Hey folks!

Thanks to those that have been reporting issues/bugs with the 0.11.0.0 beta. That is extremely helpful and appreciated.

One of the big issues was captured entities not eating/drinking. This was due to a bug and some unclear new behaviors relating to rooms. Namely, there is the behavior where captured entities won't eat/drink anything outside their designated rooms. I've added a toggle to all owner groups to enable/disable this behavior, even for entities outside the Captured faction. As well, I've added a second toggle to enable/disable the auto population of stockpile item settings based on occupant diet. This is handy to have stockpiles filled with foods your animals will eat/drink. There is also a new notification for when entities don't have their diet food in a room AND they are restricted to the room.

-Music: Audio levels have been balanced for all music.
-Music: Added in the last new track. All five new tracks are in the game now.
-Feature: Added a toggle in the room edit window to populate stockpiles with occupant diet items.
-Feature: Added a toggle in the room edit window to limit entities to their rooms. This will keep entities from leaving the room as well as eat/drink and do jobs outside of it.
-Feature: Added a notification to indicate if an entity that's limited to a room is missing their diet items.
-Bug Fix: Where the description expand icon wasn't showing up.
-Bug Fix: Where Nyctoid and Chronoblast plants were obstructions.
-Bug Fix: Where tomes weren't spawning while playing the Ardyn race.
-Bug Fix: Where fishing wasn't behaving correctly, or sometimes at all.
-Bug Fix: Where troughs weren't showing when they had food/water in them.
-Bug Fix: Where the region room wasn't checking for food/drink jobs often enough and entities would not get those jobs.
-Bug Fix: Where entities weren't dying of old age.
-Bug Fix: Using the capture job on a contained entity that's already friendly will no longer make it hostile.
-Bug Fix: Where entities which died in water would not fully die and spawn their items.
-Bug Fix: Where the notification preview at the top of the screen could have text overflowing out of the window.
-Tuning: Ardyn start with one extra Tome of Agriculture (total of 2 now).
-Tuning: Ardyn start with campfire cooking research unlocked.
-Tuning: The Unassigned profession now has all skills enabled by default.
-Tuning: Fodder can now be made with the Fire Pit.
-Tuning: Added captured entities to the default stockpile hauling owners.
-Tuning: The Bare Bones Ancient starting loadout now comes with 2 Void Crystals instead of 1.

There are still lots of tuning things to be done, especially with the Ardyn race. I'll continue to clean things up, but I want to also put out a modding tutorial tomorrow. It will be a video where I go through all the steps to make a mod. Stay tuned for that!

Thanks and have a good one, friends!

Waylon

Transparency with the community is extremely important to me. That's why I want to let you all know that the price of Odd Realm will soon be going up from $10 USD to $15 USD in about a month. The game is currently on sale for 20% off to help players get the game at a lower price before I make this price change.

Now, I've always tried to keep the price of Odd Realm low for a few reasons but, namely, being an early access game, I wanted to make sure the price was fair to the consumer. If they're buying a half finished game, it should be half the price. That's why I started the price at $10, half of the $20 price that the 1.0 game will be. Now that we're getting very close to that 1.0 finish line, and there is a third race to play in the game, I feel it's time to raise the price to $15.

Normally, that content to price conversion wouldn't be on my mind and I'd keep the price low. However, a big part of raising the price now is that things are starting to get much more expensive where I live and $10 is no longer a feasible income price point.

Lastly, and this is a small thing but still a thing, I think many dismiss cheap games as amateur or small projects. I think it's easy for folks to see $10 on Odd Realm and think, 'eh, that is probably not a serious game or it's extremely short.' It's not, and it's not. I hate, HATE the marketing side of making games, but at the end of the day, I have to also consider how these things affect the development of Odd Realm.

Anyway, I hope you can understand my intentions here. To all of you supporting the game and telling your friends about it, I want to say thank you. I wouldn't be able to make this game without that.

Hello my friends!

There is lots to talk about for the new 0.11.0.0 version on beta so let's jump right in.




You can now select and play as the Ardyn!


They are a completely different race from Humans in pretty much every way. The main difference being that they don't need food or water to survive. Instead, they age much faster than all the other races. For them, every hour is equivalent to one day of aging for normal entities. This means that they die of old age (Senectia - an aging disease unique to their race) much faster.



They prevent themselves from getting old through a process called retroanimation. Retroanimation takes the life-force from one entity and gives it to the Ardyn, stealing their youth to keep the Ardyn young. This requires the Ardyn to constantly need to maintain large populations of captured entities to survive. Many other races fear the Ardyn because they ruthlessly hunt and capture all living things.






The Ardyn also differ from Humans in how they reproduce. They can have companions but they don't procreate with a partner and spawn offspring. Instead, when an Ardyn dies, their bodies can be turned into Astrasomes. These organic seed-like pods are used to grow a plant called a Chronoblast. Caretakers of Chronoblasts must feed them life-force to help them grow, and when they are mature, they produce one adult Ardyn settler.


There are three new rooms for the Ardyn to use. These can only be unlocked by having an Ardyn settler.




This is the main fabrication room. It is where Ardyn workers can create items like Astralite, Astrasomes, and Nyctium. As mentioned previously, Astrasomes are used to create more Ardyn settlers, but Astralite and Nyctium are mainly used for constructing things.




Astralite is a dense material that is the biproduct of Nyctium being fused with the life-force of an Ardyn. It is extremely valuable because of its difficulty to make and is often used to make advanced containers like Astracubes.




Nyctium is an organic material that is heavily used in Ardyn construction. It is unique in that it can only be harvested from the Nyctoid plant (more on that later).






The Somnic Pools are where the Ardyn use retroanimation on entities to remove Senectia and make themselves younger.




