Expand your horizons [0.2.11]

We have packed a lot of work in this version, hope you enjoy it! You can download it for free from the page at itch.io.

As we continue pouring work into this, we get closer to a point of providing a paid “Earlier Access” version via itch.io. That will probably happen for version 0.3.0 which is not extremely far away. For now, this version remains completely free. A demo will likely remain free with limited in-game time (10 days).

We have been streaming weekly on Wednesday and Friday, 11 AM PST / 7 PM GMT. Subscribe to our twitch so you don’t miss it! But if you do, these are always backed as VoD into our YouTube channel, so subscribe to it as well!

The overall goal for v0.3.0 in the roadmap is improving Farming, so that has been the criteria guiding the development of these new versions. Here is a summarized log of the changes and the work behind them.

Visuals

Following suggestions by friends, we have expanded the field of view to cover the entire viewport instead of a circle in the middle of the screen.

While this will have some implications over the perceived size of the world, as well as the future possible auto-mapping features, I believe it works pretty fine for immersion purposes and addresses the problem we were having with the underused areas of the UI.

Additionally, there are now atmospheric colors based on the time of the day with smooth transitions between them, removing the sudden change to nighttime and adding a bit more immersion to the exploration experience. I thought I was being smart by using HSL interpolation instead of RGB but the hues went crazy, so I ended up using chroma.js which was a breeze to create nice-looking gradients.

I also did a first incremental pass to the title screen art; originally a downscaled AI-generated art, so there was a lot of work done removing noise, and flattening colors in preparation for adding proper shading.

Animals

Although we will be focusing on the developments around animals in a future milestone, a tweak was needed to prevent out-of-control exponential breeding; now you will have to feed them daily in order for them to progress through their breeding cycle. There is a new command for this (Shift+F, Feed), and it can also be accessed from the actions menu when you are in front of an animal.

The changes designed for the future stipulate things such as different types of diets per animal race, and more nuances and complexities for the player to consider while breeding, however for now all animals eat the same kind of food (nuts that can be found in the forests.)

Crafting

Fixes were made to enable crafting liquid items into containers besides cooking (such as paints); containers that are already partially filled can also be reused now to craft more of the same liquid.

Note however that the Paint action is still disabled, and paints can only be used to craft other items such as clay tiles.

Gameplay tweaks

Small but important changes were made based on feedback from playtesting sessions, including the following:

• Reduce costs for actions drastically (both time and fatigue)
• Reduce the weight of stones
• Reduce hunger recovery for knock nuts
• Make rafts carry-able
• Allow walking over sprouts before they become shrubs

Additionally, we are also now displaying the real reason why you cannot carry an item now when your inventory is full.