in front of them. 2Spooky4Me.

-Fixed some dialogue for Elise when she is at the inn.

-Adjusted default audio levels to be slightly louder. Basically, the loudest sound setting should now be a little bit louder.

-Altered the broken staircase quest to only require 15 iron bars instead of 20, because I’m not that much of a sadist nowadays.

-Recalibrated gem nodes slightly to make them easier to break.

-Fixed a bug where trees that were transparent when you moved between rooms would get stuck that way.

-Fixed signpost text displays not aligning properly.

-Changed forage object generation on the first day of play to generate more.

-Moved a mushroom spawn point as it led you to a place where you could inadvertently get blocked in by Quent, bully that he is.

-Fixed a bug with animal naming UI still allowing interaction with the items behind the prompt.

-Fixed a bug related to viewing the status of a barn or coop with no livestock living in it, chart would display dummy information.

-Rebuilt all UI menu opening and closing infrastructure, this shouldn’t have a visible change, but the code should now be more manageable which will hopefully allow me to figure out any bugs related to people getting stuck in their inventories. I should also have less trouble expanding on these systems now.

-Fixed an issue with the inventory UI in the oven UI don’t lining up properly,

-Fixed a bug that would occur when shift clicking (specifying an amount) an object that was in a chest and grabbing the full stack. This could cause the object to turn into a different object.

-Fixed a bug where you could not water crops with a repeating yield such as strawberries once you had harvested from them once.

-Added SFX to attunement stone.

-Added a schedule for Remi to now have her fruit stand run out of her house when it rains on the days she is supposed to come to town.

-Changed bronze ingot recipe to only require 3 copper instead of 5.

-Modified shoreline collisions on the beach to make fishing easier.

-Added tree tapping animation to the game.

-Fixed several animation glitches with fishing rod casting.

-Added an idle animation to fishing.

-Added animation for shearing sheep.

-Added animation milking cows and goats.

-Added a gold count under the clock.