The Hortichron is where Chronoblasts and Nyctoid plants are grown.




This plant is grown by Ardyn Technochrons to produce the rare material, Nyctium. It requires the remains of an entity to be planted, and, over its lifetime, must be fed life-force by the Ardyn farmers.




With the Ardyn basics covered, let's talk about some improvements that have been made to the various windows and UI elements. First off, the production window. I've received so much great feedback about this screen. It is a complicated beast. This has made it quite tough to present in a clear way but I've done a lot of work with this update to help improve its presentation and how the various jobs communicate their requirements.

One change that I think makes things much clearer is that the jobs are now immediately placed in the room, and no longer queued. If you manually add a job, it will be placed in the room. However, this can only happen if the requirements are met.

Lots of work has been done to better communicate job requirements. There are five main areas of requirement:

• Skill - i.e., Carpentry
  
• Items - i.e., 2 wood logs
  
• Blocks - Where the job is done. i.e., Workbench
  
• Entity - The one doing the job. This may require a race, status, or intelligence type. i.e., Human, with Tired (Status), with Sapient Intelligence.
  
• Target - The one being used for the job. i.e., The victim of retroanimation. This can have the same requirement specs as Entity (seen above).

You can now specify the hour and season jobs get created. This could be handy if you only want people to farm certain crops in winter, while switching over to something else for spring.




I've added three new features to this window:

This lets you make stockpiles a high priority if you want items moved their first.

This lets you specify items that you don't want in a stockpile.

This lets you choose the min amount of items you want in the stockpile at all times, as well as the max amount. The settlers will do their best to keep the item inventory count in between these values.




Characters now show the items they have equipped on their sprite. So, if you deck out an entity in full rutile armor, you'll see a little red settler running around. If they have a pickaxe equipped, you'll see this on their back.




This is a new sub-window that is part of the Settlers window. Its purpose is to let you specify which skills start enabled when an entity spawns. So, for example, if you want new Void Woken summons to not have mining on, you can set that here.


You'll notice a new 'room' called Region in the production window. This room represents the entire map, and it houses all of the core jobs that entities need to create in order to do basic jobs to survive. For example, eating and drinking can be found here. Players won't really need to edit these jobs, but I wanted to surface all of these to players to make sure things are clearer. Before, all of these jobs were created under-the-hood, and it was tough to know what requirements were used to create them. Now, you can see all of these from Production.


Ok, I put in an absolute ton of work into this for the update. In fact, I completely changed how the game's data was handled to allow for modding. Before, everything was part of a big ol' JSON text file. Yes, this let you mod but it was really not fun. It also made it impossible to have multiple mods at once. Now, all the game data is represented by Unity's scriptable objects. I've also expanded my build pipeline to export a separate Unity Project which houses all of the scripts and data required to make these. This project can be accessed by anyone through github. It can be used to create and edit the data which can then be built and used as a mod. All the modder needs to do is put this data into the Mod folder in the game's folder, and the game will try to use this new modded data. Either overwriting old data, or adding it into the game. I am going to make a video to fully explain this process in the next couple days. I'll go into much, much more detail about how this all works.

One thing I still need to add to the mod pipeline is the ability to have multiple texture atlases. Right now, if players wanted to have multiple art style mods, that wouldn't really be possible unless, the art mods were all from the same modder and they created just one atlas. As soon as you have multiple different modders with their own atlases, it won't know which ones to use. But, that's definitely on my to-do list! :)


You'll notice their is a new faction (much like player, neutral, hostile) called 'captured'. This faction is applied to, you guessed it, captured entities from cages. It has all the same functionality as the player faction, however, captured entities will try to stay in their designated rooms AND will only eat/drink from those room. Make sure to keep those rooms stocked with food/water so your captured entities can eat/drink.

As well, factions can be used to limit room occupants. The prison cell is one such room that uses this setting to determine occupants. You can edit this faction setting from the Room Edit Window.

The Prison Cell is pretty much the equivalent of the Animal Enclosure, but for Sapient entities. Pretty soon I'm going to add some deeper mechanics to how captured entities react to their situation. And how they are housed in cells will play a big part into whether they choose to join you or try to escape or get sick, etc.


Matt Creamer, our wonderful composer, has created five new tracks for the game. Four of which are in this update. I will add the fifth track in patch 0.11.0.1. I didn't add it because it wasn't looping properly and needed Matt to address that. You'll also notice the new tracks are a bit quieter than the previous ones. Matt is currently normalizing all these volumes and those changes will be in the next patch as well.


Ok, I'm not going to lie, I did a terrible job tracking this update's notes. I was going through a lot of personal stuff and neglected to track things as I went. Lots of small tuning changes and UI improvements went untracked and I apologize for that. Going to track these better going forward. Here's what I managed to jot down:

• Content: New Ardyn playable race with three new unique starting loadouts.
  
• Content: Three new Ardyn rooms (Astralarium, Hortichron, and Somnic Pools).
  
• Content: New Technochron profession. Levels up Time Weave skill.
  
• Content: New Time Weave skill. Only Ardyn can use this one!
  
• Content: A bunch of new props and items to build that are unique to the Ardyn.
  
• Content: Chickens now have a child (chick) appearance, as well as a male appearance. Slowly going through all the animals to differentiate these different states. More on the way soon!
  
• Tuning: Tons of work was done cleaning up tooltips and adding missing info.
  
• Feature: Core jobs like eating, drinking, sleeping, warming up, etc, are now visible from the Region room in the production window. This is to let players have more control over how these are started.
  
• Feature: Modding capabilities using a separate Unity mod project. Plus the ability to select and load mods from in-game.
  
• Music: 5 new ambient music tracks have been added to the game. These play during settlement gameplay.
  
