Name | Verdant Village | ||
Developer | Exodus Software | ||
Publisher | Exodus Software | ||
Tags | |||
Release | 2020-08-04 | ||
Steam | € £ $ / % | ||
News | |||
Controls | Keyboard Mouse | ||
Players online |  n/a  | ||
Steam Rating | Positive | ||
Steam store | |||
Public Linux depots | Verdant Village Linux [304.58 M] |
It is already the end of April, which is rather alarming. I feel like the month just disappeared but thats nothing new. I was hoping things would be a bit different by the time we reached the end of the month, but it is what it is. As such this will probably be a shorter update. |
Im slightly early this month cause of the weekend, but here we are. Things didnt go as expected this month. Not in a bad way, but I wasnt really expecting to work on what I did. I think in the last update I talked about maybe moving towards combat. I nixed that decision pretty quick, but well go in order. |
As usual its time for another dev log. I did a bit of looking and actually it has been a year since I announced I would be remaking the game in a new engine. I didnt think that I made the announcement at the end of February 2023 but apparently, I did. Looking through a few of the subsequent logs though it seems I didnt really start coding until May. So, its sort of been a year, sort of not.
So basically, everything revolving around animals was done this month. Ive also setup the Silo UI. The last things to do are make silos distribute food, which is easy, and then these things need to be replicated across all animals. At the moment, chickens are the only things that work. That may sound like a huge deal but all animals function off the same parent object. So basically, I have to copy and paste code and then make a few minor changes to the specifics on each one. This is all pretty simple and shouldnt take more than a few days I would think, if that. I dont like that animals have taken as long as they have to setup, but looking back I guess it makes sense. I believe Ive mentioned this before but most systems in this game are fairly simple, mine a rock, make a potion, cook an item, etc. All these things dont involve much in terms of system design. These types of games are often the combination of a lot of very small systems rather than a few large ones. Animals are more of a cascading problem though. Before you can even have an animal, you need a building for them. This is in and of itself a giant system to build, move, upgrade, and destroy buildings, not to mention handling all the internals of each. That was what took up most of January if I recall. Then once you actually have a building for animals you have to be able to buy them, name them, store all the relevant data, handle feeding, disease, grooming, health, happiness, product creation, pastures, selling them, transferring them, aging, player interactions, etc, etc. So, it makes some sense that it took a while, I just dont like it when the end of the month comes and it feels like I did one thing. Pastures were the biggest difficulty of this month. They were probably the system that took the most time to make. Effectively a system was needed that calculated where you put the building and (without lagging the game) found all the tiles that surrounded that building to form that pasture. Then store that data in a usable way and allow for on the fly adjustments if a player changes the pasture layout. All that said, Im happy with how it turned out. Its far more stable and compact than the system that exists in the live version of the game. The only other real change to mention is the structure in the coop that holds eggs. Anyone playing the live game will know that eggs just sort of drop on the ground and you pick them up. I didnt really like this. Feathers make a bit more sense as fowl would just drop feathers on the ground in real life (I think). Im not a farmer but I believe chickens lay eggs in their nests, not just randomly on the floor. With the amount of tasks you have to do for animal care increasing I thought this might be a nice little addition to make daily chores a little easier. Most of the other things that I mentioned were fairly self-explanatory. As mentioned before, I have just a few things to clean up with animals, most of which is just replication for more animals. Then of course I have to decide what to do next. This is something Im a bit unsure of. A lot of the UI for the game is currently in flux as Im having a lot of it redone to make it more consistent. Since I dont have all the sprites finalized setting up UI is, well, not entirely pointless, but it is sort of annoying. Anything I setup without the finalized UI will likely require me to go back later and adjust a bit. It isnt hard to do but its just an extra step when I could just wait to have the sprites and then do it right the first time. This is a bit problematic because a lot of systems rely on UI. At the moment Im debating between building out the world, or maybe getting some of combat in place. Im hesitant to do too much world building as there are also sprites being made for the overworld and I think it would be better to do that work when I have all of the assets at my disposal. However, I could start laying out zones in basic ways with temporary sprites and notes. Ive likely mentioned this before, but I do want to put out versions of this game again prior to a 1.0. I think getting that feedback helps immensely so I dont want to just make this entire thing in a vacuum and then let it loose. Ive got a sort of unofficial list of things I want in the game before I put anything out onto Steam though. Combat is on that list because its something entirely different from the other systems and I want to make sure its enjoyable. I think it will likely be implemented sort of piecemeal along with the mines. While there is combat related stuff outside the mines they sort of serve as a more traditionally leveled area where it gets more difficult as you go deeper. So likely in one of the first uploads of this new version youll maybe be able to go down 2 levels or so (remember there are only 10 very large hand crafted floors instead