Jul 8, 2022

Legends of Astravia - studioalemni

Hello everyone,

I'm going to keep this update fairly short, as it's primarily meant to serve as a check-in for June's progress. Unfortunately, further bug fixes and gameplay mechanic improvements means less visual changes to share.

Additionally, I am disappointed to admit that life has gotten in the way, and the time I've been able to put towards development has be heavily reduced from what it was at the beginning of the year.

However, I am currently investigating some options that may permit me to get a little help with the project in order to mitigate the loss of progress I've had in the past couple of months. If all goes well, the pace of development should improve.

Release Date Change

I'll start by ripping off the band-aid: I have set Chapter 1 of the game's release date across all sites back to "TBD". The anticipated release for the end of this year was already a pretty soft deadline, but I'd like to call it early to ensure anyone following the project and expecting to play a full game by the end of this year is not mislead.

It has been very challenging to uphold the same momentum I had a couple months ago, and I'm just not certain that I can pull through for the rest of Chapter 1 at the same pace. Game development is kind of like running a marathon--and I've used up a lot of energy sprinting with both the demo release, maintenance, and other things discussed in the prior log.

I think the new date won't be terribly far off--Spring of 2023 is feasible. But I'm not going to set any formal dates until I am certain.

With that out of the way, let's see a little progress.

Mordin Village Progress

The next area of the game, Mordin Village, continues to be worked on. Being the first real "town" area, it will have a lot of additional characters, some side quests, and a big portion of the main story.

The base maps are finished now, and just need to be polished and have the actual events added to them. I think the new structure of the town is much more fitting, and makes it feel like home. Also, by splitting the map up into a couple of separate areas, it will help prevent any lag present in the original.

And here's an in-game shot:

NPC faces have been put together as well. My goal for the various towns of Astravia is to give even minor characters a bit of agency, and not have them be just scarecrows that sell you items. Nearly every member of Mordin Village will have their own personality and distinct relationships with other members of the town.

Engine & Feature Progress

I was able to address some pretty big problems with object collision (i.e., walking into an enemy or door). In the demo, it was pretty apparent that certain enemies would seemingly cause a battle to start even though they were several tiles away from Oliver, or the doorways would trigger in an unusual way. This will no longer be an issue.

I have some improvements in mind for wall collision as well, that will hopefully both help with performance and also some various issues reported with clipping. These are pretty intensive, and will take me a bit more time.

The battle system changes discussed in the previous log are still being worked on, and just a few more features need to be added / tweaked.

That's all for now. As always, thank you for your patience and continued support. I know many of you are eager to play more of the game, and I am so eager to share more of the world with you. I hope to have more fulfilling progress updates in the future.

- Jaiden

Jul 8, 2022

New, Version 10, Hold Your Own!

Hold Your Own - Zuleica

Hey everyone,

V10.0 is now available to play test on the beta - experimental branch for those wanting to try out the additions before the patch is released.

To access it, right click the game in your Steam library and hit properties. There you will find a BETAS tab, select beta - experimental and launch your game as usual. Because we don't expect this beta branch to last too long, we will NOT be posting a Beta Specific Channel for feedback. Despite that, please specify (for bugs, feedback, etc) if you're playing on the Beta or the live game.

NOTE: A new game restart will be required.

Hope you enjoy your time on the beta branch, feel free to come visit us in Discord, and Have a great day!!

Backstory

A small atoll in the Pacific discovered in the late 1500s by a Portuguese explorer. It was named As Ilhas Esquecidas or The Forgotten Islands as there was evidence of prior inhabitants. It became a small way station for resupply of Portuguese trader and explorer ships until it was deemed too far out of the way of the established trade routes. The settlers that remained populated the islands until more modern times when a modest amount of minerals were discovered.

The islands mostly retained their original Portuguese names until the Insurgents came. Known locally as O Vento de Sangue, Blood Wind, or just the proper name O Vento, the Insurgents carried out a bloody invasion that resulted in the remaining exiles to refer to the islands by their current, more colorful names, most in Portuguese.

New map layout.