• Bug Fix: Where the correct tomes weren't spawning. i.e., The Tome Of Cooking never spawned for cooking jobs.
  
• Bug Fix: Where a visual fragment would appear on some blueprints with transparency.
  
• Bug Fix: Where Lfeth (an Ancient) would lose hunger and thirst.
  
• Feature: Prohibited items can now be added to stockpiles.
  
• Feature: Priorities can now be set on stockpiles.
  
• Feature: Min and Max item counts can now be specified for stockpiles.
  
• Feature: Added schedules to auto-jobs. Players can now limit the hour and season for auto jobs. i.e., No planting carrots in winter. Or, no sleeping from 12pm-8pm.
  
• Tuning: Added Wood Fishing Pole to the Human Hermit start.
  
• Bug Fix: Hitting ESC while the new settlement loadout popup is open will now close it instead of closing the overworld screen.
  
• Art: Cleaned up a bunch of inconsistent color palletes.
  
• QoL: Dropping an item on an entity item slot will now select the individual uniform by default (for the uniform selection popup) if there isn't an item in a higher priority uniform.
  
• Art: Updated profession icon art to unify visuals.
  
• Tuning: Planting and Harvesting skills have been replaced with Horticulture skill.
  
• Bug Fix: Where airborn entities could not spawn on the map because they wouldn't check air blocks.
  
• Bug Fix: Where extinguishing a fire that had just gone out would create a giant pool of water.
  
• Bug Fix: Where the raw foods tooltip showed it provided a worse buff than raw foods. Now shows it provides a worse buff than *cooked foods.
  
• Tuning: Room owner size is no longer based on room size. Now, it's a flat starting value that players can edit.
  
• Feature: Added an 'auto' option to auto-jobs. This setting will create jobs as long as the requirements for the job are met. i.e., If all the items and block requirements are available, a build brick job will be created.
  
• Tuning: Most props now act as obstacles and will block pathways.
  
• Tuning: The 'Create New Room' hotkey now uses Left Control instead of Left Alt.
  
• Feature: Added a notification to indicate when entities cannot reach items used by jobs.
  
• Feature: Added new Prison Cell room.
  
• Feature: Add a new 'Captured' faction. Animals captured in cages will be given this faction when the capture job is successful. The faction is player controlled and provides an extra layer of control. Captured entities may also try and escape.
  
• Bug Fix: Where the Spellbook of Death wasn't issuing attacks.
  
• Bug Fix: Where entity appearances were not matching up when entities grew older.
  
• Bug Fix: Where rooms couldn't be designated on snow.
  
• Tuning: Overlay states now save to individual selection groups. i.e., disabling the priority overlay when placing jobs will not disable the priority overlay for the priorities selection.
  
• Tuning: Summoning is now an Ancient only ability. In the future, other races will be able to summon certain things, but the Ancients are now the masters of this.
  
• Feature: Separated the deconstruct jobs into platform, prop, block, and all.
  
• Bug Fix: Where you could select an overworld tile when the confirmation popup was open.
  
• Bug Fix: Where the 'no profession assigned' notification would trigger for entities that could not change their profession.
  
• Bug Fix: Where freeing an Ancient from a Stasis Crystal would spawn them as neutral.
  
• Bug Fix: Where entities were climbing up/down through floors/roofs.
  
• Feature: Skill defaults sub-window in the Settlers window.

This next week I want to focus on bugs (as well as make a tutorial video for mods!). I know there are lots of new issues with how entities are prioritizing stockpiles and some auto-jobs not being created. I want to spend the entire week hyper focused on cleaning all those issues up.

After that, I want to add the remaining props and items I have on my Ardyn to-do list. I wasn't able to add them all in and there are a few to help round out the Ardyn tech tree.

I'd also like to work on polishing up and tuning this update for about three weeks. I think that will be enough time to make it feel really nice and then I'll push it to the main production branch once it is in a good place.

Once this update is done, I'm going to jump onto a little content update that focuses on adding more events, props, items, and summons. I think it's time to start adding to the depth of the game now that we have a third race. I want to flesh out (HA) the Ancient race a bit more as I think they are the most lacking in terms of things to do. Void magic is a powerful tool, but it's also extremely risky to use because it attracts the attention of other entities in Odd. Summoning creatures from the void is a huge advantage but it will mean the Ancients have to also be prepared to fight off the slumbering void creatures that are awakened by the large magic use.

Well, that's all for now. If you've read this far, bravo! I appreciate you taking the time to read through this. I know it's a lot. As well, thanks to all of you for your support and feedback and kindness. Many of you messaged me about my grandfather passing with kind words and I read all those. I hope you know that these messages keep me going.

Thanks and have a wonderful day!

Hello!

I've been meaning to make an Odd Realm demo for a while now. I don't like seeing people buy the game only to realize the visual style isn't for them, or it doesn't run so well, or any number of reasons. No one wants buyer's remorse! That being said, you can now play the Odd Realm demo on Windows, Mac, and Linux. :)

The demo is the full version of the game with two limitations. First, players can only play as the Humans, and, second, saved games cannot be loaded. If players decide to buy the full version of the game, their saved files from the demo will be there to load.

That's it for now. I'm wrapping up the rest of the new race update, so look forward to news about that soon!

Thanks,
Waylon

Greetings everyone!

I apologize for posting this so late in the month. My grandfather passed away just over a week ago and I had to attend to his funeral. I'm back to work now and I have lots of fun things to show today.

One thing I've been meaning to add for ages is a window which lets you toggle the default enabled skills per profession and race.



It's pretty straight forward. Within the settlers window, there is a skill defaults sub window (seen above). This window shows all the default skills that are enabled/disabled for when an entity spawns. Players can also select which race to edit the skills for. So, let's say you wanted to disable mining for new Void Woken summons. You could select the Void Woken tab, navigate to their default profession, and turn off mining.

