Hello all, it feels like it’s a been a bit since a wrote one of these, but I suppose its just that a lot has happened. As usual it’s the end of the month so its time I regale you all with what’s been going on with Verdant Village. To be completely honest, I’m looking forward to February because January turned out to be rather busy with some stuff getting in the way of development. Thankfully, February looks a lot more boring, which means more time to get stuff done.

So, as I sort of just mentioned less got accomplished this month than I would have liked. The holidays sort of ran over into the first week of the year. I was then out of town for work for a week, and what would a going out of town be if I didn’t catch some sort of cold afterwards for like a half week.

Anyway, I’m not here to make excuses (although I sort of just did), but I wanted to give a bit of perspective as this wasn’t exactly a normal month. Still, I did get some stuff done. As I remember it, the last update I was getting started on raising livestock. For those that may have forgotten livestock are also getting an overhaul. The last update will explain in more thoroughly but the TLDR is that animals now have a few factors to their care like grooming, types of feed, pastures, and disease. These all feed into an overall happiness level which determines what an animal produces each day.

It should also be mentioned that originally there were plans for monster attacks, which you would have to essentially upkeep a magical ward to prevent. If you let this ward fail animals would potentially be attacked, even inside their respective buildings. I got some feedback on this last time and as a result it has been dropped. I thought about ways to maybe modify it. Most people seemed to be okay with the idea of attacks happening if animals were caught outside, just not when they were inside. Problem with that is that there isn’t really anything to keep an animal from going back inside at the end of the day. Even in games like Stardew it really only happens if the pathing for the animal is messed up or you purposely block them. Adding a system where you have to manually bring animals inside would also be pretty tedious I think. Given that you aren’t forced to go to sleep ever this would end up just being a different version of something that forces you back to your house at night.

I suppose it could be done and then you could later automate something that brings animals inside for you but that seems, how do I put it. Like a needless complication, I guess. Because effectively a system would have been made at that point where having to do it manually would be annoying, so most likely players would just wait to get the automation element before letting animals out and basically just skip the whole thing. Hopefully I’m making sense here. The point is that for the moment at least, there is no risk of attack, animals will just go outside and inside without issue, on their own. Changes could always be made in the future though.

Alright, I’m nearly a page into this and I haven’t discussed anything I’ve done yet. For a quick overview I’m just going to drop in my internal list of things I did this month. I used to keep these when I was still updating the live version so I had a list of what had been done since the last patch. This is just what I did this month instead.

• Fixed several UI bugs
• Finished transitions allowing players to place animals into buildings
• Setup code around displaying what animals exist in what buildings
• Setup failsafes during animal purchase to prevent purchase when you have no space or building in general for an animal
• Made clock UI and hotbar shift to the opposite side of the screen when needed
• Created a system to handle collisions in the world via a tilemap
• Animals spawn and move around inside their respective buildings
• Setup system to place animal feed
• Animals now eat each day
• Animals grow from child to adult
• Animals can be fed treats once per day
• Added quality for specific items in the game, currently just crops and animal products however this might expand out later
• Fixed a bug that was persistent through the three chest organization buttons
• Animals now contract, spread, and self heal disease over time

Some of that is more self-explanatory, others a bit more vague, and others make a lot of work sound like very little work honestly. A good example of that is the system to handle collisions via tilemap. This is extremely important but I just hadn’t gotten around to it. To explain briefly, most objects in the world have their own collision built in. For instance, a tree, the player’s house, etc. However, there are other elements like cliff faces or bodies of water where because they are tilemaps rather than objects they don’t have a collision paired with them. This means there needs to effectively be an invisible layer placed over the map that acts as the collision mask. That is what was created. Very boring, also very important.

I don’t want to make this post a mile long and over explain things but there is one more thing from that list that I want to touch on, because it’s a fairly large change. You might have noticed near the end I mentioned that specific items now have quality levels. If you’ve played Stardew, or maybe Graveyard Keeper you’ll be familiar with these. For those unacquainted let’s say you get a chicken egg in game. It is no longer just an egg, it will have a quality attached, in the case of Verdant Village, bronze, silver, gold, or adamantium. This quality level at the moment simply dictates value. Items have a base selling value; a higher quality gives a multiplier to that value. For instance, a silver quality might make it worth 1.5x the normal value.

I hadn’t planned on doing this, but I found that I couldn’t think of a better alternative for livestock. As mentioned before livestock have a happiness level that is dictated by several other factors. This happiness level determines what the animal produces each day. In my outline prior it had much more variance. There was no quality so instead higher happiness would alter things such as, having a higher chance to spawn the product at all (yes in that version you could just have an animal not produce when it should have). It could also make animals produce products faster, for instance sheep could grow their wool in less time. Or in some cases you could get situations were instead of getting one chicken egg per day you would get two.

I still like some of these ideas, however there are a lot of problems with it. The first and probably most important being inconsistency. Having a chance to be taking care of your animals and still just not get any products one day because of random chance would feel terrible. Aside from this there was a logistical issue with lowering the time it takes to spawn a product. Sheep for example might take 5 days to grow their wool at low happiness but only 3 days at a high level. While I could do some math behind the scenes and make the numbers work it would lead to inconsistency. The player doesn’t really have an idea of when the sheep will finish growing its wool as the happiness level might fluctuate meaning the wool grows at a different rate each day. This means it could be 3 days, could be 7 days, but its hard to tell without meticulously checking the animal’s stats each day to know what happened.

All this is to say that the old method was fairly vague and I think a little too convoluted for its own good. Adding quality to the items allows for something much simpler where the better the happiness value, the higher the item tier. Simple one to one values. In the case of something like sheep where it will take multiple days to get one item I’ll use an aggregate of the happiness during the growth time to determine the quality of the resulting item.

As I said, I think that’s one of the larger changes that has come out of this. I think the reasoning is sound however. Of course while thinking this I of course considered other items as well. Currently crops have gotten the same treatment. I think they can support the same sort of structure and it feels odd to only have quality on animal products. Crops will gain quality based on fertilizer or alchemic items you put on them. More may be done to affect that in the future but for now that’s all it is. I did have a brief thought about adding quality levels to seeds so you could effectively breed better seeds but I’m not sure how complex I want to get. At some point complexity becomes annoying, so we’ll see.

Of course, I may add this on to other things as well. I actually made a note of systems that it might make sense to add quality to. Specifically, alchemy, brewing, cooking, jewelcrafting, and tailoring. That is entirely up in the air at the moment however. I suppose just don’t be too surprised if you see the system bleed into those. Hunting and fishing could also potentially see it although I’m not sure how quality would be determined outside of some sort of skill level or a luck variable.

Anyway, I’ve talked enough I think. This is already long by my standards. Its funny, I never feel I have much to talk about and then I exposit for about two and a half pages. As I said at the start, I’m expecting February to far better in terms of productivity. I’ve got some animal stuff to finish up still. I’m staring down pastures which will likely be the toughest part. Aside from that currently you can only buy chickens so I have to extrapolate all this code to all the other animals, but that’s mostly just copy paste with some minor edits. After that I’m between doing the shipping system, which I was going to do before livestock but I needed the updated UI (which I just got), or moving into dialogue. I’ll likely decide when I get to it. You’ll hear from me again in a month. I hope you all had a good start to the year, and if you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading.