I never know how to start these. Maybe I need to develop some sort of greeting like ‘Hello Villagers’ or something. That sounds weird, probably not going to do that. On the plus side this odd tangent has served as a way to start this devlog, so at least one problem has been solved.

This month was one of those ‘only one thing got worked on all month’ months. Suffice to say cooking is a fairly involved system. On top of that I was sick for a week which really didn’t help matters. To start I should say that cooking is (basically) done. I have quite literally one final detail to write into the system to display some icons which I’ll be taking care of after this. So, I’m going to go ahead and call it done. Going into cooking I figured this was going to be fairly simple. After all its really just a couple of menus that search for ingredients and let you combine them into food.

Realistically, it’s a lot more than that. One of the big things was actually data. I kept a good deal of the recipes in the current game but some were added, others were modified, and some got deleted. That said there was still an extensive amount of data entry to do. The final count of recipes is 155 plus 16 ingredient recipes but I don’t really count those. Simply put, lots of data.

Once the data was setup the actual UI had to be put together. Much as it pains me to post unfinished art you’ll have to bear with the image. Just bear in mind that everything you see is temporary. I promise there won’t just be a giant number (in this case a zero) to indicate oven heat when the UI is done. If you’ve played the game you are probably familiar with the UI. For the most part the changes mostly come from item quality, the oven, and the fish filleting process.

To start, item quality. I believe I’ve mentioned it before, but some items are going to gain a quality level in the game. If you’ve played Stardew Valley or Graveyard keeper its equivalent to items having bronze, silver, and gold stars. These quality levels aren’t attached to every item. The plan is to basically keep quality tied to items that you create, like food. Also, some materials that go into various recipes, for instance crops, or fish will also have quality.

As you can probably guess in the case of cooking the quality of your ingredients dictates the quality of the final product. This was the first UI system I’ve had to make that takes quality into account so there was some work to standup the UI systems. Now that the code has been made it can be reused for other systems thankfully.

To accommodate all of this the cooking UI shows as much data as possible when selecting a recipe. Once selected you can see the ingredients that are required for the recipe in the top right. These ingredients are shown to you per their quality. Selecting the buttons to the left and right of each item allows you to cycle the quality of the item and see how much you have of each item. As you adjust the quality of ingredients you’ll be able to see how likely you are to get a particular quality of product. If you don’t hit an exact threshold you basically get a percentage chance of getting the next quality level.

Below the ingredients you can add items to generate heat in the oven that you’ll need for cooking. Recipes are listed on the left. They are separated into categories and sorted alphabetically to hopefully make them a bit easier to search. Recipe categories are selected on the left side of the recipe menu via the line of buttons.

The oven UI is the next bit that is worth showing. The old oven UI operated on a set of slots you had for cooking. I’ve decided to get rid of this slot system. You can instead cook as many things as you want at the same time. Below is again a temporary UI but it gets the basic point across. When you cook something it will be added to this list within the oven. In terms of game time 1 in game minute is 1 real life second. Once an item is done cooking you can retrieve it and add it to your inventory, simple as that.

Last is filleting fish. I didn’t bother uploading an image as it basically looks the same as the oven. To explain, you’ll have a similar looking list of all the fish you have in your inventory or chests. These entries are separated by breed of fish as well as by quality. So, if you have a bunch of bronze and silver bluegill you’ll have two listings to select from. The quality of a fish directly correlates to the quality of the fillet you get from it. Bronze fish gives bronze fillet, so on and so forth. In addition to this, different fish give a different number of fillets as well as different types which is all shown to you in the UI. To explain types I made two types of fillets for this version, normal and prime. The main difference is just that certain recipes use certain fillet types. I thought it might be a nice touch just to add some differentiation to fish that you catch without making things too complex.

Speaking of types of items, the other large change that came to recipes is meat. If you’ve played the current version of the game then you’ll know there are several different kinds of meat. All specifically named like pork, chicken, venison, rabbit, etc. I decided this was cumbersome. There are a lot of types and it ends up with each having just a few specific use cases.

The other obvious problem with meat is things like chicken, beef, and pork obviously come from farm animals. While I suppose I could build in the option to slaughter your farm animals for meat it hasn’t ever really sat well with me. I mean I know it’s a common thing on farms, but these kinds of games always felt a little too light hearted for that. Barring that option the only way to get these kinds of meat was to buy them which I didn’t really like.

The new plan is to tie hunting into cooking a lot more. In the current version hunting is basically off in its own world. All the meat you get from it can’t be used in recipes outside of a few outlying cases. In this new version meat has been simplified down to two types, which basically comes down to red and white. While you can just buy meat from stores like before hunted animals will now also drop this meat and will serve as the primary way to get it without having to pay for it. I suppose if people really thought that slaughtering farm animals was an interesting mechanic I could add it in at a later date as well.

In any case that should cover cooking for the most part. Most of the work came from data entry and setting up item quality UI interactions. As stated near the start, bar a small addition, the system is done, at least until I get the art assets which will involve a tiny bit of legwork to rearrange some assets.

Which leaves me with what’s next. To be honest, I still don’t really know what system to work on. The goal is to get this new version into a playable state sooner rather than later. However, I’m debating on what to call a playable state. The only thing I really know for sure is that I want combat to exist in the game before I go live with it. Alchemy might be another that’s sort of core and ties into a lot of things. Hunting is probably worth putting in as well given its new ties to cooking.

So while I might focus on one of those there is an equal chance that I take this next month to focus on odds and ends along with building the world a bit. There are a lot of systems that are effectively done but sprites or animations are missing or data needs to be entered. For the most part I’ve been operating in a style of building out systems but not necessarily putting in every piece of data that the system uses. A lot of this was because most systems tie into other systems so adding all the details for a system was impossible until all the parts were in place. At this point though a lot of framework is in place. So I may go back and clean up loose ends in various places.

Aside from that there is world design. I think I’ve mentioned before that the world is going to have something of a revamp. In a lot of ways, the main point is to condense the setting somewhat. I don’t plan to take areas out but some are entirely too big. The hope is to take the world and (as I said) condense it so that there is less walking and more doing whatever you want to do. All this is to say this next month might end up being a random assortment of things rather than a more concerted effort, time will tell I suppose.

Regardless, I’ll be back next month to share progress. I hope everyone is having a good fall. Happy Halloween if you celebrate that. I’ve eaten more than my share of candy this month so I’m doing my part. Thanks as always for your patience, hopefully I’ll have something interesting to report at the end of November.