of 100+ random ones). Ill likely also add some sort of level cap that Ill raise as more mine floors get added. This way I can focus on balancing combat in smaller chunks rather than trying to get the whole range of combat right at once. Aside from balancing I have a general goal of complete systems. Im trying to make it so that anything a player would see in the game is done. A good example of what I want to avoid is the health bar in the current game. In the live version you have health, food and potions can give you more health, there are buffs for combat too. Despite all of this there is no combat and not even a way to lose health. Thats jarring. Maybe not to someone who has been playing for a while or is watching the development but someone coming in would likely just find it confusing. The other obvious example of an incomplete system is NPC dialogue. In the current version NPCs have the bare minimum dialogue. Id like to write everything for a character all at once to keep them consistent in tone. The one caveat here is that while I might write everything all at once, some of the dialogue for each character will be dependent on other things in the game happening. So, while it will be done it may not be accessible right away. The general rule of thumb though is to have things be as complete as possible when they go into the live version. Id like to avoid uploading a version of the game and having to say hey, theres this part of the game that makes no sense right now because I havent implemented the other system that feeds into it. To bring this all back to topic, adding combat is necessary to avoid that issue. I think thats mostly it for now. I feel like this was more of a ramble than a dev log. Unfortunately, there isnt much to articulate about animals unless I start going deep into code talk. I figure this stuff is a bit more surface level, but its probably more informative about what is going on with development. The other option is me explaining the use of recursive functions to trace the tiles that make up a pasture and compiling them into an array of structs that can be easily referenced for calculations. Seeing as that sentence was boring even to me, I have my doubts about it keeping other peoples interest. So, thank you all for your patience. As time goes on Ill hopefully have more definite info on when you can expect an actual upload of this version of the game. I think I said this a long time ago but what I might do is upload it as an opt in beta so people can try it if they want but retain access to what currently exists. Ive also said this before but just as a reminder, if you own the game now youll own the new version too, no repurchase required. Alright, Im going to go finish animal systems. I hope you all enjoyed February 29th, it only comes around every 4 years after all. Ill have more updates in a month. |
Hello all, it feels like its a been a bit since a wrote one of these, but I suppose its just that a lot has happened. As usual its the end of the month so its time I regale you all with whats been going on with Verdant Village. To be completely honest, Im looking forward to February because January turned out to be rather busy with some stuff getting in the way of development. Thankfully, February looks a lot more boring, which means more time to get stuff done.
Some of that is more self-explanatory, others a bit more vague, and others make a lot of work sound like very little work honestly. A good example of that is the system to handle collisions via tilemap. This is extremely important but I just hadnt gotten around to it. To explain briefly, most objects in the world have their own collision built in. For instance, a tree, the players house, etc. However, there are other elements like cliff faces or bodies of water where because they are tilemaps rather than objects they dont have a collision paired with them. This means there needs to effectively be an invisible layer placed over the map that acts as the collision mask. That is what was created. Very boring, also very important. I dont want to make this post a mile long and over explain things but there is one more thing from that list that I want to touch on, because its a fairly large change. You might have noticed near the end I mentioned that specific items now have quality levels. If youve played Stardew, or maybe Graveyard Keeper youll be familiar with these. For those unacquainted lets say you get a chicken egg in game. It is no longer just an egg, it will have a quality attached, in the case of Verdant Village, bronze, silver, gold, or adamantium. This quality level at the moment simply dictates value. Items have a base selling value; a higher quality gives a multiplier to that value. For instance, a silver quality might make it worth 1.5x the normal value. I hadnt planned on doing this, but I found that I couldnt think of a better alternative for livestock. As mentioned before livestock have a happiness level that is dictated by several other factors. This happiness level determines what the animal produces each day. In my outline prior it had much more variance. There was no quality so instead higher happiness would alter things such as, having a higher chance to spawn the product at all (yes in that version you could just have an animal not produce when it should have). It could also make animals produce products faster, for instance sheep could grow their wool in less time. Or in some cases you could get situations were instead of getting one chicken egg per day you would get two. I still like some of these ideas, however there are a lot of problems with it. The first and probably most important being inconsistency. Having a chance to be taking care of your animals and still just not get any products one day because of random chance would feel terrible. Aside from this there was a logistical issue with lowering the time it takes to spawn a product. Sheep for example might take 5 days to grow their wool at low happiness but only 3 days at a high level. While I could do some math behind the scenes and make the numbers work it would lead to inconsistency. The player