Hey all, so as I mentioned last time, Im going to be at the Boston Festival of Indie Games tomorrow! Sunday, December 15th from 10am to 5pm at Cyclorama, 539 Tremont St, Boston, MA 02116. For those of you who cant make it though, youre not missing out on the new update! 0.7.15 of the demo has now gone live, which is the same version that is available to play in Boston. (The main difference is that level 3 is also playable in BostonFIG.) Heres the full release notes:

• Added dirt ground textures to animal pens.
• Implemented Needs for villagers now they require food and water, otherwise their satisfaction will fall, which may cause them to leave.

• Added a new menu when starting a new game, making it a more thematic experience.
• Made farms 21 with longer crop rows
• Updated train consists so that later stage goods are more spread out. This should help make it so that you dont have to wait for several trains before making one huge trade.
• Fixed coal tenders to show as full if the train is not requesting coal (i.e. level 1)
• Updated status icons to look more like a speech bubble, which should help legibility
• Updated progression to add potatoes and peppers to level 1. Potatoes act as a very good source of food, and peppers can be refined in level 2 to make magick powder.
• Adjusted passenger car graphics to make the floor higher.

• Added a Magick Refinery to turn the magick peppers into powder.
• Fixed Build Menu tutorials to adjust their y position if the menu moves, e.g. because the window is resized.
• Added trains that move in the main menu
• Updated progression levels to be permits with names, which should hopefully be a better thematic explanation for why certain buildings are unlocked at certain times.
• Added an in-universe tutorial note at the start of the game.
• Fixed an issue where the status of the tender was not persisted on load
• The bakery now produces 2 bread per 1 water & 1 flour instead of 1 bread. This was required to balance the game economy, now that bread is the best food available for filling up your villagers.
• Fixed an issue where pressing A on the controller would not actually let you build the selected building.
• Fixed a few different instances of menus where controller focus would be lost.
• Made orchards 12
• Made homelessness less dissatisfying in level 1. Your villagers will be about three times more patient about sleeping in the station at the start.
• Fixed the passenger number pop up to properly display the number of emigrants.
• Fixed an issue where reopening the build menu would focus the controller on a button in the first tab, not the one thats still open.
• I also uncovered an issue thats probably been around since the start: the Load Game and Save As menus do not work on the Steam Deck. This seems to be an issue with how Godot works with the OS the FileDialog seems to rely on org.freedesktop.portal.FileChooser, something which is probably installed by default on normal Linux, but not the Steam Deck. Since Im planning on implementing cloud saves, Ill end up having to do my own implementation anyway, but I just wanted to call this out.