Island name changes to reflect the backstory.
Ilhas dos Mortos (Dead Islands, four connected by bridges)
Ilha do Desespero (Desperation Island)
Coby’s Isle
Ilha da Traição (Betrayal Island)
Ilha de Perdição (Perdition Island)
O Oráculo (The Oracle)
Ilha do Sangue (Blood Island)
Ilha Congelada (Cold Island)

New POIs in addition to towns with the old look; fishing villages, mountain villages, desert villages, swamp houses, lighthouses.
Towns on the coast have boat docks, as one would expect in an archipelago.
All POIs are custom layout, no 'generic' towns.

Changed some caves to mines, replaced all cave entrances.

New rural roads with some guard rails, drive carefully!

Animal spawns are now more location specific, e.g., crocodiles spawn in and around the swamp biome on Ilha da Traição.

Loot

There is now greater loot list specialization and new loot-specific containers. You are most likely to find specific items in containers that would make sense in the real world. Anything you think might contain something try and open. Clearly some are still static decorations for performance’ sake. However, there are new loot containers that are easy to overlook. Try and open everything.

Loot only respawns after 10 in-game days and only if the loot container is empty. This means that if you leave something in the container, that container will not respawn. Each loot container has its own respawn timer. This is the way it has always been, and I left it working the same way. It also means you can use loot containers (not AI dropped containers) as your own storage…try and remember where though. They will not respawn if there is something in them.

Perishable items will only start to perish once the loot container is opened the first time. If you don’t need food, then don’t open containers that you are confident contain food items. Go back and open them when in need of food.

Added Battery to loot list for insurgent drops on kill. It is a relatively rare drop but is now required for crafting a Flashlight on the Weapons Bench. Batteries can also be crafted in the Workbench but require Titanium Ingots (same as old recipe). Flashlights can only be crafted or bought from an NPC.

Added Iron Ore to garbage loot containers. In case a player has no more iron ore and no pickaxe they can either loot trash containers for some small Iron Ore loot or punch iron nodes in caves for small chance at Iron Ore.

Quality of Life (QoL) Improvements

Pistol gun parts stack, 5 per stack.

Better organized crafting menus, grouped and alphabetized with group.

Bread and some other cooked items have a longer shelf life.

Added Fahrenheit and Celsius temperature option. Can be set at start of new game or changed in options menu during game.

Added Body Temp slider showing proximity to hypothermia and heat exhaustion limits.

Added Power Available indicator/text to workbenches requiring power. Now you know you need to turn that generator on before you try to craft.

Added default crafting quantity of '1' if recipe requirements are met. This was an often requested feature!

Increase quantity arrow, ‘>’ in crafting window turns red to indicate not enough mats.

Adjusted weapon damage, more adjustments will likely be necessary.

You can now use coal in the campfire, forge, and wood stove. It burns quite a bit longer than wood.

Allow building components to be picked up instead of destroyed. Deleting now returns the component to inventory. A confirmation message was added to confirm ‘deletion’. Targeting placeables gives a "[Del] to Pick Up" tool tip. Targeting building components does not but you can still use [Del] and a confirmation window will pop up.

Removed building prerequisites that would have required removing some buildings parts to remove others. This can result in ‘floating’ components. There is no Structural Integrity (SI) currently, and no plans to add SI currently.

Workshop Blueprints are not consumed when building the Workshop or the Workshop Foundation. This means you can build as many Workshops or Workshop Foundations as you like.

Added 3rd person view option to vehicles (like the boat has). Please provide feedback on 3rd person distance, adjustments may be necessary to prevent motion sickness. Recommend sitting back from monitor while driving, especially for large monitors.

Removed the build/delete circular bar. Now builds are instant and deletes (picks up) are instant after confirmation.

Added progress view of deliver material quests to the Quest tab.

Added public Workbench, Saw Bench, Chemistry Station, and Weapon Bench at various locations.

Added public Plant Bed at farms. There are five farms on the starting islands and three more farms on Ilha do Desespero.

Boat has an auto-forward key now. Left-Alt starts the boat forward at its current selected speed. Either ‘W’ or ‘S’ resumes manual control.