I would like to get your opinions on how these selections get saved. Currently, I have them saving to the player settings which means it applies to every game. However, you might want to save only to the current game. I'm not too sure which is better yet. Please let me know your thoughts if you have a preference.

The main focus of this update is the new Ardyn race. I have made a lot of progress on their gameplay mechanics over this last month. I'm very close to being finished. All I have left to do is some tuning, and add a few additional items, props, and events. Oh, and I also have to add some tutorial steps for them too. Not a lot of big things, but still a few weeks of work.



When the beta goes live in a couple weeks, I'm going to write up a big post explaining their mechanics. They have a bunch of new items and props, as well as three new rooms which allow for them to procreate and construct things. The unique element of the Ardyn race is that they use time to create items, stay alive, and procreate. I'll explain all that in the beta post, though. ;)

The production window is one of those screens which has a lot of functionality, and, as a result, is quite complicated. So, I went through it and cleaned it up, focusing on making the job requirements easier to read and understand.



There are four main requirement areas that include skill, block, items, and/or entity status. A job doesn't necessarily need all these things, but it will clearly show what is needed, highlighting missing requirements in red. For example, the above job, "Sleep In Bed," needs a bed block, and an entity that's tired.



Additionally, I've added auto job schedules which allow players to select time of day and season to limit when auto jobs can start. For example, you only wanted to plant carrots in summer between 10am-2pm. You can enable the schedule for that job, then disable the times and seasons outside those requirements. You can also make schedules global, meaning every job of that same blueprint will have the same schedule. Handy if you wanted everyone to only sleep in beds between 10pm-630am (my bedtime!).



I've added an 'Auto' option for creating auto-jobs. This will create a job as long as all the requirements are met for a blueprint. So, if you have a build wood plank job that needs wood logs and a workbench, and you have two workbenches available, it will auto-create these as long as those workbenches are open.

Another small change I've made is that jobs are created immediately and there's no more queueing. In the live build, you'll see two numbers representing 'active jobs' and 'queued jobs'. Queued jobs are waiting for a place to be created in the room, while active jobs are active in the room. There was a lot of confusion around this. To fix, I've done away with that queue number. Instead, the jobs are immediately created in the room if you manually add them, or when the auto-job requirements are met.



Lastly, I've surfaced a lot of hidden jobs players didn't have much control over. Examples of these are: eating, drinking, sleeping, warming up, equipping items, and extinguishing fires. I want players to be able to control all aspects of the game, and for things to be visible, so I've added a 'Region' entry to the production window. The Region represents the entire map, whereas other entries represent rooms players have placed. It's essentially a giant room that contains the whole map. In there you'll be able to see how these jobs start, and edit their settings. I don't think this will be used all that much, but it's there if needed.

Well, my timeline was pushed back about ten days because of my family emergency, but I am feeling very good about things. I'm hoping to get a beta build out in two weeks! As I said, there are only a few more Ardyn tasks on my list which aren't too overwhelming. Stay tuned for that in the coming weeks.

Hope you are all well. As always, thank you for all the support and patience waiting for these updates. And thank you for reading!

Waylon

Hello!

Today I'll be talking about all the exciting things coming for the next expansion, Timeless Tyrants. I have been extremely busy working on this one and I still have quite a bit of work to do to get it into your hands. I don't want to promise anything but I should be able to put out a beta build in a couple weeks.

Alright, let's take a look at what's coming down the pipe!

Every expansion going forward will introduce a new race to play. This expansion will unlock the Ardyn, a race of fierce warriors with a vibrant culture and history.



The unique aspect of the Ardyn race is that they age extremely fast. Every one hour of in-game time is one year to them. To combat this, they have evolved the ability to syphon life from other entities, keeping themselves from ever growing old. Their victims, sadly, must pay the price and often die of old age as their youth is drawn from them. This survival trait has given the Ardyn many enemies. Some small factions within Ardyn society have forsworn the use of their powers on sentient entities, preferring to roam the lands as peaceful shepherds.

Their development is coming along very nicely, and I'm in the middle of populating all their new appearances, special items, and various game data requirements. Stay tuned for more on them in the next post!

Just as it sounds, you will now see items that are equipped on your character sprites.





Every entity sprite has a set of default colors, and accessories which get swapped out based on two things: the entity default appearance, and the entity equipment. The default appearance will establish things like skin color and hair. The equipment will then take a higher priority and override colors or add accessories. For example, hair (say, a ponytail) is a default appearance accessory which can be hidden by a helmet accessory coming from the item equipped in the head slot (as seen in the above gif.)

I will be adding some new settings options so that players can disable any accessory visibility. For example, if players don't want helmets visible, I'll have a toggle to hide them.

This is a big change and I didn't think I was going to be able to pull this off. This is something that I've seen suggested quite a bit, but I had always shied away from implementing it because of the workload. It required going through every animation frame to set the anchor point positions and orientation (so things like hair and helmets move properly.) It was extremely tedious. But, that's all done now, and it works great. The only real downside is that things can't be very accurate in scale. For example, a helmet lying on the grass will look slightly larger than the one on the character sprite. There's nothing to do about that really. The scale of the game can often be an annoying restriction in cases like this.

This change added a lot of new properties to edit for entities. It's very easy to make appearances and swap out skin color, fur color, type of hair, etc. This leads into the next big change...

This is another HUUUUGE change that I'm super excited about. I think it's going to open up a lot for the game.

Essentially, I've done away with the old method of game data management that I was using. I no longer derive the game's data from that one .json file. A file that was generated from a 100+ page spreadsheet on google. It was just an absolute nightmare to edit after the game was built. Instead, I've migrated all that data to use Unity's scriptable objects.



