Hey, mates! The last couple of months were pretty intense for Craftomation 101. We got featured on Steam's main page for a while, we participated in a programming-themed event (that also got featured on the main page). But most importantly, we released not one but two major updates, in which we introduced new mechanics, reworked the old ones, and added some long-awaited QoL improvements. It's been a wild ride, so let's try and summarize it all up. It sounds somewhat ironic but we quite literally started this cycle of development by dealing with weeds. Those thorns that we had initially introduced to add more challenge to the game, turned out to be in the specter between annoying and frustrating. So now there's an option to permanently deal with those pesky Bushes, or use them as a source of Thorns that can now be used for producing Fire.
But adding new ways to deal with Thorns (including a special brew known as Uproot Beer) has not solved the problem of them being frustrating, Thorns still felt out of place. Reinventing them would mean creating the whole gameplay mechanics from scratch. The initial goal of introducing Thorns was to add more challenge to the game and stimulate the players to warm out map tiles more efficiently. So, after weeks of discussions, we remembered similar mechanics from earlier prototypes. Were now about to introduce a new system of snow, in which some areas will be more frozen than others. Heres a work-in-progress example of how it will look:
This would mean rebalancing the Bonfires and improving the heat map but this system looks and plays more intuitively than the current mechanics. With it in place, the Thorns (and also Ancient Ice) will most likely disappear from the game in one of the next updates, so take your time to say goodbyes! As for another mechanic that we introduced in September, its a keeper. We mentioned them more than once already but now you can finally try them for yourself: Ale Sprinklers disperse whatever Ale you load into it at an area on the map. This opens a whole new level of organizing your base: create dedicated areas near the resource where CraftoMates work faster? Sure, do that! [previewyoutube=xZBpM6nLmTI;full][/previewyoutube] To enrich this part of the game we changed the effect of Primordial Ale: now it slowly replenishes the battery of your robots for 2% per second, for 45 seconds. Wanna try making an area with auto-charging for your CraftoMates? By all means, do that too! And then, of course, there're new programming tools. The uncombine command allows you to disassemble an Object into its components. We also added 'any object' and 'nothing' categories to Object categories (e.g. in Variables): you can now make a bot check whether its' hands are empty, whether a selected tile contains Objects, etc. CargoMates have dedicated commands for checking the amount of items in their backpacks. Oh, and in one of the next updates they'll learn to drag Bonfires around, too (although they don't look very excited by this idea):
Last but not least: let's talk about those UI/UX improvements. The word around indie devs today is that in 2024 users are becoming more demanding of the quality of Early Access titles. Craftomation 101, on the other hand, is an old school, polish it as you go kind of an Early Access game. That means some pretty obvious and intuitive features take months to implement - sometimes due to technical limitations of the engine, sometimes because we get too carried away by improving the gameplay.

• But we're getting there! Here's a brief list of improvements we made in the past few months:
• Ctrl + Z and Ctrl + Shift + Z now work in the Editor (oh yeah!!!)
• Smoother camera zooming due to the release of a native camera module in Defold
• You can now input numbers as arguments for variables from the keyboard (can you believe it?!)
• We also added an option to input custom names for Variables and connectors of Functions

Oh, and for your convenience, there's now an option from the main menu that allows you to get unlimited progression points, so you could get the full set of programming options from the start, if you wish so. This feature becomes available after you unlock Sulfur Source at least once during a playthrough.
And if, on the contrary, you need more guidance in the early parts of the game, we have frozen not one, but two CraftoMates on the map, who have a premade programs installed in them: for your inspiration and maybe occasional copy-pasting. We also added fog of war into the wiki and the tooltips, which looks surprisingly good and intriguing:
As for the near future, we're up to something really exciting: we are now discussing the narrative structure of the game. After studying the feedback and playing the game again and again for a couple of weeks, we feel that this is the kind of motivation that Craftomation 101 is currently lacking. We still have to figure out how it will work though, and we'll make sure to let you know as soon as we've come up with a decision. Our Discord server is the place if you want to hear about it first and discuss it with us. See you in the next edition of our developer diaries!