26 October

InDev 29 Road Map - The Quality of Life Update

An update I've been wanting to work on for a while now is finally coming, the Quality of Life update! This update will mainly focus on fleshing out some of the mid and late game and improving upon the existing systems. The main focus will be the new upgradable farms, housing and storage. But there's also some other nice tidbits, like the new aging and trader systems!

I'm really excited for this update, as it's the first in a while that steers away from working on the defense mechanics.

This is a fairly large patch, and I may break it up into two parts depending on the timeline. A lot of the new features are not that technically-complex, but could take more time than expected.



Aging / Lifelong Health System

• Villagers will now age and die. But through providing them a healthy, happy life you can help them live longer.
  
• Villagers will eventually "retire" and no longer be able to take a job, but when they chat with villagers they will impart their wisdom on them, giving them experience bonuses so they level up faster.
  
• Having good housing, keeping people well fed, happy and having clinics as well as many other factors will assist in extending villager's age.

Social System

• The chat system will be rewritten, adding a "social" bar, similar to health, hunger and thirst.
  
• They will no longer chat somewhat randomly to boost happiness, rather, they will chat when their social bar is low. A high social bar will help boost happiness, a low one will make it drop.

Catjeet Traders, Marketplaces and Gold

• New Catjeet traders will visit any village that has a marketplace built.
  
• Catjeet traders will allow you to buy and sell goods from them, and they will stock a "global" inventory. Meaning if you sell 100 rocks from one village, you can buy the same 100 rocks in another later.
  
• You will also be able to buy/hire Catjeet workers, who will join your village and become part of your workforce, offering another way to expand your population.
  
• The Catjeet will deal in gold coins. You can get gold coins either by selling items to the Catjeet, or by mining gold ore, turning it into gold ingots at the forge, and turning the ingots into coins at one of the smithies.
  
• Gold coins will be an actual resource in the game, so you need to make space to hold your wealth!
  
• Oh, and Catjeet have tails.

Upgradable Houses

• Houses will now be upgradable and the concept of how housing works will be changed around a bit, encouraging players to build multiple house types depending on their play preferences.
  
• Rather than tents, shacks and hovels, you will now get to pick between different quality houses. Deciding if you want a low occupancy high quality home (faster energy regeneration and a happiness boost), or high occupancy low quality homes (slow energy regeneration and no happiness boost).
  
• Most houses will have roughly the same cost and physical space requirements, with some exceptions. The player just decides if they want high occupancy low quality homes, or low occupancy high quality ones.

Upgradable Farms

• Both current farms will be removed from the game.
  
• The new farm will have a larger build footprint than the original Large Farm, but will have 5 upgrade phases, starting out roughly the same quality as the small farm, and upgrading into something much better than the original large farm.
  
• Upgrading farms will give you more crop spaces, and possibly faster growth rates.

Upgradable Storage and Storage Management System

• All storage buildings are being replaced with a new buildings. Similar to farms.
  
• The new buildings can be upgraded 4 times. Starting out slightly worse than the original small storage, and upgrading up to being much better than the original.
  
• You'll be able to click on each storage building, and enable/disable certain materials from being stored there.
  
• There will still be resource-specific storage like we have now, as well as a catch all. But the catch all can not store quite as much overall as its resource-specific counterparts.
  
• A new "Gold storage" building will be added, to accompany the new Catjeet trading system and currency being added to the game.

24 October

Follow Up: Let's Talk About Leaving Early Access.

Hey again everyone,

Thanks for the ridiculous amount of feedback you all provided over in the original announcement. I've read pretty much all of it, and I decided to write a nice neat follow up addressing the common feedback among all of you, since even my own comments get buried in the sea of feedback over in the other announcement.

Feel free to continue providing some follow up feedback of your own down in the comments! I'm always open for more.

Here's some of the hottest topics;

This ones an interesting one to address. Many people are requesting "endgame" content or a campaign mode of some kind. The problem is, this game isn't actually the kind of game that makes sense to have either.

I could shoehorn in a campaign, but that really is just "forcing goals" and masking areas where the content is lacking, and I don't feel that would jive well with the nature of the game. Although a scenario mode is on the drawing board and may be implemented at a later date!

Most of the time in a game like this, when people are asking for "endgame" what they're really asking is "Give me more late game content" without realizing it. That's certainly something I want to address in future patches, but that's not really "endgame". That's simply adding more late game content and pushing the content wall farther away.

My plan is to keep pushing that content wall out as far as I can, with the end goal of a player never really being able to experience everything in a single village, and if they somehow do, they're probably satisfied with the hours they put in and is ready to move on to another game in their library.

This goal simply takes time though, I can't make an "Endgame" patch, as that wouldn't make much sense and that's not really how all this works. Endgame is really just the content wall being hit and giving the player some arbitrary goal, that once hit, still circles back to the same problem; nothing left to do. The ultimate goal isn't really endgame, it's to avoid the content wall being hit all together. So my plan is to just keep on chugging out more content, endlessly, before and after the game leaves Early Access.

Whole heartedly agree, and I will take any and all feedback related to accomplish that. :)

The original game design plan did not include a world map, this was something added post Early Access. I am still wrestling with a solid plan to push forward on tying all the maps together, and would love to hear your thoughts on the matter.

Keep in mind a technical limitations when providing your ideas though; The simulation can only run on one map at a time, and the passage of time can only happen on one map at a time. The villages cannot communicate with each other from a code standpoint. Each map is in "stasis" when it is not being played, only the data in the map currently being played, and the world map itself, is accessible.

A lot of you have great ideas for future content, surprisingly a lot of your ideas are actually already planned too. But one thing I noticed quite a lot in the other announcement was many people seem to be under the impression the game's development will stop, slow down, or transition into DLC releases once the game is released.

This is wrong.

The game will continue to be developed, at the same pace it is currently being developed after release. The day Rise to Ruins is released will not be the day development stops, it will only be the day the community feels the game is worth the pricetag as-is, without any additional content. But development will keep pushing forward! :)

This sort of plays in with the feedback above about needing <X> before release. The game will never have DLC (outside of the soundtrack). If you own the game, you will own all the content the game will ever have. You will never pay more for anything extra. Anything that could have been "DLC" will just be a free content patch in a later version of the game. So no worries! I have you guys covered there.

It's planned, don't worry about this one. After release, saves will only break if there's literally no other option. But "never" is the ultimate plan.

Agreed, and this will be partially resolved with the new per-map difficulty, weather, and mob spawning settings being added in a future patch. :)

Sadly, modding is not planned as an official feature. Unofficially, the game is written in Java, and thus anyone with the technical skills can simply decompile the game and do whatever they want (Hint: Minecraft technically doesn't support modding either!).

But, workshop support is still planned for custom maps and localization support, slated for release some time after leaving Early Access.

There's no gentle way to really say this, but I only speak English. I can't support your native language (unless it's English!). There's too many technical and logistical problems in a game like Rise to Ruins to pull it off effectively and professionally. Thus why I am adding user-made localization support to the workshop, to allow you guys to maintain them yourselves. :)

Now, before you say "But <service> will translate the game for you!" or "I'll do it for you, no worries!", keep in mind the game is constantly in development, now and after leaving Early Access. I can't pay a professional service to retranslate parts of the game every major patch and I can't rely on fans to keep with it either, it's just not financially and logistically realistic.

I apologize for it, but it's just the way it has to be. I'm a one man dev with limited time, budget and resources in this department. The best option here is to open up the workshop and let you guys maintain localization yourself. :)

Agreed and planned. :)

Thanks for taking the time to read this wall-o-text, see you in the comments.