There are a couple benefits to doing this. Firstly, it makes editing and creating data objects super fast. I no longer have to import my spreadsheet every time I want to tune values, or create new content. Secondly, this has the added benefit of working nicely with Unity and the bundling framework.

Not only have I migrated to this new framework, I've also done a lot of work on making modding easier for players. At a high level, let's take a look at how mods will be made, as well as how they can be used to give you an idea of where it's going.


Note: I will be making a detailed walkthrough later, so don't get hung up on how things find folders and such. I'll cover the details thoroughly later. This is a very, very high level overview.

Modders will be able to download a unity project from a git server that I will keep updated with the latest builds. This project will provide two important things: the core game data (i.e., blueprints, dialogue, items, etc), as well as the c# game data scripts. The scripts will be necessary for modders to make their own game data that can be read by the game client.

The unity project will provide a nice way to edit game data, but, more importantly, the tools to create a mod bundle.

Here's an example where I've created a very small mod which edits the tag for Cauldrons. Tags are a data object which represent a group of other data objects, in this case, cauldrons. Here, the cauldron tag gets used for room requirements, specifically, the kitchen room.



In the modding project, I've simply changed the display name for the tag from Cauldron to BETTER CAULDRON. Then, I built the bundle which creates a special folder named BetterTags.





The Mod folder resides in the same directory as the game's save files. This is to avoid any mods getting stomped when a new game version comes out. Inside the Mod directory, you'll see my new mod, BetterTags.


The game client will automatically look for the Mods folder, and will display any mods inside when the game boots up. All you have to do is put the mod folders here for them to be used by the game.



Players can then select which mods are active and the mod will display the version it was last used on. I am going to add lots of helpful stuff here as I go. I want to add warnings for out-of-date versions, conflicts on assets, and maybe even a mod importer. So, please let me know if there's anything you'd like to see at this screen!



With the BetterTags mod active, you'll see (in the above gif) that the new tag shows up. Pretty cool! Because everything in the game derives from data, modders have a lot they can change, not just lame tags. Want to make a new item? Go for it! I've also made it so character sprites and animations can be modded, not just the texture atlas. At some point, I'll still need to make it so modders can change the game's scale, but that's on my to-do list for now.

This is hopefully going to work out pretty well, but I'd love to get your feedback on things. So, feel free to leave a message. I'm sure there will be lots of fun problems around how mods merge, modify textures, and so on. We'll figure them out as we go. :)




Stockpiles now have item prohibiting, and priorities. Entities will move items from lower priority stockpiles to higher priority stockpiles. This should help when trying to keep things like animal enclosures stocked with food.


That's it for now! I will work as fast as I can to get the next beta going. I need to do quite a lot still to get it ready. I'll keep you folks updated! Thanks for your patience and great feedback. I hope you have a great day!

The Sacred Scrolls expansion is an update I've worked on for a long time. It is the foundation for all future expansions of Odd Realm, and can be thought of as the creation of the planet Odd. Previous versions were more of a proof-of-concept. I'm excited to have this update finally completed because it means I can start to tell the story of the world, and add in all the great content I've planned with the help of the community. New playable races, overworld kingdoms, overworld diplomacy, more items, more blueprints, more everything. There's a lot of work to do, but I'm stoked! I wouldn't be here without the support from all of you. You've been incredibly patient waiting for me to add things to the game, and I want to express how thankful I am for your interest in the game, and your support. As a solo dev, it has never felt lonely because I've had all of you keeping me company. Thank you!

Also, because this expansion had to change a lot of the core systems (namely, variable world sizes), your saves from previous version, are not backwards compatible. I do apologize to those that have to start new games and have lost hard work. This isn't something I like doing, and is avoided at all costs.

Now, let's take a look at what went into this expansion!




This was a huge task and was the main setback for this expansion's lengthy development. I had to rebuild my world engine from the ground up. I guess this is to be expected when you start building a settlement building game for the first time. Lots of lessons learned!

Alright, you can now edit two sets of dimensions when starting a new realm. The Map Size settings are what determine the actual in-game block world dimensions. The Overworld is simply the map with continents you see when choosing a place to settle. Keep in mind when selecting Map Size dimensions that, the bigger you go, the more demand it will have on your computer. If your machine isn't super beefy and you notice the biggest maps are lowering FPS, it's probably a good idea to drop down a size. You can mix and match sizes (i.e., 128x16x64, 16x16x16, 16x256x16, etc), so, go nuts!

All the available sizes are:

Map Sizes
X: 16, 32, 64, 128, 256
Y: 16, 32, 64, 128, 256
Z: 16, 32, 64

Overworld Sizes
X: 64, 80, 96, 112
y: 64, 80, 96, 112


Previously, a game save was directly tied to a tile you settle. Now, your progression is saved globally, and individual tiles save out on their own. This is to allow for my future plan of kingdoms. Players will be able to control many settlements (tiles) that will simulate as they play. You'll expand your kingdom by exploring and settling new tiles, and, often, you'll need to fight for them!







Having Ren as some HUD stat was way too gamey for my liking. Ren is now a physical item in the world. I want players to build big vaults and banks and see their wealth. As well, I want thieves and bandits to come hunting for it. You can still use the Ren to trade with merchants, and when buying things from you, they'll drop it off in the new "Vault" room.




There are too many to list! Plus, I won't spoil the surprise of finding them. A lot you can unlock from the Saga window (more on that later!) and quite a few are found in dungeons and on bosses. Happy hunting!




Tomes are an item that have three purposes. First, and most importantly, they can be used to unlock new blueprints and rooms from the Saga window (again, more on this later.) Second, they can be equipped to buff skills, Third, they can be sold to merchants as a fairly decent export item.