Reduced quantities of some delivery quests by ~20%. My intent is to make these delivery quests more engaging and less grind. I have quests rework and additions on my road map but will like push some of this work earlier in smaller increments.

Reduced berries requirement for Juice from 10 to 5.

Set sales price of diamonds at 50 gold…seeing as, temporarily, they have only one other use.

Reduced crafting time and increased stack size of Tallow (used to make Biofuel).

Reduced Leather requirement for Leather Chair from 25 to 15.

Increased the number of increments of foundation height placement (‘U’ key bind) from 3 to 6. Max height adjustment remains the same, increment is smaller.

Reduced the Extractor time from 120 sec to 60 sec since it is a late game item and uses considerable power. Also replaced the magnesium powder with magnesium.

New

Added craftable Freezer that further reduces spoilage time over the fridge. Crafted on the Workshop Bench and requires Titanium Plates. Freezer is on the right, fridge on the left.

Added a bed to forward compartment of boat. Mousing over gives option to click to sleep.

Added building components to Saw Bench menu so you can craft both from inventory and Saw Bench. Saw Bench crafting is faster than crafting from inventory.

Added Stone Forge recipes to Furnace.

Added sand recipe to Anvil.

Added alternate Glass Jar recipe to Electric Furnace and uses sand directly.

Added Campfire recipes to Wood Stove and Electric Stove, added some Wood Stove recipes to Electric Stove. Once you craft the Wood Stove you will no longer need the Campfire, you can pick it up and use it when at remote locations.

Added alternate recipes for Juice, Chamomile Cup, Coffee Cup, and Green Tea Cup that uses glass water jar instead of plastic water bottle. Jar is consumed.

Added capability of food items to have multiple health benefits. This greatly expands the food crafting options as we continue to evolve the game. Both positive and negative benefits can be applied with foods items. Including future use of poisons. It also makes new health stats easily added.

Several fruits had no crafting use in the game, blueberries, apples, grapes, and tomatoes. Two new recipes were added to utilize these.

Added Canned Fruit that uses 2 each of apples, blueberries, and grapes and is crafted in the Wood or Electric Stove. When consumed it regenerates 40 Carbs and 10 Thirst.

Added Tomato Soup, crafted on the Wood or Electric Stove, that uses 3 tomatoes 2 Medicinal Herbs, 1 Salt, and a Glass Water Bottle. When consumed it regenerates 40 Carbs, 10 Thirst, and 20 Health. The bottle is not returned. Currently tomatoes are loot items only.

Added a new Workshop Foundation piece that snaps to other foundations and lets you integrate your workshop with your base. Make your workshop as large as you want, use the same walls, ceilings, and roof parts as the rest of your base, and add lights. Original Workshop is still craftable.

New 4x4 vehicle choice to purchase at the Mechanic. This vehicle is more expensive but is tuned to perform better on various types of terrain and hence will climb steeper slopes. It also has a higher clearance and will roll over objects that would stop the other vehicles. Please provide feedback on all vehicle types and I will continue to fine tune.

Added friction values to the various road and terrain surface types. The vehicles have different performance on these various surfaces, the Sedan better suited to paved roads, the 4x4 doing quite well on all surfaces. Adjustments will be ongoing.

Added car naming function and recall. When you place your car, it will ask for a name. You can now rename or recall your car by going to a garage and accessing the radio on workbench in the back right side.

This will cost 100g and will recall your car to the garage you are at. This will be helpful if you go flying off the road into the ocean, or if you want to sail to another island and use the garage there to bring your car to you. There are garages in the two modern towns, the mining town, one on the side of the road in the Ilhas dos Mortos. There are three garages on Ilha do Desespero; the mining town and the modern town. There is one on Ilha da Traição in an industrial complex near the modern town. There are three on O Oráculo; one at the industrial town and two in the mining town. Since these are the only islands with significant road systems, they are the only ones to which you can recall your car. If you want a car on one of the others, buy a new one and place it when you are on the island.

Added a clay rock type. It produces only clay and can be found around the lakes on the starter islands. Use pickaxe to harvest. Like all surface rocks they will not respawn.

World temperature drops by 5 C (9 F) when it starts raining.

