Thought it was about time I did a proper news post for Verdant Village. As I just checked the last real content patch came out at the end of August. In case you weren’t aware I used to update on a weekly basis. I changed this, mostly based on how Steam works. It seems to want you to push large patches, not weekly builds to take advantage of marketing stuff. Aside from that, the export process takes an extremely long time, at least a few hours to get everything exported and pushed out (I’m looking at you Mac and Linux users, nah just kidding). Doing that on a weekly basis feels like a waste of time since I probably lose close to a half a day in the process.

Anyway, a lot has been going on in the meantime. If you pay attention to twitter you may have seen a few of these things already. In terms of additions there are already three new zones plus a house interior if you count that (I count that). More archeology digs have been scattered about, because of course they have.

There are some new items to place down for decoration, including boulders and bushes. Someone mentioned that a while ago and I agree with the idea, I think they can add some more organic decoration to the exterior of your farm.

Aside from that there are two new NPCs who have been added, one of whom has a shop. As well as a quest. That seems pretty meager, one quest and two NPCs, but I’ll explain in a bit (or a lot) more detail later. Aside from that, the fishing minigame has been updated. I think this one will suit the game better and hopefully be more comprehensible to all people. I’ve said it before, but the current fishing minigame seems to either come across as too easy or too hard for most people. With any luck this one will have a more balanced reception. If not, maybe I’ll finally give in and use the stock standard fishing game.

Next is something I’ve mentioned a bit before, but now it’s done. There is now a system in place that allows you to brew alcohol. To explain it in more detail you essentially pick one of 6 types of items. This will determine what kind of drink you are making, wine, beer, mead, etc. Then you get to add 5 other ingredients from a list of something around 120 or so I think.

Items that you add have two basic traits. The first is the effect the item gives, these effects range from gaining stamina or making you run faster, to resistances in the future battle system, extra profit for selling the drink, or improved fishing skills. The second trait is its flavor or taste. Items that you add to your drink each have a flavor such as sweet, sour, earthy, or bitter for instance. By combining similar flavors or similar effects, you will enhance the potency of the drink. As for flavors you can also add complimenting flavors to increase the effects.

When you’ve crafted the drink you want, you’ll get to name it and pick a sprite for it. At the end of the day you’ll basically be crafting your own unique drinks. Once you craft it once the game will remember it as well so you can manage your recipes and easily recreate drinks you find useful or profitable. The brewing system sort of leads into buffs as well. Up until now there have only been a few basic buffs. I’m currently in the process of making a buff UI, but in total there are 21 different effects at the moment. I will preface this by saying that more than a few of these relate to the battle system that will eventually exist. In any case, buffs will be added on to certain food recipes as well so in general buffs should be a lot more relevant in the game. At the moment, I believe the only way to get them is to buy some of John’s drinks from the bar, but who wants to do that.

The last thing I’ll mention is probably more of a tease than anything. This bit is difficult to give any sort of exact timing on. With the other things mentioned so far, I can tell you that they will all be in the next patch. This bit I may hold on to for a while as it’s something that could become extremely volatile in the code if I rush it and mess it up.

So, what am I talking about? Dialogue, lots and lots of dialogue. If you’ve played Verdant Village for any significant amount of time you probably know that NPCs (outside of quests) have a few basic lines of dialogue depending on the season or where they currently are. While this basic setup isn’t likely going to change there does stand to be a pretty massive addition, at least in my opinion.

Those who have followed this game for a while may have heard me refer to the “topic system”. That is what this is, and it stands to be the meat of the dialogue engine for this game. For those who have played the game or seen it, you might have noticed that “topics” button above quests when you talk to NPCs. If you clicked it you probably saw that you got a throwaway line like “the mines are caves that have rocks in them crazy right?”. Originally, a long time ago when I was a wee lad, I planned for the topic system to be more of a discovery tool where NPCs would clue you in to bits of the world and maybe point you towards interesting things, ala rumors in TES: Oblivion, minus the spooky Mr. Potato Head NPCs. Side note, I love Oblivion.

The remnants of the old system are still intact, but this idea is no longer the plan. The basic idea for the topic system was to have the player do things in the world that would trigger topics of conversation with various NPCs. For example, catch a number of different fish, maybe you’ll get a conversation with Matias about one of his past fishing adventures. Basically, things you do would spark more dialogue with NPCs, hopefully in a fairly organic way so it feels more real than walking into a guy’s house and then having him vomit his life story at you. Because, while I can’t be certain, I don’t think people do that in real life.