Settlers have the chance to write down their learnings as they work. The Tome given is determined by the skill that was last used. For example, the Tome of Industry will spawn for a miner digging a tunnel.




Item carrying efficiency has seen a lot of work in this expansion, and backpacks are a great way to increase how much an entity can move around. Later on, I'll be adding other items to equip to the back slot. Things like capes and back armor come to mind!






Wood log block, wood beam, and thatch roofs are just some of them. You can see all the great blueprints the game has from the Saga window (I'm getting there!) and they are no longer hidden. Take a look!

Cages are a new addition as well. These replace the old taming system where you'd tell a settler to go and attack an entity and it somehow became tamed. Now, you must build cages to first capture entities before you can try to tame them. This is a common way to get other races into your settlement as well. Capturing an entity in a cage has a chance of failing based on the target's evasion rating. Once the entity is in the cage, you can use the capture job on it. This also has a chance of failing, and can cause the entity to become hostile and attack. The Tame skill is used here, and the Shepherd is the best bet to handle these jobs.






First, let's stop and stare at the elephant in the room, stockpiles. What the heck is a stockpile? They're zones, but in a different location (the rooms menu) and with a different name (stockpiles). That's right, there's no zones menu toolbar. Don't fret, you can still designate areas on the map to put items. You do so by placing a stockpile room. However, you now have the added functionality of assigning settlers to this room. One thing to note about rooms in general, you can assign items and item categories to any room, not just stockpiles. Stockpiles are just an easy access template to designate areas for item storage, but you can add item storage to any room you have. Want raw meat brought to the kitchen? Add a Raw Meat item category to its stockpile settings and settlers will do so.

One of my first tasks for the next update is to add stockpile priorities. I know it is desperately needed, and it's at the top of my list!

Another nice change to rooms is that they no longer have to be contiguous. By this I mean, you can have one room with designated points spread all over the map, and on different z levels. Want one home to fill a seven story condo? You can do this!

Let's look at all the rooms! Not all of these are new, but they have definitely changed in some form. Here is the list of all the rooms so far. :)

Home - used by Humans for sleeping and procreation. Humans will move their families into a Home if it is big enough.
Farm - where you can grow crops.
Animal Enclosure - where Shepherds can feed and house Animals.
Wood Mill - used for crafting various wood materials and items.
Foundry - where metal-based materials are produced.
Kitchen - used to prepare food.
Smithy - where metal ingots can be converted into items.
Barracks - melee training ground.
Range - ranged training ground.
Distillery - where alcoholic beverages are produced.
Grain Mill - where grain items can be processed into food components such as Flour.
Chaos Construct - used for creating void-based materials.
Summoning Chamber - used to create a bridge between Odd Realm and the Void Realm.
Immortallity Tomb - used by Ancients to maintain their immortality. Without it, they succumb to Void Sickness, and perish.
Transmuation Chamber - used to forcibly convert raw materials into Void Crystals and Void Shards.
Wellhouse - where water can be produced.
Tailor - where cloth-based materials are produced.
Tannery - where leather-based materials are produced.
Market - will attract merchants to your settlement. It's also where items are spawned when buying from a merchant.
Arboretum - where saplings can be planted to grow trees.
Library - where ink, paper, and books are created.
Stockpile - used to group and organize items.
Arcane Study - a magic training ground.
Masonry Shop - where stone-based materials and items are produced.
Vault - where Ren is placed when trading with merchants.

Coming soon:
Prison Cell - where prisoners are housed.
Guard Room - used by militia to patrol and keep watch on designated locations.
Town Hall - where non-militia go during combat/raids, and is required to run a kingdom and elect leaders.
Apothecary - where alchemists make potions and heal the sick.

Many rooms produce items and have unique jobs. I'll cover this more in the Production section later.






Water is no longer blue lava! I've added an oxygen attribute to entities so that they can submerge themselves in water and hold their breath. Some entities, like Ancients, don't need oxygen and can chill underwater forever. Most are not so lucky, so be cautious when building your underwater base.

If you choose, you can settle the ocean tiles. This is a fun challenge for trying to survive on a raft. Try it out!




Your castle walls actually do something now! Huzzah! Settlers can no longer climb blocks that are higher than 1 block. Ladders will let you create vertical paths higher than this if you don't want to make stair shaped paths into your mine. There's a handy overlay on the bottom bar to show you vertical pathing, if you are unsure what can be climbed.

A quick note about invaders; if they can't path into your base, they will either try and build ladders to scale things, or try and mine through the obstacle. Keep this in mind when building your defenses.









You can now equip items directly from the inventory window. Any of the uniform, entity window, and entity tooltip equipment slots can have items dragged onto them from the inventory window. The slots will change color while dragging to indicate valid equipment permissions.

The uniform window has seen a lot of work to help better communicate uniform priority and allow easier management. Players can still designate individual, control group, and profession uniforms which can be prioritized. The game will automatically create individual uniforms for every entity that spawns, and these are by default the lowest priority uniform. As well, every profession has an empty uniform already created which players can edit, copy, paste, etc.




Ok, finally, we have arrived.

One big problem I had with the old version of Odd Realm was that players missed a lot of blueprints because I never communicated how they were unlocked. You just had to find the right item requirements and some new blueprint would appear. This caused a lot of chaotic player progression. Now, players can see all the available blueprints and rooms from the Saga window. These unlocks are tied to the realm, so you can start new settlements and keep this progression. To unlock the blueprints/rooms, you have to unlock each node using the required tomes. Some trees will only be available if you have certain races in your settlement. Homes, for example, will only be unlockable when you have a Human settler. This window also allows Humans to use magic, but you'll still need to obtain Tomes of Arcana from exploring or merchants.

