Hello Saeges!

Our first demo was released, and now it has finally left the store. So many of you played it and gave us invaluable feedback. We are so very, very thankful! And so many of you truly enjoyed it...which is even better! :D But now that the character creation demo is behind us, we need to talk about what comes next. What are the next steps in the development of Farmwand, and what can you expect in the upcoming months. Let's begin!

The Second Demo

First of all, we've started work on what will be a fully realized gameplay demo. With a little bit of all the game's mechanics and a simple series of quests to teach you how to enjoy Farmwand the best, we are hoping this new demo will be a great way to immerse yourselves into the world we are building. There will be potions, spells, charming characters, lots of decorations to get, things to craft and crops to farm! But because of this, it will take a little bit before it is ready. Remember to hop into our Discord or follow our socials (Reddit, Patreon & Twitter) if you want to stay up to date far more frequently. And as we move towards this second demo and what will be our Early Access next year, there were a few things we had to leave behind. That is, our prototype UIs.

New UI designs

It took a little bit of time and a few tries to go from our early prototype seen here:

To the fully realized version of our UI:

From the beginning we decided that the inventory in Farmwand was going to take the form of a magic purse where you can put all sorts of things. While not an "infinite" inventory (we still want you to do a bit of inventory management and to get the satisfaction of expanding it yourself) it is quite big anyway. And you can even carry some cute critters inside! Did we mention that the inventory is customizable? [previewyoutube=59LIytLLovA;full][/previewyoutube] But the magic purse does not work only as an inventory. If you close it and look at its fold, you will see something else...

Skills in Farmwand

Farmwand is a hybrid of RPG and cozy life-sim. But as any good RPG, you will have a good progression system. You already saw that there are different schools and majors during our first demo. Well, each of those "branches" correspond quite well with the different branches in the skill tree. So many skills! But besides these active skills that you can unlock for new abilities, recipes and more, you can also find special passive skill gems. We're trying to give you several ways to build your character around your playstyle, and of course another good reason to play the game more than once!

New Systems, objects and Locations

And finally, something else we've been working on are the many internal systems that will handle the world of Farmwand. One of them is a fully featured Weather System that can generate different events like soft rains, foggy mornings, blizzards and more depending on the season, biome and time of day. This weather system is paired with our Time of Day system and a bunch of graphical features that allow us to simulate snow accumulating over objects, and vegetation changing as the seasons pass.
[previewyoutube=70FFTbnwqfI;full][/previewyoutube] And as you saw in the video above, we've also been working on lots of little houses for what will become Lunahweld town:
And even a brand new Sleepy Dragoppotamus Forge, ready for all your smelting needs!

This update took a little bit to release. During this past month, both of us got really sick with the flu and, just a few days before, our family dog passed away. July has been...eventful. But we hope August will be a much better and happier month, and are already looking forward to sharing with you all the progress we make as we build Demo 2. Thank you for reading, and thank you once again SO MUCH for playing our first lil' demo, and for all the support you've shown us during all this time. Until the next dev log!

[ 2024-07-27 02:52:02 CET ] [ Original post ]