Today's build includes the new Quest Slots system and the new Story Quest, Heirloom!



One of the neat things about the Quest Slots system is it allows me more options when creating quests. For example, a quest can now ask you to craft something. The new system allows me to add that craftable to the crafting list only when the quest asks for it and then remove it when that part of the quest is over. It also allows me to add the new item to the Quest Slots, rather than your inventory.

Note that two existing quests that formerly put items in your inventory, Cursed Trees and Improved Helmet have been updated to use the Quest Slots system. In the case of Cursed Trees, any cursed wood that you have will no longer work with this quest. So if you have some cursed wood and your save is at the part where you need to bring it to the townsperson, just cut down another tree and get a new cursed wood.

For Improved Helmet, the quest system will work for either an in inventory Meteorite Ore or one in a quest slot. This is because if you already got the Meteorite Ore, but saved before dropping it off, you'd have no way of getting one again for your quest slot. So I made that quest backwards compatible, but any time you get it going forward it will fully use the Quest Slots system.

All four story quests also use this system now. These quests will also all work just fine if you are midway through a quest in a save before the Quest Slots system went live. So if you already used the Magic Pool on the Apple in the Apple Tree quest, but haven't returned it to the NPC yet, when you load your save, you won't see the Magic Apple in your Quest Slot. But speaking to the NPC will complete the quest. The same is true for Bookworm and Wishing Wisp.

In addition to adding new quests, I'm also going to redo the Bed Rest quest to use this system. I never really liked that quest as it didn't feel like an adventure at all. The new version will have you craft something special after finding some special ingredients to heal the sick NPC. Should be a lot more fun and you won't have to give up a healing potion!

This build also includes a couple of fixes related to chopping down trees and the house roof color system.

I've got the new quest slots system working with the Cursed Tree, Upgraded Helmet, Apple Tree, Bookworm, and Wishing Wisp quests along with the fourth Story Quest, Heirloom. I also added a counter to the quest item slots that will appear if you need to get more than one of an item. In this case, the Stack of Books in the far right slot shows that I have three. These slots also support pop-up text so you can mouse over an item if you aren't sure what it is.



Lots to test since this is a pretty big change to the way items can be obtained and how the quest system looks for them. I might add a couple more quests or release this first with only the new Heirloom Quest and then add more quests afterwards. Depends on how testing goes.

I'm finally finding some time to add some more quests!

As part of the next update, I'm also going to be adding some new slots to the Inventory UI specifically for quest items. These items can't be equipped or trashed and don't take up inventory space. That way a townsperson can give you something or you can obtain something for a townsperson and you'll actually see it in your inventory.

Quest Item Slots (click the image to see full size)

In the screenshot above, you'll note a new Story Quest..."Heirloom".

One of my townspeople has given me a ceremonial axe that has precious sentimental value and as the third part of the quest, I'm bringing it to the magic pool to clean it up! The axe is in one of the quest slots underneath my Inventory.

Existing quests such as the Ram Helmet, Cursed Trees, and the Story Quests will get updated to use the new slots as well. So items like Cursed Wood, Special Ore, and the Apples, Books, and other items from Story Quests will appear in these slots.

I'm hoping to add a few more quests in addition to Heirloom along with the Quest Slots.

Today's update includes part of the material and texture optimizations and the ability to change the color of the roofs of the houses in your town!



Holding left-ctrl and right-clicking your mouse will bring up the Roof Color Choice UI provided your cursor is over a Wooden House or a Stone House. I'll be adding the ability to do this with most other buildings in a future update.

You can either choose to change the color of the selected house or you can change all of the houses to the color. If you select All Houses, then any future houses you place will also use that color by default.

On the optimization front, about half of the structures are now using the optimized materials. Once they are all updated I can then add the color roof option to the rest of the buildings.

This update also includes an optimization to the night lighting to reduce an issue that sometimes caused framerate drops during night.

The optimizations should help with memory usage and the fact that it also unlocked the ability to color the town building's roofs is a nice bonus I hope!

I'm working on the new house roof color system as part of the optimization update and wanted to share some in-game screenshots rather than the mock-ups I showed in the last update.

The UI to change a house's roof color can be accessed by holding left-ctrl and right-clicking the house. You can choose to change the roof of a single house or change all of the houses. If you select "All Houses" any future houses that you place will automatically start out with that roof color.


A house with a purple roof!


I'm hoping to have the optimization work and this system completed in a couple of days. Initially only houses will have access to the roof color system. I'll likely add the option to the Stone Champion's Home and other buildings in a future update. My primary focus is the optimization work, but it's always better when I can add something fun at the same time!