doesnt really have an idea of when the sheep will finish growing its wool as the happiness level might fluctuate meaning the wool grows at a different rate each day. This means it could be 3 days, could be 7 days, but its hard to tell without meticulously checking the animals stats each day to know what happened. All this is to say that the old method was fairly vague and I think a little too convoluted for its own good. Adding quality to the items allows for something much simpler where the better the happiness value, the higher the item tier. Simple one to one values. In the case of something like sheep where it will take multiple days to get one item Ill use an aggregate of the happiness during the growth time to determine the quality of the resulting item. As I said, I think thats one of the larger changes that has come out of this. I think the reasoning is sound however. Of course while thinking this I of course considered other items as well. Currently crops have gotten the same treatment. I think they can support the same sort of structure and it feels odd to only have quality on animal products. Crops will gain quality based on fertilizer or alchemic items you put on them. More may be done to affect that in the future but for now thats all it is. I did have a brief thought about adding quality levels to seeds so you could effectively breed better seeds but Im not sure how complex I want to get. At some point complexity becomes annoying, so well see. Of course, I may add this on to other things as well. I actually made a note of systems that it might make sense to add quality to. Specifically, alchemy, brewing, cooking, jewelcrafting, and tailoring. That is entirely up in the air at the moment however. I suppose just dont be too surprised if you see the system bleed into those. Hunting and fishing could also potentially see it although Im not sure how quality would be determined outside of some sort of skill level or a luck variable. Anyway, Ive talked enough I think. This is already long by my standards. Its funny, I never feel I have much to talk about and then I exposit for about two and a half pages. As I said at the start, Im expecting February to far better in terms of productivity. Ive got some animal stuff to finish up still. Im staring down pastures which will likely be the toughest part. Aside from that currently you can only buy chickens so I have to extrapolate all this code to all the other animals, but thats mostly just copy paste with some minor edits. After that Im between doing the shipping system, which I was going to do before livestock but I needed the updated UI (which I just got), or moving into dialogue. Ill likely decide when I get to it. Youll hear from me again in a month. I hope you all had a good start to the year, and if youve made it this far, thanks for reading. |
To start things off, happy new year! Its been quite a year for myself, and Verdant Village in general. Ive said it before, but I cant say I was expecting to be in the process of remaking this game at this time. A lot of the framework for the game has been laid since I started in a new engine earlier this year. Were getting fairly close to the point where the more complex systems are in place and hopefully after that development will speed up a bit. |
Im a day late here which Im going to blame on, uh, holidays, lets go with that. Totally not me losing track of time. In any case, big systems were the name of the game this month. That and sprites, lots and lots of sprites. |
Hello everyone, thanks for checking out this devlog. Lets jump right in, its been an interesting month full of things I dont usually do as much. This months work was more planning than work if I had to classify it. |
September has just about come and gone here. Ive been working on a variety of things with Verdant Village this month as Im slowly piecing the game back together. I feel like a lot of the framework is in place at this point. Theres still a lot missing, but I think Im making good progress. Once the framework is done its on to more of the details and little things. I generally find that those little details are usually easier and quicker to add because they are comparably small. A good example is adding perks and skill levels is important, but in terms of system design its a minor detail when compared to something like farming. |
Hello all, time for another update on the game. I think this will be a little shorter than others simply because of what Ive been doing this month. Less stuff to talk about as its been bigger projects. |
Hello all, it is, of course, time for an update on the progress of the game. Im staring at my clock and realizing we are already like 2/3rds of the way through the year which is wild to me. Im also realizing that I probably need to start writing down what I do as I do it so I have a better list to go from for these updates. |
Hello all, time for another update on Verdant Villages development, or rather re-development at this point. Things are moving along smoothly I think. Similar to last month there is definitely still something of a learning curve with the engine. All in all however I think Im moving faster than I was. Which is pretty much all I can ask for. |
Hello all, more than a few things to talk about this time around, so strap in for the excitement of game development. This was basically the first month where I spent the majority of my time actually working on code. Some random things came up that needed to be done, but generally I was coding. |
As usual, another month has passed me by and Im wondering where the time went. Regardless, Im due for a little dev post here to let you all know whats going on. |
As usual time for an update on whats been going on with Verdant Village. The answer to that question is a bit complicated. Sort of something between a lot and not a lot depending on what you interpret as progress. |
I'm not sure I have a good way to segway into this but big changes are coming. So big that I broke convention and didn't just name this "Insert name of month News Update". In fact, I dont know that they could get much bigger.
