Dec 30, 2023

Verdant Village - exodussoftware3

To start things off, happy new year! It’s been quite a year for myself, and Verdant Village in general. I’ve said it before, but I can’t say I was expecting to be in the process of remaking this game at this time. A lot of the framework for the game has been laid since I started in a new engine earlier this year. We’re getting fairly close to the point where the more complex systems are in place and hopefully after that development will speed up a bit.

Now, as for what happened this month, I regret to say it wasn’t much. December is always sort of a weird month just because of the holidays. This year was busier than usual for me, and I also had the pleasure of being sick for a bit. I did make some progress on ranching, but admittedly this month was a bit of a wash. That said January should be far more normal, and I can return to getting things done.
While I didn’t get around to that much this month there are two major things that did happen, more so in planning than execution. The first is ranching. It’s the system that I’m working on at the moment and while in the process of setting things up I was taking a look at the actual gameplay systems and determined that I didn’t think much of them.

For anyone who hasn’t gotten to ranching yet in game I’ll explain. In its current state ranching is very simple, basically you just feed your animals each day and they will give you a product as a result. If you fail to feed them for too long, they starve. That’s basically it. There are some other minor things like automatic feeding, a pasture system, and a few animal variations like pink and brown cows as well.
All of this is alright as a base, but while I was considering ranching, I came to the conclusion that its sort of lackluster. Something I’ve tried to avoid in this game is systems that are nothing more than a button press. I prefer for there to be some nuance to everything so that this doesn’t just become a chore simulator. This is harder to do with some things, but ranching has plenty of opportunities for complexity. I’ve never raised livestock in person, but I’m guessing it requires more effort than just giving your animals food every day.

So, in that spirit, there will be something of an overhaul coming. In short, there will be more aspects to taking care of animals. Specifically, I currently have several systems planned, health, hunger, sickness, cleanliness, pastures, and wards. Each of these is pretty simple but I’ll explain.

Health is exactly what it sounds like, every animal will now have an HP value. An animal at full health is happier. Health can be affected by things like sickness or monster attacks.

Hunger is obviously how hungry an animal is. Feeding an animal each day will ward this off. However, there will be a few tiers of feed which have other effects. Treats will also be something you can feed animals. These don’t actually fill up an animal but can boost their happiness and HP to help them recover if needed.

Sickness means, as you likely guessed, that animals can get sick. There are a few different types of sickness, that cause damage and even death if they aren’t treated. Disease can also spread if it isn’t taken care of.

Cleanliness is just a simple system where you’ll have to wash or groom your livestock every few days.
Pastures are sort of multipurpose but ultimately a pasture serves to make livestock happier. A larger pasture will make the livestock in it happier.

Last is wards. This is related to monster attacks. Monsters can attack your animals each night and wards will keep your animals safe. They have a duration that they last so they’ll need to be replaced. In general, they serve to reduce the frequency and severity of monster attacks.

All of these things play into happiness. In other games like this, happiness tends to be something you build up over time. For instance, if you feed your animal each day and pet it the animal will like you more. This is usually a cumulative system meaning that once your animal is happy, you’d have to really just stop paying attention to it for its levels to drop. Generally speaking, I don’t like this as I think it sort of lowers the stakes for consistent care.

The plan for this system is that happiness will be a value that is determined each day based on the status of the animal. This happiness value will determine what you get from the animal. There are several tiers of happiness, the higher the tier, the better your rewards.

It should also be mentioned that these systems are meant to play off of and affect each other. For instance, not cleaning your animals lowers their immunity which makes them more likely to get sick. Letting animals into a pasture can make them happier, but they’ll get dirty more quickly. Being in a pasture will also provide the animal with food so you don’t need to feed them, but pasture feeding isn’t going to be as good as high-quality feed.

Aside from all these things all animals will have at least one to two transformations that you can change them into by feeding them certain special items. There are a few other things as well, but they aren’t worth really getting into. The hope is that with all these things raising livestock will be a bit more interactive rather than just a mindless task.

Now, if you’ll remember I said I had two major things to talk about. Last month I believe I mentioned that changes would be coming to the mines. The first is that it’s going to be closer to town. The world is getting a general makeover and one issue is that the mines are really far away. So no more winding mountain trails, or at least not as much of one.

