Hey neighbours!
I hope you’re well! I’ve been loving all the rain we’ve been having in Melbourne this week. Today’s update is a nice chunky one so let’s go to it!
First up the most exciting thing: cooking! You have been invited to a taping of Jordon Gamsey’s kitchen make over show at the pub in Garland East. Afterwards you’ll be able to purchase a pot (or borrow the one in the pub) and cook your own meals. The mini game is a memory game where each ingredient is assigned an action and you select the action to complete the recipe before the timer runs out.
Each NPC has a recipe for their favourite comfort food, you can collect them around the city after becoming good enough friends. Eating the meals you make comes with a buff specific to the NPC. Some of them are silly and some are useful so make sure you try them all!
This update also has some nice quality of life features including:
- NPCs now have a chance of giving you a gift back when you gift them, the chance is higher the better your relationships is.
- Ravens now have a chance of dropping gifts when you pat them.
- Recycling bins now sell stuff people have recycled (items, furniture etc). They restock daily and each one has its own items so check them all!
- Big updates to interaction radius to better handle stacked items and different kinds of input.
- Tea recipes now only require one of each ingredient.
- Using the toilet now removes any food related buffs you have that day.
- Lots of new accessibility features including adjusting the timers on mini games, custom cursors and toggles for the sleep requirements.
- You can now also use the back button to force progression and auto select the final option of text if you want to spam though long scenes.
In addition to all of that, this update has major changes to how the graphics and textures are handled in the back end. This is the last of the major optimisations I had planned, I’m sure there will be some more that come to me but now this is out of the way I’ll be full steam ahead on more QoL stuff and tasks.
Thanks as always for your bug reports and sorry I’ve been a bit slower with replies lately, life has really being life-ing! But I really appreciate your support and I’m excited for the next bits!
I’ll most likely have one more update before the end of the year and then I’ll be taking a little break over the holidays to regroup and update the roadmap.
<3 Violet
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2.0.0F - Patch (PC and Mac) (Full and Demo) - 04/11/25
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Current song: WITCHYMAN - Cain Culto
General:
- UI - Adjusted placement for small screens
- Ui - Fixed nine slice on scrolls and sprites to prevent being visually off.
- Hotbar - Health - no longer flashes blue when not in use and doesn’t appear on day one
- TV - fix image not destroying on early exit
- Portraits - minor changes to train portrait height
- Error messages - edited some wording
- Adjusted spawn logic for all types of daily spawns
- Music shop - moved opening mail to Spring 14th.
- Music shop - Require reading letter before going to music shop for intro scene to trigger.
- Tea shop - Require reading letter before going to tea shop for intro scene to trigger.
- Demo - Adjusted text across achievements and pop ups.
- Fixed “Quit to apartment” after rental not going back to hotel on first day.
- Dehydrator - Adjust text to say “off” not “error” if not currently working but items to collect.
- Player - fixed body colour not updating at the mirror in some situations.
- Player - Clamp draw to prevent sub pixel display.
- Hotel bed - Fixed can get stuck on first night if spamming exit at the right angle.
- General typos etc.
Items/Inventory
- Added “SPECIAL” category, to prevent selling or gifting required items (ferris wheel ticket)
- Added various ingredient and recipe card items.
- Inventory App - Fixed wrong hover placement when moving items with controller/keyboard.
- Fixed Fringe/Beard registering as hair when added from lucky bag gifts.
- Hotbar - Fixed hotbar item not reselecting the current item when tab is pressed again.
Furniture/Decor:
- Fixed crash from getting single bed as random lucky bag reward.
- Placement sparkle for putting items on tables now has correct placement.
- Adjusted Redecorate and Turn tool interaction windows.
- Switched off collisions for furniture on tables etc.
- Fixed shadow placement when holding furniture outside.
- Removed ability to put Rugs and Beds on tables.
- Default Player furniture - adjusted microwave placement and plant placement
Shops/Storage:
- Update various shops inventory including Butcher, Supa, Fish, Market, Nights, Pub, Dan’s fridge
- Recycling Bin - Now will have random items for sale each day (good ones, not trash!)