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Small hotfix incoming. I expected there would probably be a few issues despite testing the new pasture systems. Thankfully nothing was terribly out of line, but there was enough happening that I wanted to address it now rather than waiting for a normal patch cycle. Below are the details for whats been modified. These things have been tested with player save files so they should fix the issues, if you find you still run into problems let me know.
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Alright, patch time is here and there is much to discuss. As I think I stated in the last monthly update this took a bit longer than expected, regardless we are here now. Simply put this patch has tuned up livestock a bit and made room for future additions as now the systems are set up.
[h2]Quality Of Life[/h2]
[h2]Balance Changes[/h2]
[h2]Bug Fixes[/h2]
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Normally I would just wait till the end of the month for this but I wanted to put out a small hotfix to address a few things. Really just two things. The simple reason is that one of these issues was rather disruptive if you were far enough into the mines. In short it would make the area unplayable at deeper levels.
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Hello all, and happy new year! 2022 is just about over, that sort of just whisked by. Before 2023 I wanted to put out a quick news update just to keep everyone informed. Given that there were just two sales on Steam there are likely a good number of people who havent seen one of these before.
[h3]QoL (Quality of Life)[/h3]
[h3]Balance Changes[/h3]
[h3]Bug Fixes[/h3]
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Terribly sorry, broke my own game. I trusted myself from the past to have done something consistently and he certainly did not. There have been reports of players not being able to access areas of the game or getting locked in once they get in. These should all be fixed with this very tiny patch. Sorry again, hope it didn't cause too much trouble.
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Hello all, Im back, with updates, or rather fixes to my previous updates! This isnt very large but there are a couple of things that needed to be addressed which are listed below.
[h2]Bug Fixes[/h2]
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Extremely small hotfix to fix a few dumb issues I overlooked during the patching process. Apologies to anyone who played in the last like 15 hours. Fixes are listed below.
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Its been a long time coming but its finally patch time. Like a procrastinating college student, I am slipping in literally right under my self-imposed deadline. Ah college, what a time, and what a terrible student I was.
[h2]Quality Of Life[/h2]
[h2]Balance Changes[/h2]
[h2]Bug Fixes[/h2]
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Alright, spooky season is coming to a head so its time for an update. This one is going to probably be a little less about what Ive been doing and more about the future, so lets get into it. |
I apologize that Im a few days late with this update. Ive been on a family vacation for the past week so needless to say its been a little less productive than usual. Of course, this means I lost a week this month so I havent gotten around to as much as Id like, but still, as usual, progress was made. |
Hello again, weve once again come to the end of a month and I am once again confused as to how we got here. Ill get right down to business however. If you read the previous news update you may be thinking to yourself Hey Exodus, you said you were looking to patch this month, why are you a big ol liar?. To which I would say, This is the reason its a bad idea to specify release dates. In the words of my father, my mouth is writing checks my ass cannot cash. |
As usual, another month and another quick news update for Verdant Village. This month, Im happy to report, has been pretty productive. |
Well, that was a month that went by far too quickly. Welcome to the end of June devlog for Verdant Village. It feels like I just wrote one of these, but I guess that was a month ago. |
Quick update for whats been going on with Verdant Village here. This month has been something of a mess from an outside perspective. Combination of trying to go on vacation and then getting Covid instead so a chunk of my time was sort of squandered. |
Another small patch to address a few more issues that have cropped up since the quest overhaul of 0.4.7. I suppose this is also a content patch, although its very small. I was midway through adding something and I couldnt backtrack it so now its a live feature.