Lots more will be added to this window as I go, and I'd say it's only 50% filled.




Some rooms provide production jobs to make items and summon entities. To automate and create these jobs, you can use the Production window. The window provides a robust set of tools to determine when and how these jobs get queued. For example, auto-queue 10 "Craft Stone Brick" jobs every time your Stone Brick inventory drops below a count of 10. Or, alternatively, auto-queue 1 "Summon Void Woken" job when the Void Woken population drops below a count of 1.






Sick of having your cows eat your raw meats? Well, now they have customized diets to make sure they don't!

This system is mostly finished, but I still have to add some sicknesses related to a poor diet, but it's coming soon!




Pretty straight-forward. You can now see the output of your settler work and attacks. If this is something you don't want to see, there are options in the settings menu to hide action text, or only show it for selected entities.










This is one of those tasks that never really ends, however, for the expansion I've gone through a lot of UI elements and added helpful tooltips. The block tooltip, for example, will now list all its contents. You can select a block, by holding TAB and clicking the block you want to inspect. Once it's selected its tooltip will be locked and you can hover over the contents of the block to see further tooltips about items, plants, and general block info.




You can add any item or entity to the top HUD to track. For items, you can toggle their tracking from the inventory window. For entities, you do so from the settlers window.






Jobs, rooms, priorities, quantities, settler icons, temperature, and layers can be toggled from the bottom left bar. My personal favorite is the "All" overlay which can be toggled by holding TAB. It's extremely helpful for seeing rooms and jobs without needing to open their menus.




You can filter lists and find settlers by holding "Shift' and typing the name of your target. For example, with the inventory open, swords will be listed if you hold shift and type "sword". Sometimes it's handy to jump to a settler by typing in their name. Give it a go.




No more limit to the amount of saves you can have! Plus, there's a lot more info provided, including a preview of image of your settlement.




Without spoiling things, let's just say they are much more spicy. Their attacks and abilities are unique, and will provide different challenges when discovering them. Not all of them are hostile, so keep that in mind before issuing the attack orders.






This is also one of those things I'll continue to add probably until the end of my days. This expansion adds a lot of fun cave/dungeon gen, especially when first settling.




Well, this is something that was requested for ages! Want to settle in the middle of a lake? You can, and it'll also create a nice little raft. As well, all of your items will be put into containers. You should be able to spawn your people pretty much anywhere you want.


There's now a "StreamingAssets" folder in the "Data" folder where your executable of the game is located. In there you can find the texture atlas and game data files. There's a lot you can edit from these. This is very much a prototype of what I want modding to be. I will soon be replacing that giant text file with separate data files for each data group. Lots more work to do with mod support, but we're moving in that direction steadily.





Water now has mass and will evaporate and fill basins. I have lots of plans to add water-focused props such as sluice gates, pumps, pipes, and drains. This change is the beginning of all that fun.




Torches, fire pits, and other heat sources will now propagate heat outwards. Some things, like being open to the sky, can limit heat transfer. Greenhouses can be built in the Tundra biome to help grow plants when it's cold. Many plants are sensitive to hot and cold. You can see this info from their tooltip.


There are a lot of new systems., andI've upgraded the tutorial to cover all of them. It can be enabled/disabled/reset from the settings menu as before.


The next update is the Ardyn expansion. It will introduce a caste system, new professions, new rooms, and, what many have been waiting for, a new playable race, the Ardyn. Going forward, development is going to be all about content. I know a lot of people have been waiting for the game to get rounded out, and now is the time!

Before I say goodbye, I'd like to again say thank you for the support. It means a lot that so many people are interested in my game. If you'd like to be part of its development, like so many in the community already have been, please join the discussions on the forum and in our discord server. I'm active every day and am happy to discuss new ideas and suggestions. :)

Anyway, thanks for reading this far, and stay tuned for more Odd Realm stuff in the future!

Waylon

Hey gang!



This is (please god) the final hotfix patch before beta goes to the live production branch. Apologies for how long this is taking to go live! I'm at the point where I'm doing several hour playtests to find those bugs and tuning issues that arise during long play sessions. I found a few more things which I've listed below:

-Fixed a bug where some settings windows weren't showing.
-Low Food and Low Beverages notification should now only be seen for Humans.
-The game is now paused when the camera does cinematic moves, to avoid entities running off before the camera arrives at its target.
-Fixed a bug where the game could get stuck paused if an auto-save happened at the same time as a scenario.
-Fixed a bug where entities with all combat skills disabled would still fight. Now, they will flee away from their assailant.
-Changed some plant heat resistances so that not all plants can survive in extremely hot climates.
-Changed a few blueprints to use the Misc skill instead of Craft Wood. i.e., Thatch Roof, Dirt Wall, Cobble Floor, etc.
-Increased resource spawn rate for Human inherent buff. It was 0.5%, and is now 5%.
-Fixed a bug where the dim witted debuff was positive instead of negative.
-Entity notifications now show the profession icon.
-Fodder is now produced in the Kitchen instead of the Animal Enclosure.
-Fixed an issue where jobs could clog up rooms. Essentially, a job would get auto-added by a room, then the required items would become unavailable and the job would never start if the items weren't found. This would block other jobs from being placed. Now, jobs that sit for long enough without being started will be removed to let other jobs get added.
-Fixed a bug where entities could get assigned jobs they didn't have the skill for. Hilariously, a cow or other animal would sometimes have this happen. Please do let me know if you see an animal going to town on a hammer at the wood mill. This is entertaining, but not intended.

Alright, the plan is to push this version live tomorrow! I want to be safe and let it see some beta testing before flipping the switch. I'm fairly confident this version is stable, but you never know. I could have missed something. Stares at settings menu nervously. Also, I need to write up the post detailing all the 0.10 changes in the interim. There are a few!