That’s a pretty minor detail though. Much like ranching I’ve been contemplating the mining system for the game. Now, the act of mining itself is going to stay the same. The thing I decided to focus on was the mine itself. For those who haven’t played, or seen the mines, it is basically the same as other games of this genre. You enter and descend through around 100 floors. Each time you enter a new floor it randomly generates the layout to add some level of uniqueness to the area. The mines also generate a few different things like stamina drainers, keysprites, treasure chests, seams, lighting, buffs, etc.

The point of this was to vary the mining experience a bit each time you went in and give the player a bit of something to encounter. General combat encounters were also (and still are) planned for the mines.

Looking at the mines I sort of came to a conclusion about the whole setup that I didn’t really like. To put it bluntly, it’s sort of redundant and it’s stretching a fairly thin gameplay mechanic across a large swath of game. Along with this the random things you can find in the mines combined with the random layouts means that rewards are sort of just laying around.

The older I get, and the more games I play, the more I’ve come to the conclusion that random generation is something that really should be used sparingly and in the correct circumstances rather than a replacement for level design. I had thought the mines would be good for this, but I think that was incorrect. Looking at the mines as they are right now, I see it as basically having 100 very subpar levels. The poor quality is offset by the quantity. So, the new plan is to rectify this.

Currently my idea is that there will be 10 levels to the mines. Unlike the current mine levels these will be far larger. Instead of random layouts they will each be handcrafted. There will be a boss enemy at the end of each level to keep people from simply rushing to the lowest floor. The biome will change every two levels and what minerals and gems you find on each floor will change.

The mines will be designed cyclically so that the end of the level winds back around to the start. This way when you want to come back via the elevator you won’t have to traverse the entire level again. There will likely be other ways to hop around the level as well.

Probably the most important part however is that each level will be treated like something of a dungeon. There will be plenty of ore to mine that is scattered about however your progress through the level will be gated by smaller puzzles, locked doors, or combat encounters. Once you’ve reached the end of the level and defeated the boss it will unlock what I’d refer to as a mining room. This would be a large area full of rocks you can mine so once you’ve completed the level you can come back and mine in a more traditional setting without having to run through a maze just to find mining nodes.
That’s the general idea. To be clear, I used the term dungeon earlier which makes me think of Zelda. To be clear, this would not be something as extensive as that. There’s already enough going on without adding a Zelda clone to this game.

I’d be curious to know what people think of this, so if you have an opinion feel free to share it. My personal perspective is that I would rather have 10 well-made levels instead of 100 forgettable ones. Doing something like this would also allow me to use the mines for other things potentially since there would be a static layout that I could tie to other things in the game.

Anyway, this post is already very long so I’ll wrap it up. I have plenty of work in front of me which I’m eager to start. I do apologize for not getting a ton done this month. I’m keenly aware that people have already paid for this game and are potentially waiting for me to get on with it. Granted, I don’t think there are people waiting with bated breath on this new version. However, call me old fashioned, I don’t like to keep people waiting, especially when I’ve already taken money from them.

I’ll hopefully have more to report next month. As for now, I hope you all enjoy your new years celebrations and start off 2024 on the right foot.

Dec 30, 2023

Blog post: 2023 summary and outlook for 2024

Summer Islands - Matt

Hello everyone,

I hope you had a relaxing Christmas and that you, your family and your friends are doing well under the circumstances.

As the year draws to a close, I wanted to take a look back and forward with this post.
Before that, I wanted to motivate you to leave some feedback. Everyone can create a Steam review, write their wishes in the forum or write me directly about their wishes or problems Support@SummerIslands.de
The more feedback, the better. That's what Early Access depends on and I'm happy to implement your wishes and improvements.
I have to admit that I always look at the percentage of positive/negative user feedback. My goal is always to stay above 75% positive :D

The following update was made for 2023:

03.2023 [v0.8.5] with Gamepad Support
04.2023 [v0.8.6] with reputation through quality & environment
05.2023 [v0.8.7] with volcano, pollution and more
07.2023 [v0.8.8] with Awards, Currencies and more
08.2023 [v0.8.9] with nature, more nature and fixes
09.2023 [v0.9.0] with special buildings and more
11.2023 [v0.9.1] with more sabotage
12.2023 [v0.9.2] with plant growth and more (coming next Weekend)