[h2]Bug Fixes[/h2]
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Another month of development has come and gone for Verdant Village. What did I do this month? I honestly have to look; things have been a bit crazy lately. Most importantly 0.4.7 and a subsequent hotfix went live this month. These were both relatively small patches focusing on QoL for some things Id been meaning to get around to. |
I just wanted to put some notes to go along with this roadmap. As specified near the top of the roadmap this only shows larger planned features. Smaller additions and changes will also be occurring, but they arent detailed here. |
Quick hotfix for a few outstanding issues with quests that cropped up during the modifications made in 0.4.7. Everything that is addressed shouldnt have any persistent effect on player progress. The most relevant bug, the minecart not repairing, should leave your mine progress intact as well.
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Time for another patch! I got delayed a little bit due to a few art requests that took a little longer than expected. All in all this patch is somewhat small. I think this is the tail end of a lot of QoL changes and some bug fixes for the game that have been mentioned in the Steam forums and discord. If I didnt address something you mentioned it probably means Im still thinking about it.
[h2]Quality Of Life[/h2]
[h2]Balance Changes[/h2]
[h2]Bug Fixes[/h2]
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Another quick news update here. Strange, I cant remember where March went, but I guess thats pretty normal for me at this point. |
I feel like Ive been posting a lot lately, but its the end of the month and that means another news update. What happened in February? Well a lot, and also not a lot, at least in terms of what I expected to do. |
Alright here is another hotfix for Verdant Village. I call it a hotfix, but honestly this got a little out of control. I was intending to just fix a few issues that had cropped up that were causing some serious, if a little rare, problems. And an extra week or so later here we are with a whole host of fixes and some smaller improvements and changes. I dont have much else to say but below is the full changelog for this patch. Fingers crossed I can stop searching for bugs for a bit and get to work on some features.
[h3]Balance Changes[/h3]
[h3]Bug Fixes[/h3]
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As per usual its time for a quick hotfix. This one is pretty small but it was a couple of things that I either forgot to address or addressed incorrectly. Details below.
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It is once again patch time. To be honest, I was a little worried I wasnt going to hit this deadline. I had what I thought was a huge problem on my hands just a day ago. Turns out it was poor optimization on my part that looked like it was a bug. In any case, that has been fixed.
[h3]QoL (Quality of Life)[/h3]
[h3]Balance Changes[/h3]
[h3]Bug Fixes[/h3]
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Already a month into 2022. It doesnt feel like it at all, but regardless its time to give you all an update as usual. This month was a little strained due to my holidays seeping into the first week of January, but a lot has still been done. |
One more news update for 2021. Its been a long year with a lot of updates and changes throughout, but well get into that later. There isnt a ton to talk about for this month. December tends to be slow with the holidays taking over the latter half of the month. Still, I have been getting things done, just nothing spectacular, I guess.
Listing things out like that makes it seem sort of small actually. I think condensing down Bug Fixes and QoL into two lines is the cause of that. Looking back at the patch notes bug fixes alone were pretty much always multi page lists. Its also occurred to me while making this just how many things were reworked in large ways, which I cant say I planned to do from the outset. Looking back at this is a bit telling, I think. A lot of my time was spent fixing bugs or reworking systems. I dont want to set myself up here, but I think 2022 will be far more focused on additions rather than fixes or changes. Of course, Ill fix whatever crops up but I think things are reasonably stable, bar a couple of outstanding issues. At this point most of the major systems are in place. Major systems are something I define as a system that will take me multiple weeks to code and setup. There were several of these in the past year, the mines rework, fermentation, hunting refinement, alchemy rework, etc. At the moment I can foresee a few more large systems, such as combat, the topic and general conversation/cutscene/romance system, one that I wont mention because I havent talked about it yet, and the compendium, which wont be hard so much as just a lot of stuff. Keep in mind these are the large systems, it doesnt constitute other smaller things such as animal breeding, secrets, tailoring, holidays, or other things. So, there is still a lot to do but the point is a lot of this years work was squashing bugs, but another huge part was just setting up or reworking very large systems. Since there arent as many large systems to work on going forward, Ill have time to fill out the game in smaller ways, more NPCs, zones, and things to populate the areas. Essential a lot of whats been done I would call framework. Once the frame work is in place its very easy to create things within it. So with any luck that means more content faster. All that said Im excited to get started on 2022. I think a lot of cool things are going to be added to Verdant Village this year. With any luck you all will have the same opinion. As always, thanks for sticking with me through the bugs and development process. I appreciate all the feedback, reviews, reports, and everything else. This game is something Ive wanted to make since I was like 11 so Im happy I finally get to do that and share it with people. I hope you all had a good 2021 (or as good as it could be with Covid), and I wish you all a happy new year as well. |
With the recent patching and such it feels a little too soon to be writing something up again however, here we are. A day late of course because it nearly slipped my mind. |
Another small hotfix patch for Verdant Village. This one is mostly to sure up one issue but makes a few other small changes listed below.