Thanks everyone!

W

Hello and happiest of Fridays to you!

I was hoping that today I would be switching the beta branch over to the live branch. Sadly, I ran into a lot of tuning/progression stuff that I wasn't comfortable pushing live just yet. Today's patch should fix a few things that stood out to me, and I'm sure they stand out for you too.



I've altered how bandits, and other threats get activated. Previously, I activated threats based on how much time had passed. As well, to get certain threats such as bandits, you'd have to settle a 'bandit' tile, or some such. I felt that this was rather tough to tune, and didn't seem that organic. Plus, it doesn't quite align with how I want interactions in the world to play out in the future. Now, to move the design in that direction, threats will activate more often as you acquire wealth. For now, I'm only looking at Ren, but, later, I will factor in other items, especially rare unique artifacts. I know some of you don't want ANY threats to appear, so I've also added a setting in the settings menu to change the threat frequency to 'never, low, normal, or high.'

In addition to that, I've done some work to improve the loadout generation of baddies. Items and attributes NPC's start out with will now be generated based on the player's average settler level. Before, the entities would pull from a pool of items that were predefined. This wasn't terribly accurate to the player's progression. With items/attributes generating based on settler level, the threats should be much more challenging while still being fair.

You'll notice a few new things to build in the patch notes. I definitely didn't want to add new content to this patch as I only want to move beta to live, however, there's a bit of a gap in the early game content, that I felt needed addressing. Without unlocking the wood research, you were pretty limited to in what you could build. I've gone ahead and added some new things to build with wood and plant fiber, to help fix this. There's no end of things to add, but I think this should be a good small addition.

This patch also has a significant merchant item value change. I noticed that you could quite easily acquire Ren, so I'm making things much more expensive in addition to lowering the price things can be sold for. Wealth should be slowly acquired, and your settlement should earn it by working hard to fabricate and find valuable items. Please let me know if you find ways to easily acquire Ren by cheesing the game. I'd love to know, so I can tune things.

Notes:
-Fixed a bug where changing priority on a started job might remove it.
-Added extra tooltip info for block traps. Entity capture size (for cages), and general trap functions are now displayed.
-Tuned research costs to be a bit cheaper.
-Added blueprints to recycle tomes back into paper.
-Tuned lighting color overlay back a bit to make things easier to see.
-Fixed a bug where tree leaves weren't changing color on season change.
-Tuned merchant prices.
-Enemies will drop their items in a stoneleaf bag upon death. This bag will disappear when emptied.
-Wood Plank block now drops 1 wood plank instead of 1 wood log.
-Added a wood log block to make with wood logs.
-Added a thatch roof platform to make with plant fiber.
-Added a wood beam block to make with wood logs.
-Added a Threat Difficulty setting in the settings menu.
-Dangerous events ("Threats") will now use the player's settlement value to determine frequency. The higher a settlement's value, the more often the player will encounter threats like bandits. The threat frequency can be changed from the settings menu.
-Entity threats will now use the average player settler level to determine item and attribute loadouts.
-Fixed a pathing bug where entities could get stuck after logging trees.
-Added entity size to entity overlay.
-Natural plant growth will no longer happen in rooms.
-Auto job blueprints are now ordered with those that can be built at the top.
-More optimizations to improve FPS.

Ok, I'm going to let this new patch test over the weekend to see how things play out. I'll probably have some small fixes and tuning changes to patch in early next week, but the build is just about ready to be live. I will update you all next week! :)

Thanks!

W

Hello!



This is a shorter list of patch notes today as I focused a lot of last week fixing up and adding in-game events. There are quite a few fixes related to combat in there as well. Plus, I've done some optimizing related to a GPU bottleneck some players might have been experiencing.

Regarding events, I've gone through a bunch that were disabled for the beta and have enabled them and fixed issues that kept them from working properly. As well, some of the game's bosses are now quite a bit more involved and powerful. Each has their own special set of abilities. As you can see in the above gif, the Dweller shoots a beam of energy at nearby player entities, carving out any terrain (or critters!) in the way. I won't spoil the other bosses and their abilities, but be careful! They're out there.

The Ancients now have a bit more challenge as I've added a faction called the Ancient Hunters that may appear. They see Ancients and magic as a threat to the world and have devoted themselves to finding and eliminating all Ancients. After all, magic was used to cause the Fracture. I've always intended for Ancients to have a bit more threat from other factions to help balance out their easier playstyle.

Here are the notes:
-Optimized rendering performance.
-Re-enabled several scenarios.
-Upgraded boss scenarios to provide more of a challenge.
-The 'Game Saved' overlay should appear before the save to make it more noticeable.
-Fixed a bug where entities weren't attacking.
-Fixed a bug where ranged attackers could attack enemies if they didn't have the same pathing room.
-Improved combat behavior and entity control.
-Fixed an attack timing bug that caused projectiles to be fired at the beginning of an animation.
-Fixed a bug that kept fire from updating while on water or in the air. This would keep it from disappearing.
-Updated the game's loco art assets.
-Fixed a bug where battle music could continue playing after re-loading a save.

I'm very, very close to moving the current game out of beta and into production. This week, I'm only going to be tuning and testing. By Friday, it should be ready to move over.

Last, but not least, I am very excited to tell you all that Matt Creamer, the talented composer behind Odd Realm's music, is working on a bunch more music tracks for the game. Currently, there are only two tracks that play while you manage your settlement, so he'll be working on making more to fill that gameplay. I want to extend a special thanks to the Patreon supporters for helping bring these new tracks into the game. All the money raised in the Patreon has gone towards that! :)

Thanks everyone!

Waylon