Hello everyone :) To mark the start of TactiCon 2023, I've decided to start writing dev diaries where I'll talk about exciting new features that I am working on. I won't talk too much about specific gameplay elements to begin with, because that changes quite fast, but I hope you'll still find these posts interesting and informative while you wait for the demo :) The biggest thing I am working on right now is finishing the core loop which consists of hiring miners to excavate ores, hiring smiths to turn ores into ingots and ingots into items, displaying items on racks, and finally customers buying items and using that money to scale up your production. I believe this core loop will be closed very soon :) After that my next milestone will be finalizing the demo.
One of my main goals for this game is to improve replayability, more so than in Tavern Master. I have identified many areas that can be improved, like the map being too static, not enough things to do while you wait for money to generate, not enough customization options etc. but I wanted to start small for now. I've always felt that character diversity in Tavern Master wasn't great. There were only female waitresses and bartenders and they all looked pretty much the same. I was very limited with 3D characters that I owned, but I've overcome that and so far I have made a random blacksmith generator so every blacksmith you hire looks different.
I will also make something like this for other staff types like miners and cashiers, and for customers as well. The biggest milestone recently was that I've added wood as a new resource. So far there are 75 items in the game which can be crafted from start to finish, and I'm working on having a wide variety of different crafting processes because I don't want it to feel that every item created in the same way. Besides wood and metal, my plan is to add leather (mainly for armor), gems (jewelry and some more expensive items) and glass (jars, potions, perhaps even alchemy!).
Many of those 75 items are shields which were the most recent items added to the game:
From these 2 gifs you can also notice that animations look much more polished compared to Tavern Master which was also one of the goals for this game :) It's an ongoing process of course, but by the time we get to a proper demo build, you should be able to appreciate the differences more fully. The development of Blacksmith Master started while I was still doing major updates for Tavern Master. Since both games share the same code base, I have also transferred new features from TM to BM like basements and weather. My 3D artist Marcis has started prototyping a coin minting machine which I am very excited about. To start with, the machine will be split in 2 parts - a smelter for creating blank coins and a stamp for finalizing the coins. It will be a slow process but later on you will be able to upgrade it into a more effective machine doing both jobs at the same time:

That is it for this dev diary - I will try to update with new diaries at least monthly :) I am very curious to read your feedback because as a solo dev it always helps me a lot when I know what potential players think about the things I implement :) Don't forget to join the Blacksmith Master Discord and I hope you enjoy the rest of TactiCon! :)