Emerald Woods - Swimmer [0.3.3]

A new version of Emerald Woods, the chill no-combat farming, building, and exploration roguelike where you can die, is now available!

Play for free for now (online/windows) at https://slash.itch.io/emerald-woods, we are still in an “Earlier Access” phase, so let us know any suggestions you have in the discord!

If you like the game, you can still become an Early Supporter, and get your name into the game!

Continuing with the roadmap to 0.4, this version includes a lot of water-related changes. First off, you can now swim into rivers and lakes, so the raft is no longer required to get across them! However, swimming is a very tiring activity, so keep an eye on your fatigue else you may easily faint while swimming which might be fatal!

Rivers also have currents now; you will drift while swimming in a current, and swimming against the current will be a very intensive effort.

But it’s not just about swimming; you can also now dive into lakes and deep rivers, and once you are underwater you can explore flooded caverns to look for rare materials and plants. This required heavy changes internally to support layered terrain, but it definitively gives a new level of depth to the game. The underwater level is procedurally generated, based on the surface level, with the water bodies carved into the rock and then expanded into caverns. Note that while underwater, you will consume oxygen very quickly, so make sure not to get too far away from surfaceable water!

Aquatic animals will also now spawn underwater, instead of the previous special spawning on the water surface to emulate some sort of “fishing”. That will eventually be replaced with real fishing.

On an unrelated note, point lights on the world now use raycasting to determine the areas they lighten; this means they will no longer ignore walls and other obstacles! it doesn’t have a huge gameplay impact (at least for now), but it was just not right so I had to correct it.

Finally, I added full-screen mode to the executable versions; in order to do this had to add the ifdef-loader module to allow conditional typescript compilation, since bundling the electron library on web builds is quite troublesome, but is needed for the executable versions to do things out of the sandbox, like closing the game.

In the future, it will come in handy when we are doing things that interact directly with the filesystem, like saving games or improved modding support.