This was the plan, but then plans change, mostly because when professors in college told me about limiting the scope of a project, I ignored them. In the words of Homer Simpson, “I am so smart, S-M-R-T”. Much like how brewing was originally going to be “put hops in barrel, get beer item” this system got some iteration.

The basic plan is still there. I’d like to have certain conversations become available after you do certain things. However, the change comes in when I examined systems like friendship hearts in Stardew and, uh, whatever harvest moon had. I played that game when I was like 10 and I spent all my time mining instead of making friends, which is oddly telling. In any case, I don’t like these systems. I mean I like filling up meters in game as much as the next guy, but it always felt really strange and unrealistic for me. I mean I I’m simplifying a little, but Stardew was essentially just throw gifts at people every week until you were besties or married. It’s a very gamey solution and I can’t blame the guy for going that route. On a basic level, it makes sense and it functions well enough. Not to mention, in his defense, he did sprinkle in little dialogue scenes with characters to let you learn about them which was cool.

So, my current solution is to replace all of that with the topic system. Instead of grinding out gifts I’m currently working to write small stories for each character. Each character in the game will get one of these. Characters that you can romance will have two, a normal one and then a romance related one. To give an idea on how long these are I wrote one character’s the other day and it was 6 pages of dialogue. Some of these scenes involve using the cutscene engine as well, which to clarify that’s the engine used for the intro scenes in the game.

The general idea is that between these longer form stories and then the topics that come up naturally there should be a fairly large amount of dialogue in the game. It’s my opinion that this sort of thing would be more compelling than a system where you grind for friendship by repeating generic tasks. Also, I’d like to add, because I don’t like pointing out what I consider flaws, that I love Stardew and I mean it no ill will. I’m also trying to make a point to have visual changes or larger world changes accompany the longer stories. I can’t say if every story will have such a thing but so far, I’ve got a few ideas in mind. If not a huge change, I’d like to at least maybe have these events alter NPC schedules or dialogue or something of the sort.

In a way I guess they are sort of like quests except, at the moment at least, no one is going to ask you to collect 5 copper ore or whatever other wacky quest requirement I’ve come up with. The hope is that with all this in place getting to know the characters in the game will feel more like an interactive process and story rather than a series of checkboxes.

So, now that I’ve laboriously explained things, I hope you didn’t fall asleep by the way (although I wouldn’t blame you), I can mention the catch. Remember way back at the start of this post that I said I’ve only added like 2 characters? That’s because before I write anyone else into the game, I’d like to get this stuff squared away, or at least mostly fleshed out. I feel like if I just keep putting characters their personalities may not match whatever story I write later. In general, I’d like to write an entire character all at once, which means characters additions may be sparse for a while. Granted I have plenty of other gameplay things to do in the meantime, like that whole battle system thing, I’m sure that won’t take too long…ha, ha. But in all seriousness, super excited to make the combat.

I am dedicating about half my day to writing this stuff right now, so I hope that it doesn’t take an insane amount of time. However, I do feel obligated to say that there are like 45ish characters planned. Which is assuming I don’t add a couple more for the single characters to marry once you pick your spouse. I’m sorry college professors I just keep having ideas and I can’t help myself. This of course ties back in to the whole “I can’t predict the timing on this” thing. As much as I’d like to say that this will come soon I just can’t. Writing aside, the logistics of making it work via the code are another thing to handle as well. While I don’t know this for certain I can say that it’s likely these things will come into the game piecemeal. I’ll probably write everything first and then slowly add the stories to characters a few at a time.

So, that is most everything. Lots of work being done at the moment. Lots more planned for the future of course. I hope some of this got you a little excited for the future of the game. While I wish I was sitting here announcing a patch, all I can promise is that I’m still working on it. Early access has a bad track record of games that never get finished, but I intend to shirk that stereotype. Your patience is appreciated, and I hope you enjoyed this look into what is happening with Verdant Village and what is coming in the future. Also, I’m sorry for my terrible jokes, hopefully you survived all of them. This will likely be the new format for these sorts of updates. Once I think I have enough to talk about I’ll just post about it. I’ll also continued to do patch notes when the patches actually come out but given how sporadic the updating will be these seem like a good idea to keep people who are interested up to speed. With any luck in the near future I’ll have a substantial patch for the game as well.