Modified Cooked Crocodile to give 70 Protein but also -10 Thirst. Also added two Salt to Recipe but gives two Cooked Crocodile instead of one. Crocodiles can only be found in the swamp biome on Ilha da Traição.

Wooden Crates now stack on top of other Wooden Crates, Military Crates stack on top of other Military Crates.

Added Empty Container to Workbench recipe list, you no longer need to rely only on looted Empty Containers. One Aluminum Ingot produces two Empty Containers.

Modified the Chamomile Tin recipe to require 2 Chamomile plants, 2 Medical Plants, 1 water. The Chamomile Cup now gives 30 Thirst and 30 Health, instantly now but Heal Over Time (HoT) in the future. Chamomile Tins are now rare in loot crates. This distinguishes the Green Tea Cups that only provide 30 Thirst from the Chamomile Cups that have additional benefits.

Reduced the Ore Extractor cycle time from 120 seconds to 60 seconds since it is a late game item, uses a lot of power, and doesn't extract all that much ore. Also, replaced the Magnesium Powder with just Magnesium to match what you would mine in a cave.

Fixes and Changes

Ported to UE 4.27

Fixed Workshop not being able to be deleted.

Removed crafting recipe references for gold bars and gold coins…for now.

Sun moves now when in vehicle/boat/heli so you can see the change instead of it just being updated when you exit the vehicle/boat/heli.

Helicopter no longer flies underwater. A height limit is also now implemented.

Cars are much more controllable; improvements will continue to be made in driving.

Changed heli HUD text to using Helipad to change name rather than Shipyard.

Reworked weather system. When fog rolls in it now also affects the water.

Fixed a problem where Coffee would not regenerate stamina past the original 100. Coffee though will be reworked significantly in the future to provide temporary Stamina increases…likely followed by temporary Stamina decreases, like that feeling you get when your first two shots of espresso for the day wear off.

Fixed an old problem that resulted in partial loss of commands such as switching hot bar tools, jumping, or accessing main menu.

Fixed an old problem that resulted in erroneous 'full' messages when eating or drinking.

Adjusted storm frequency. You will see a storm between one half and two ingame days. One ingame day is 72 RL minutes. Please let me know if you find this too frequent or not frequent enough. Personally I like the storms but I've tried to balance it. In the future I may expose the settings in the ingame menu.

Added vendor NPC (Mechanic, Trader, Pharmacist, and Arms Dealer) map markers at the start of a Full Sandbox game. The new map would likely make trying to discover all four of these frustrating. If players in Full Sandbox mode find this too easy I can consider a 'hint' method of narrowing down their possible locations.

Fixed a problem where holding the right mouse button (aim) while using 'E' on a container or entering inventory with 'I' would result in hotbar freezing, weapon firing freezing, jumping to not work, and even getting the main menu to fail.

Fixed an old problem where the boat, if run into the shore or any object either forward or backward, would tip up on the bow or stern and behave badly. Now, if you run into something the boat gently stops and settles back into the water allowing the player to regain control. However, there are partially submerged rocks that can ground your boat, so be careful! If you’re on auto-forward be in open waters! If you try really hard you can probably also ground it in other locations, the fix was meant to reduce the problem. I find this far too amusing to try and prevent!

Happy Sailing!

Dev Notes and Known Issues

MP has been disabled in the main menu due to severe issues after porting to 4.27. I will revisit this in the future.

Some NPCs will spawn on roof tops and when killed their loot crate will not fall to the ground. While it can be annoying to be denied your just reward occasionally, I decided having NPC 'snipers' kept you alert...so look up often! Unfortunately it also means that the very occasional animal can be found on a roof but that is much more rare.

Vehicle Stats

These, except the price, are relative numbers indicating the performance differences in the various vehicles. They will likely undergo significant changes as players report issues. For example, Max Torque affects, in part, how well the vehicle does on different slopes.