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Another quick hotfix for two things, one larger than the other. Probably not worth writing anything out in detail so Ill just list the changes below.
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Im back once again with a small hotfix for patch V0.4.5. Ive missed a thing or two here as usual. I apologize for the inconvenience. Not to make excuses, but this game has a lot of systems and things tend to slip past me. Or I make a change and dont realize that it breaks something else.
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It's finally patch time for Verdant Village again. I was hoping to push this out a little more quickly than I did honestly. I kept running into small issues or new bugs that prevented me from doing so however. It sort of turned into a situation of just one more thing, then Ill patch until, well, here we are.
[h3]QoL (Quality of Life)[/h3]
[h3]Balance Changes[/h3]
[h3]Bug Fixes[/h3]
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Looks like October has come and gone here, time for another look into development. Theres been a lot of work going on, but not a lot of standout developments to really dig into. Last month I talked a bit about combat and showed off a few monster designs. Work is still proceeding on that front, but my attention has turned pretty squarely onto this next small patch. |
Time for another news update. Things have slowed down a little bit for the game this month. Although, thinking on it, that might only be in comparison to last month where there was a large content patch and then several smaller patches. |
Another small hotfix to take care of one serious issue and a few other small things I stumbled across. Not much to say other than I hope this is the end of the bugs for now so I can buckle down on combat. Of course, if you run into something let me know via the steam forums or the discord. As usual, full changelog below.
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Another small hotfix to take care of some outstanding issues from patch 0.4. I think this will put the game in a pretty stable state. Of course if you find more bugs report them and Ill deal with whatever comes up. With that said there isnt much else I think, the full changelog is below.
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Another month down, this one with some significant progress which was long overdue. If youre new to these sorts of posts I make them at the end of the month (and usually miss posting them by a day because something inevitably comes up to prevent me from writing them). |
Another small hotfix to take care of several issues that have arisen post patch 0.4. There are still a few things Im looking into as well as minor additions that people have requested. The biggest bug that I cant figure out at the moment is the bow becoming locked. If you experience an issue where you fire the bow and then are suddenly unable to do so again please let me know along with whatever details you remember.
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Hello all, very small hotfix patch for a few things today. Given how many different systems could have blown up in V0.4 Im pleasantly surprised to see that the bugs (black screen and saving aside) seem to be isolated to a few key things. Of course, they still need to be addressed and I will attempt to do so quickly.
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Alright, this has been an extremely long time coming. I am happy to announce that there is finally a patch for Verdant Village. Ive spent a long time on this so hopefully it lives up to the wait.
[h3]QoL (Quality of Life)[/h3]
[h3]Balance Changes[/h3]
[h3]Bug Fixes[/h3]
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Many things got taken care of this month. Looking back at the list of changes that I keep I actually surprised myself a bit. Ive been tied up working on larger systems for so long that I forgot what its like to solve a lot of smaller problems and fix bugs. |
As usual Im a day or two late here, but better late than never I suppose. As usual, work has been steadily continuing. Ive actually upped my regular hours in a sort of self-imposed crunch time. I plan to stay that way until this patch comes through. |
This month was more of the same for the most part. Work on the mines from last month continued. The scope increased slightly, hence the longer turn around time. As it stands, I have one more thing to program for the mines then I just have to create the randomized chunks to fill in the levels. This is arguably the easy part. Programing new elements is usually what takes longer as problem solving is usually involved. Once Im done programming things however it should just be a matter of piecing the terrain together. That can be a bit tedious but it usually doesnt take long. |
This might actually be a short devlog for once, guess well see. Not that a lot hasnt happened its just all centralized into one system this time around. The month of March was spent very wholly on the mines. Ive been putting this off for a long time and I finally decided to tackle it this month. I spoke briefly about this in the March news, but now the system is far more concrete, so I can expound on things a bit. |
Another month of work for Verdant Village down. Im a few days early, but its the weekend so Ive got time to write this. A lot of things were done this month, but not a ton of it is worth mentioning in explicit detail. Mostly this month I got around to a lot of the QoL and bug fixing thats been on my list. There is still a lot to go, but a significant dent was made in March. |
Another quick update for progress on Verdant Village. Were getting closer to an actual patch. Feels like Ive been saying that for a long time, but my artist is getting closer to catching up on things. So hopefully sooner rather than later on that. |
Another quick news update for the game. Things are progressing well enough. As far as the game itself goes Ive moved on to bug fixing, balance and QoL for now. The major additions of the coming patch are in place, now Im just working to hopefully make some things a little nicer, and fix some of the issues that have cropped up. |
Another quick news update before the end of the year. Also, congratulations, you survived 2020! So, to start things off, I have to mention a few things regarding working on this game. Normally, I wouldnt dive into this stuff because you probably want to know about the game and not my life, but this affects development pretty heavily. |
Another small patch for today. This patch should address a few of the more egregious bugs that have been pointed out or that Ive discovered myself. This message will also serve as an update for what is happening in terms of development and where the game is heading/what Ive been doing all this time. If you want to see the actual changes to the game scroll to the bottom, otherwise strap in. Oh, and before I forget happy Thanksgiving! And if you dont celebrate the holiday happy November 26th I guess?
