Emerald woods – downloadable! (0.1.4)

The streak of weekly releases continues for now, hope you enjoy it!

Play online (or download!) at https://slash.itch.io/emerald-woods

Downloadable build

You can now download Emerald Woods so you can play offline easily any time you want. We are using Electron for this hence the big download size, but that shouldn’t be a problem in 2022 (luckily!). The recent update to JSRL was really helpful for this.

This also comes coupled with an “up to date” check done at startup, it will let you know if you are using an outdated version so you can quickly zip there and get the latest changes!

Note that, at least for the moment, I’m also keeping the online version up and working; also for the moment I’m only producing builds for Windows, but if you are on Mac or Linux you can still play online.

Exploration

I made some efforts to put some small constraints on exploration so it’s more interesting; you’ll now be heavily affected if you don’t sleep next to a campfire, losing a bit of your max health every day. Campfires are also a bit more expensive to create now and require Flintstone which is very rare (you start with 1 but can recover it by axing a campfire).

The idea behind this is to make campfires work as shelters, you need to build them at a given place to come back every night, dismantle and make another one deeper in the woods… if you want to explore further.

The starting cabin also has a “campfire” now, of course (should rename that to “fireplace”), so you can sleep cozily there.

Audio

The intensity of the walk sound effects has been lowered, and the sounds for inventory have been changed from a loud beep to something muter.

Got some new sweet sound effects from QuietGecko which were promptly integrated; these included sounds for crafting paint, building/destroying campfires, and painting stuff.

We also added a location-based sound loop for the campfires which we’ll be improving on the next versions so it fades based on distance.

Visuals

There are no big visual changes for this version, however, several icons were changed including the berries, berry bushes, and mushrooms.

Stability

• A critical bug causing the game to crash when hanging around the map borders was fixed.
• Several instances of missing checks to make sure the player could carry were added (when pulling fruit, capturing animals, crafting items, or sacrificing animals), before they would cause the grabbed item to be lost.
• Prevent contextual action waterfalling when some action cannot be performed in the chain, and restore input accordingly. This was causing the players to execute the wrong contextual action when their inventory was full.