I have to say that the gamepad support was quite lengthy and you have to try out a number of options to find the best playing experience. Last but not least, Summer Islands was also verified for the Steam deck. The map editor is still missing, but that will come.
With the other updates over the year, the gameplay was changed in many corners with small steps. Especially the reputation, the special buildings or the additional natural disasters have a strong impact on the gameplay.
Between you and me, I was most looking forward to the special buildings. In the end, however, the WOU effect was a little less than I expected.
To summarize, it can be said that all areas have once again been improved and worked on.

Unfortunately, the next year 2024 will not be such an adventure.
We are planning to come out of early access in the next updates => Release v1.0.0 in Q2 2024
This should hopefully not be a major surprise for you. We once published a timeline for this on 01.04.2023. Here is another update:

With the latest updates I'm trying to "round off" everything a bit more, i.e. fine-tuning the parameters, fixing bugs, adding more tooltips, adjusting textures, etc. There is also a major engine update pending, which should make Summer Islands run much more smoothly. So there is still a lot to do. In particular, the idea of a research tree has stuck in order to unlock buildings earlier. This feature will be available as a separate update.
But a lot is probably under the hood.
I'm also trying to focus a little more on marketing in order to have a good start for the release of Summer Islands. ;)

Last but not least, I would like to say a BIG THANK YOU to you and your support for Summer Islands.
You are the heroes and a happy new year 2024 to each of you.

P.S. If you ❤️ Summer Islands, we would be very 🤩 about a 👍 Review.

Have fun
https://trello.com/b/FbC1a19w/devboard-summer-islands
https://summerislands.de

Social Links
https://bsky.app/profile/summerislands.bsky.social
https://mastodon.social/@SummerIslands
https://twitter.com/SummerIslandsQA

Dec 30, 2023

Progress Report #96: December 2023

VoidBound - LonerPrime

We regularly update our timelines with some of the more "explicitly" NSFW content over at our Discord and Twitter.

Find us at:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/CursedAtelier

Public Discord: https://discord.com/invite/tG7DKBa

Greetings, spacefaring allies🧑‍🚀

This week on the frontiers of intergalactic adventures, we've been weathering the holiday storm with grit and galactic glue. But, despite the festive distractions, our intrepid devs have been pushing the boundaries of our cosmic odyssey and we're here to share some of those bulletin updates with you.

As always, lets start from the desk of the artist:

The jackhammering to the first planet continues as we blast its terrain with stunning new CG asset updates as well as additions of new robotic designs. Central among them is the tight focus on the Mini Boss who got some extra uplifts this week.

Not only is the fight being re-done on a technical level to accommodate new tactics, its combat assets are being updated with new CG works as well. The idea is to create a unique and a formidable foe for Caly to go up against as she starts out her adventures. Goes without saying, the loss scene associated with the mini-boss is getting a grand re-design as well so expect Caly to get "machine"-handled in a variety of new ways.

Overall, after closely evaluating our initial work on the game, we're convinced that a quality overhaul of some earlier portions of the game is in order. Not only that, but we'll also be looking through existing CGs all around the game and make the needed adjustments to bring them more in line with the current standard.

The word weavers kept themselves busy reworking the Tripteen story-line. Their absolute priority is to avoid text droning while still keeping the lore engaging, though details remain sparse at this point. However, it was confirmed that new points of interests will be added with the rework to keep player explorations interesting so, safe to presume the new rework will have significant game-play highlights as well.

Finally, a new feature update from our coder who is in the middle of developing a new “Population System”. Henosis is a bustling metropolitan space hub and its multiple large zones are a testament to that claim..- except the bustling part really doesn't show as zones tend to feel a bit empty. We intend to remedy that by adding a system that will populate crowds. Aliens from all walks of life will stroll along the streets and hallways, making it feel like a proper intergalactic hub of hustle and bustle.

And that is all for this one. Development arc dipped a tab bit this week due to the holidays but we fully intend to recover our groove once we enter the new year so stay tuned for new things in 2024!

Till then though, thanks for reading and your time.

Kind Regards,

Cursed-Atelier Team