I mentioned in an earlier announcement that I wanted to focus on optimization for a bit to help the game run better, especially on lower spec machines. I'm still working on stuff, but I wanted to share something that I hope you all will find pretty cool.

Right now every building in the game uses it's own material to determine what it looks like. For the most part this is because they have different roof colors and I've used a paint program to manually create each different color. Thing is, materials use up a lot of memory and a large town might have 15-20 materials, just for the buildings.

So I'm working on changing the way the materials work with the buildings. Without getting into too much of the technical stuff, the new method will allow buildings to share the same material, while also having different roof colors.

As a side-effect of this change, I can also add the ability for YOU to determine the roof colors and even allow for the same kind of building to have different colors.



What you are looking at above is a test, using five wooden houses all with different roof colors. In the current system, this would be five materials, and be limited by the colors I chose when making them. In the new system, these are updated in code, while the game is running. So not only is it ONE material instead of five, but the color choices could be almost anything as well.

Want every building in your town to have a red roof? Done. How about a rainbow town? Sure! You get the idea. :)



Reducing the materials will save a lot on memory and since doing the optimization could also unlock more customization, it's a no-brainer!. It's going to take me a bit of time to update all of the buildings to use this new method (and then also add a way for you to change the colors), but I think it'll be worth it.

Today's update is a quick hotfix to fix a bug related to the new quest system. The bug caused the quest manager to stop giving out quests if the scheduled quest timer was set to midnight. The fix resolves this issue.

In this build I have also turned off anti-aliasing. Having it turned on is causing white artifacts/dots to appear around objects, especially trees.

This build also includes a fix to Spiderthorn in the Town Storage menu. The town storage menu will now correctly display the amount of Spiderthorn in your town's storage and taking Spiderthorn from storage will now correctly stack in your inventory.

I'm also updating the engine I am using so i can start using some of the new features. Just letting you all know since updating the engine to the latest version and then updating HammerHelm to account for the changes, can take a bit of time. So the next update may not be for a few days.

I'm currently focusing on some more optimization work and more options in the settings menu. These are mostly meant to help lower spec PCs to run the game at higher and more predictable framerates. So yea, not exactly super exciting stuff, but important nonetheless. After that I want to get back to adding more features and more content!

Thank you again everyone for your support and feedback!

Today's build includes a really big update to the Quest Manager. Most of this is behind the scenes, but it's a much better system that allows for more control over quests.

In this new system you should never go really long periods of time without having a quest and you won't get a new quest immediately after finishing one. The system also adjusts when new quests are created based on how many quests you have active.

This update also includes:

• Workers who are set to gather stone will continue to do so when the Trees are cursed.
  
• Carpenters and Stonemasons now go back to the shops rather than going home when they cannot craft furniture or fireplaces.
  
• Carpenters and Stonemasons who aren't working will tell you that they don't have enough resources if you click the About button when speaking with them.
  
• The grass distance slider works for all terrains, rather than just the one your town is in.
  
• The item quantity in Inventory will no longer display when there is no item in that slot.
  
• Removed the yell and arm wave "wind up" from Mushroommen prior to attacking. This was causing confusion as to when to block after a Mushroomman's health bar blinked. They now attack as soon as the bar stops blinking.
  
• Fixed a bug that sometimes caused a townsperson to not start mining right away after being assigned as a Miner.
  
• Fixed the location of a stone that was inside a tree, making it impossible for Workers to get to it.

Today's update includes some changes to the overall food system in the game. Most of this is intended to ease the difficulty of keeping your townspeople well fed, especially in the early stages of a town.

After looking into the numbers more, the amount of raw food being produced was lower than I wanted and that of course could create food shortages if Cooks didn't have enough raw materials to prepare enough meals for the town.

The changes include:

• Increased Farm production for raw vegetables by 33% per plot.
  
• Increased the amount of raw meat Hunters obtain by 40%.
  
• Increased the maximum amount of meals Cooks can produce by 10%.
  
• Increased the benefit of the "Foodie" trait by 10%. This stacks with the Cook increase.
  
• Townspeople now eat once a day, in the evening.

Note that last change means for existing saves, you might have townspeople get the "I didn't eat today" debuff the first time they eat since they are all eating their food in one sitting. But assuming you are making enough food, it should clear up by the next evening.

Thank you every for your feedback!

I'm working on a big update to the quest system, mostly behind the scenes stuff to make it a bit more robust. But before I do that, I wanted to get these updates to all of you as the quest system work may take a bit of time.

Today's build includes:

• Increased the default brightness setting.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused Fishermen to sink when they got to their fishing spot.
  
• Volume settings now save and load properly.
  
• The town lights turn on earlier. (this is earlier than the change made in build 3.1.0)