Those are the things that have been added, they are ready to go, I just need sprites. Now there is something else Ive been working on that is big. In fact, Ive been splitting my days in half because of it. The first half is used to make things similar to what is listed above. I.E. systems, quests, zones, etc. The second half of my day I use for the impending dialogue system, which sounds kind of ominous now that I read it a second time. Ive mentioned it before, but Ill restate in brief. The general idea I have for dialogue is something that I hope is more organic. Throughout the course of the game you will do certain things, actions you take, discoveries you make, etc. These will sometimes open up topics of conversation with various NPCs. These topics can be anything from a personal detail on that character, to their opinion on something that happened, or even lore regarding the world. Aside from that each character is planned to have a short story relevant to them. These serve as the meat of conversation for each character. If youve played Stardew Valley imagine the conversations and events that existed for the marriage candidates. Each character will have something similar to those. On average so far these stories consist of around 5 or so events. Completing these will grant the player rewards. Some of these will grant more generic rewards, unless I can think up other things, but many, I think around half of them cause more tangible changes to the game. Things like the construction of new buildings, adding new zones, unlocking systems, dialogue changes, adding new characters to the town, etc. These conversations that you engage in also allow you to make dialogue choices. I would like to say though that these are just cosmetic and hopefully allow you to roleplay a bit. As much as Id like to have branching story paths and meaningful decisions, even Im not crazy enough to try to implement that. Still these will hopefully allow for some interactivity during conversations. To clarify all of this, this is a massive part of the game. Like probably one of, if not the largest, things Ive ever added to the game. Looking at the relevant word document, it is sitting at about 28,000 words at the moment. At time of writing, I have made 4 main stories as well as 56 smaller topics. For reference, including extra character that show up to town, there are around 50 characters in the game. Im throwing all these numbers around to hopefully give you a scope of what this is. I dont want to give the impression that this will be done in a week and ready to go. It will likely take me a while. By the time its all done it will probably have the word count of an average sized novel. I havent decided if I will add these topics in a more piecemeal fashion or all at once. Piecemeal seems like the way to go, but it will involve working to make sure everything patches correctly. In short, how it gets added to the game is still up in the air. As for what is next in terms of systems, my current projects are perks and secrets. The perks, as anyone who has played thus far, are a bit lacking. It was always my intention to add more Ive just been swamped with other things Ive deemed more important. It also helps to have most of the systems in the game now so I actually have stuff to make perks for. Ironically, I just paused to write down two more perk ideas. At the moment, there are 11 perks in the game. By the end there will probably be 44. Why 44 you ask? Because thats how many can fit in that box of course. At the moment I think I have about 30 more planned so I just have to consider a few more, then I can start putting them in. As for secrets well thats next. The map is big, as you might have noticed. At the moment, it is also somewhat empty *cough* western fields *cough* *cough*. There are things to do in most zones, but for the most part its empty space. While some other additions will hopefully go towards fixing this, Id like to plug the game map with small puzzles and secrets that give small rewards. These will mostly be relegated to the zones that are farther away from town. The hope is that these will serve as smaller distractions or things you can stumble across and get some sort of permanent item from. With any luck it will give another reason to actually explore the map a bit. So, all in all, thats about it. Plenty of stuff to come. Once I have a steady income at my disposal a content patch should come soon after. Once that patch is out of the way the next major one should be the combat system, which should be sizable as well. In the background of all this, Ill continue to write more dialogue which will see the light of day at some point. Im personally excited for all this, I hope the rest of you are as well. Ill be trying to do these updates on a monthly basis I think just to keep people informed on what is happening. It seems like a good interval to go with from what I can tell. Lastly, I wanted to quickly say thank you. If you purchased the game, I understand that trusting early access is something of a leap of faith. I hope you feel you already got some of your moneys worth out of Verdant Village. In the future, I hope this will be something you can see in your game library and feel like your money was well spent. And now, without further ado, if you read this far, the change log for this hotfix is below. Verdant Village Patch 0.3.5 Full Changelog -Revamped the fishing system entirely. Please bear with the graphics, most of them are temporary and will be replaced as soon as possible, apologies, and thank you.
