Hello, this is probably going to be a fairly short update, but I wanted to write something just to keep up my end of the bargain here. I won’t bother with all the details but if you read the last devlog you will know that I’ve currently got some anxiety/depression issues going on since my medication stopped working around the start of the year.

I won’t bother repeating everything, but I’ve started a different medication and at the moment it is sort of working, emphasis on ‘sort of’. Things aren’t as bad as they were, but I’m still pretty wrung out and lacking motivation.

All this is to say that I haven’t done much work on the game this month. There was some work on combat earlier in the month when I had a little more in the tank, but it’s still very much in progress. I’m hoping that early March is going to see the end of this and a return to normalcy, but I unfortunately can’t promise anything. Pray to the prozac gods and my doctor I suppose.

Admittedly, I haven’t had many development related thoughts this month, however there is one thing I wanted to mention and get a read on if possible. It’s mostly to do with side professions that involve refining materials in the game. By that I mean the more minor things you can do like drying meat, making cloth, etc. Not the major things like mining, farming, or fishing or even beekeeping.

In this newer version I had the plan to actually expand on a few of these things like instead of making just cloth in a loom you could take said cloth and make it into clothes which you could sell. Or instead of just making bars of metal you could forge it into weapons and armor, again probably just for selling purposes. The basic idea being to take these goods to their logical conclusion and turn them into more complete products if you wanted to do that.

What I’ve been thinking about is that there is already a lot going on in the game in terms of options the player can pursue. Adding even more machines that take up space and need to be manually paid attention to seems like it might be bordering on too much.

My idea was to take some of these systems and instead of having to manually create everything and manage all the buildings and UI menus I instead tack onto the shipping system where you can basically supply people in town with the materials they need to create goods and you get a cut of the profits. This would likely tie into some of the more end-game stuff planned that has to do with fulfilling orders for large numbers of goods for people outside of Amberglen.

It seems like a decent compromise in my mind. It could also probably have some sort of upgrade system involved like the more you give to an NPC (the blacksmith for instance) the more he levels up and then he can produce higher quality goods. It could also take the route where each NPC can only produce so much per day and as they level up that limit increases.

Stuff like that. I think it might help to keep the player as more of a supplier rather than a guy who owns a farm, who also smiths, tailors, makes jewelry, raises bees, fights monsters, etc, etc. Since this game doesn’t really automate away a ton of tasks, keeping the list of things you can do manageable might be the better route. That way you don’t end up just running around your farm clicking on each and every thing you walk by to collect and item or start a new task.

Anyway, let me know if you have an opinion on that, and don’t be afraid to shoot it down (you won’t hurt my feelings regardless of my current ailment). As I said before I’m hoping that by the end of March things will have improved. Apologies for the delay, and thank you all for the support, everyone’s kind words really mean a lot. I’m sure I’ll have an update at the end of March regardless just to keep everyone informed on progress.