Vehicle
Price
Mass
Max Torque
Max RPM
Max Speed
Drag Coef
Clearance
Flood Level
Hatchback
300
1400
480
5800
2000
0.3
17
34
Sedan
700
1500
540
6500
3000
0.25
17
35
SUV
500
1700
500
5800
2200
0.35
30
45
4x4
1,000
2100
717
5400
2000
0.35
53
80

Jul 8, 2022

DD#77 Another Page in a Dying World.

[Neolithic]To the End - orochi2k

Hi, everyone. Welcome to another week's developer's diary.
The game turned 18 years old this week.
However, we don't have much time to celebrate as many sad events took place this week.

On July 5th, we lost Yui. It's always sad to put someone to this game's "in memory of" section in the credit file. But, it happens. Yui is the first discord bot on NEOLITHIC's discord server. She also once lived on many of my friends' servers. However, in the past 5 years, Yui has become a huge project that her developer finds it hard to spend time to keep maintaining. What makes things worse is Discord's policy to enforce slash command. Thus, the creator of Yui shut the project down on July 5th, 2022. As a game developer who worked on my own project in the last 18 years, I fully understand how much efforts need to be put into a personal project. I respect their decision and appreciate all the joys I had with Yui.
Hopefully, some miracles may happen in the future to bring her back. There is still hope as Yui is a digitalized life form, more robust than fragile humans.
But, for now, rest in peace.

In order to remember her, I've added an NPC named Yui in our game as well. You can find her near Queensmouth Church. I reimplemented some of Yui's functions such as providing random kitten and puppy images. But, that's just a memorial. I don't think I can fully reimplement all her functions. At least, not right now.
Maybe, only those with her in her last moment know what this means:

Thank you for all the free hugs, cookies, kittens, puppies, inspirations, and kisses.

On July 6th, the creator of Yu-Gi-Oh, Kazuki Takahashi was found dead wearing snorkeling gear in Okinawa, Japan. I'm not a serious Yu-Gi-Oh gamer and I only watched a few seasons of the anime. But, I do remember spending a lot of time playing online with my vampire decks against players from all over the world. I also remember once I sent too much money to Konami and got my credit card frozen by my bank. I had all those fun thanks to Kazuki Takahashi. But, now he is gone.
I added the scroll of reborn to our game with a similar design to Yu-Gi-Oh's "Monster Reborn" card.
However, it's a pity that we do not live in a game world and there is no card that can bring him back.

There is more sad news this week. Japanese former prime minister Shinzo Abe just got assassinated a few hours ago; British prime minister Boris Johnson was forced to resign yesterday; Famous Minecraft Youtuber Technoblade passed away after years of struggle against cancer. Some people in China may dislike Abe, some people in the UK may dislike Johnson, some...well...I don't know any people who dislike Technoblade so far. But, anyway, being an indie game developer, I can care less about what others say, and as a human being, I feel the sorrow of their departure. With limited resources, I can't add them all into the game. But, at least, I shall mention them here. When people who once lived in this area are gone, it always brings me a feeling of the world is ending. Maybe, indeed, to live is to have a mortal wound that step by step we will reach the inevitable.

Now, enough for the sad part of the story. We shall move on.
The story continues both in Queensmouth Church and the Unlucky-13 Motel.
Treason has been revealed even among the rank of a secret society while demons now drop sulfur.

Some live quality improvements have been made with the item selection UI with some items receiving an update to make them more flexible.
New items to better control enemy aggro.
New character appearance to make the world more diverse.
New skill book mechanism to make reading smoother.
We live on, carrying those memories so that they will not be forgotten.

That's for this week. Maybe one day, everything, everyone dies. But, before that, let's live and have fun.

Today's changelog:
##########Content#################
The game will no longer quit the item selection menu after you use a book. Including life skill books from the book store, skill books dropped from enemies, and weapon proficiency books. (Thanks to 7.Ti's suggestion.)
This change only applies to new books generated after this version as there are some code changes in item generation.
Books already generated before this version can still be used. But, they will quit the item selection menu after being used.
If a character fails to learn anything new from a life skill book or a weapon proficiency book, the book will no longer be consumed.
##########System#################
If there is no more in-use item left, the system will now prompt and automatically exit the target selection window.
Items can now run a sub-event interpolator without needing to go back to the map. (Some limitations apply.)