Hello all, I can’t believe it’s already June. In retrospect I suppose I thought my May would be fairly quiet, but it really turned out to be anything but that. I should probably expect that sort of thing at this point in my life, but somehow, I’m still being surprised that things come up and take up time.

As mentioned above I had a few things happen that slowed my work a bit, however I did still get things done. Namely the interior design portion of things. I really can’t express how glad I am that its done. I don’t like to get stuck working on systems for long stretches of time. I don’t really mind it from a working perspective, but it just makes progress seem so slow when you look back and realize you’ve been working on the same system for weeks.

So, what is the interior design system I hear you ask. The short answer is that it’s the system that allows you to modify your house layout in game. Incase some preface is needed, in games of this genre (that I’m aware of at least) you’ll generally get a house at the start of the game which is usually something like a one room shack. Over the course of the game, you’ll usually upgrade your home and effectively make the interior larger. Generally, this expansion comes in the form of static upgrades to the interior layout. The important take away is that each player will end up with the same floorplan after buying all the upgrades.

What spawned this idea was that I thought it seemed like a missed opportunity in this kind of game. Assuming you aren’t min/maxing many players I think have fun with decorating their house and setting it up how they like. This system just takes that process one step further and allows you to setup the rooms and walls as you please. To put it briefly the floorplan of your house is now entirely modular down to the individual tiles. You can have as many or as few rooms as you like. You can also make them each whatever shape you want.

This entire process replaces the previous system which was just static upgrades which added rooms on. However, I think I’m likely going to keep the cellar as an option which will just be a static room. There might also be an attic upgrade you can get which will be the same type of thing.

As for the main floor you build these rooms in the same way you would construct other buildings on your farm. You’ll talk to the carpenter, pay a fee, and then be brought to a screen what you can draw in the room as you please. The only stipulation I haven’t decided on yet is if I’ll make new rooms cost resources based on the size you make them. This seems like the proper way to go I think. Probably a static gold cost but then a varying amount of wood, stone, etc based on the size of the room.

In addition to creating rooms you can freely modify and delete them once they are created so if you change your mind, want to renovate, add more doors, etc that option is also available.

I said I would try to show off something from the system when it was done so I do have a few screenshots. I started to make a gif to show the process of making a room but it takes so long to do the gif was too massive. I’m admittedly not the most creative person when it comes to designing floorplans but the point is really just to show that you can setup your house however you want. You will have to excuse the lack of furniture and the pixilation. Zooming out in the engine to show the entire room at once is currently a bit weird and smushes stuff together but I think the general point comes across.

Because I do feel bad about not being able to really show everything all at once with interior design here are a few mockups from my artist as well for furniture and decorations she is working on. You can expect that once everything is said and done you’ll have something more like this rather than a bunch of empty rooms.

Aside from this system, which took most of the month (again, so happy it’s done now) I have gotten a bit of time to work with other things. I’ve built most of the construction UI at this point which will allow you to both use this system and actually place things like coops and barns. Looking at the UI has made me think that a bit of a color scheme change might be in order, but that would be a minor art fix if it happens.

Once that UI is in place I’m going to get shipping implemented which I don’t think should be too hard although I do want to make some graphical changes to the UI. Once that system is in place I’m going to get furniture setup. To clarify, furniture placement is already 99% in place. The only things that are missing are all the items and sprites and a couple of stipulations for specific furniture types. Adding sprites is tedious, but not difficult. The stipulations should also be pretty simple once a general algorithm is made.

Once furniture is working I’ll have to jump back to the interior design system a bit to make it properly handle furniture in situations where you would delete a room or modify it in such a way that furniture placement becomes invalid. This should also be a mostly simple process as I’ve set up the system to account for furniture already. I just, ironically, don’t have any in game furniture to place outside of chests.

As you can probably tell, many things start to intertwine in games like this. I try my best to make one system at a time, but things like this pop up on occasion where you have to put something on hold while you figure out another system. The further in I get the less it happens, but this is a particularly egregious case.

I don’t have much else to say at this point. Combat sprites are steadily moving forward in the background. Most of the enemy sprites are made with just a few modifications required for some of them. I don’t usually post those because it feels like the sort of thing that should be discovered in game but here’s an example of one. This creature is admittedly pulled from D&D but I always thought they were a cool enemy. I think most of the other ones are a bit more original though.

With any luck now that I’m past interior design things should speed up a little bit. That system was very labor intensive just in terms of all the things to code. Most systems in the game are much more light to program. Hopefully I’ll have a bit more to talk about next month as with any luck June will be more dedicated to working on smaller systems.

I’m also tentatively hopeful that this version might go onto steam soonish. This is a very non-committal statement but a lot of the basic systems are starting to come together. At this point you can farm, fish, chop trees, mine (although the mines don’t exist yet), build buildings, and raise animals. On top of that most of the general functionality of the world is in place. Things like day/night cycle, seasons, inventory management, shops, and some other stuff I’m probably not thinking of are in.

All that said there are still things missing. In order for the game to be a game I’d have to design the world, which is actually a lot easier than it sounds. I also still need to add a few systems. Furniture and shipping as mentioned above, NPCs and dialogue, quests, basic skill levels, and you know a way to save and load your game. Thing is none of those are particularly complex to add. Its not like this will go live next week or something, but this hopefully gives a bit of insight into where I feel I’m at. A lot of the complex stuff has been done at this point, there’s still tons to do but most of it isn’t I guess ‘hard’ to make.

In any case, I’ll cut this off here. I have plenty of game related work to do today anyway. Thanks for taking the time to read, and, as always, for your patience. I’ll be back with more updates at the end of June.