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Thought it was about time I did a proper news post for Verdant Village. As I just checked the last real content patch came out at the end of August. In case you werent aware I used to update on a weekly basis. I changed this, mostly based on how Steam works. It seems to want you to push large patches, not weekly builds to take advantage of marketing stuff. Aside from that, the export process takes an extremely long time, at least a few hours to get everything exported and pushed out (Im looking at you Mac and Linux users, nah just kidding). Doing that on a weekly basis feels like a waste of time since I probably lose close to a half a day in the process. |
Another small hotfix patch today. A couple of things were brought to my attention and some things I just found naturally. Aside from hotfixes, there are a few visual updates and minor improvements that will hopefully smooth out some other issues.
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Quick hotfix today. There were two things pointed out to me recently. The first is that if you were hunting squirrels any fur they dropped would turn into meat once it hit your inventory. This should now be fixed.
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Tiny little hotfix patch today. Ive heard a few times now that hunting has some bugs. After looking through it myself I found a few outstanding issues as well. Given that they had the potential to be fairly game breaking I decided to put out a little hotfix for it.
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This message should be shorter than usual. In short, I will no longer be doing patches once per week. Ill explain the general thought process behind this below. The first thing is that it takes a fair amount of time to patch the game. By that, Im literally referring to the process of exporting and uploading everything, along with writing patch notes, updating social media, etc. That eats into dev time a little more than Id like it to each week. |
This weeks work was pretty content focused. Before I get into it, I wanted to apologize about some of the alchemy items added last week. There was a bug with some of them preventing them from being moved or sold. That has been fixed in this patch. Normally, Id have put out a hotfix over the weekend for something that big, but last weekend was pretty hectic so things got delayed. Hopefully, it didnt affect anyone too badly.
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Patching is coming slightly early this week. Ill be out of town starting tomorrow so I thought Id sneak this in while I can. That said, not a ton happened this week, or at least thats how it felt. I suppose it was lots of behind the scenes things.
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Patch day is here once again, this one can probably be considered a bigger one. Before we get too far into it, I have one thing I want to address. Its come to my attention that there is a bug where when you launch the game, youll (rarely) get a window, which will simply be a black screen. The game will never load, and if you try closing the window and relaunching the same thing will happen.
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Hello all, time for patch notes. First off, thanks to everyone who has purchased the game so far, it means a lot to see anyone spend money on something Ive been making. If you are new to all of this, Ill say a few things here. At the end of this are a few links to various social media stuff. Im not really active on them to be honest, but whenever there is an update it will be pushed through all of these outlets. So, if you are looking to pay attention to changes following any of those would be your best bet. One other thing, I normally do patch notes the same way each time. The bulk of the notes will be me talking about various things to give a more complete story of what happened since the last patch. However, if you dont care to hear me ramble on (I wouldnt blame you) there is always a list of the actual changes to the game at the end of the notes.
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Been a while since Ive done this. Ive been holed up working on things prior to Verdant Villages early access release. Before any notes, lets get that out of the way. This will likely be the last patch (unless I have to hotfix) before the early access release on Steam. After a long, whats it been now like 5 months or so, open alpha on Itch I believe the game is finally ready for early access. If it were up to me, I think I would just keep it under wraps until it was done, but the financial nature of things is that I have to put this out and see where I stand.
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There will be an AMA in the Verdant Village Discord Server to discuss anything about the game and its development. The AMA will take place at 12:00 PM on Thursday June 18th (CDT). |
There will be an AMA in the Verdant Village Discord Server to discuss anything about the game and its development. The AMA will take place at 12:00 PM on Wednesday June 10th (CDT). |