- Storage - Tea, herbs and ingredients are now added to the Food tab, Hair Styles are Hair Dye are now stored in the Clothes tab.
- Fixed not being able to take NPC items from storage when we don’t have money.
- Shops - Adjusted text placement in Info tab.
- Storage - fixed sound playing when exiting the fridge.
- Adjust integration window for (most) shops to include highlight
NPCs:
- Fixed direction jitter on stop and adjusted some collisions.
- Fixed visual issues when set to following mode.
- Compressed sprites for speed - (this is a WIP and may effect some cutscenes where npc clothing is changed)
- Fixed NPCs walking away when talking to you - (probably)
- Gifts - Limited daily gifts to 1, NPCs will now politely decline additional gifts.
- Gifts - Added a random chance of receiving a gift back when gifting an NPC. Chance increases as relationship progresses.
- Fixed npcs pushing items when walking through them.
Animals:
- Fixed birds flying behind buildings
- Ravens now have a chance of dropping pebbles when you pat them.
- Fixed fish not spawning in some cases
Initiatives/Tallies:
- Gardening Basics - Fixed tally check for seeds planted and cuttings harvested.
- CDs Collected - Swapped tally check from CDs picked up to songs unlocked.
Levels/Visual:
- Fixed slipping in various buildings: bank, cinema, mall
- Fixed collisions in various areas - florist table
- Added front walls to all indoor areas (your can toggle this in settings)
- University - Added fences
- Lighting - Fixed orange glow overlay being the wrong sizes.
- Lighting - Update lighting overlay in cinema
- Justice Center - Fixed transparency
- CBD - Added hedges.
- Fire Station - Fixed rug visibility
- Recycling centre - Fixed not being transparent when behind it.
- Pub - Added kitchen area with communal cooking pot.
- Surface Studio - Fixed preview of wallpaper not displaying in window.
Accessibility:
- Custom cursor colours (request what colours you want!).
- Added timer controls for Fishing, Tea and Cooking mini games.
- Add difficulty override for Cooking mini game.
- Add front walls toggle.
- Added “Require Sleep” toggle (sleep counter won’t increment so you can manage physical and mental health without sleep effecting it).
Tea brewing mini game:
- Fixed kettle placement on smalls screens.
- Adjusted recipe formatting.
- Removed the kettle game background.
- Updated recipes to require only 1 of each ingredient.
- Making tea not from recipes will now make “Experimental Tea” or “Bad Tea” depending on outcome.
- Adding too many ingredients will now only take what it needs for the recipe.
- Added accessibility timer controls.
- Add achievement after intro cutscene completed.
Cooking:
- Added cooking mini game.
- Added pot to furniture store.
- Added Mail inviting to attend event.
- Added opening cutscene in pub.
- Added recipe cards to various locations around the maps and also fridges. Each NPC has a comfort food recipe to share, to collect recipe cards, you need to be Acquaintance level or higher.
- Each recipe item is linked with a special buff.
Buffs:
- Adjusted ChanceHarvest rates.
- Added lots of new buffs for cooking items including price adjustments, raven gifts, lighting up Haruka’s sketches, double fishing rewards etc.
- Using the toilet now removes any food related buffs and plays a sound effect.
- Eating Experimental Tea or Fusion Cuisine now has a randomised chance to give up a positive or negative buff.
Interactions:
- Textboxes - Pressing “back” will now exit a textbook or if there’s a choice window open select the final option.
- Textbooks - Selections now have a visual queue when they’re available to prevent unintended presses.
- Player interaction - Adjusted check to recognise changes to player facing direction without movementt
- Cleaning - Adjusted range on tree cleaning
- Bed - Added diagonal directions to trigger sleep in bed and adjusted some scene timing.
- Adjusted all player interaction logic to be better for tables, prioritising and optimisation.
Controls:
- Adjusted keyboard reset on mouse movement.
- Settings - Custom controls: Prevented removing some inputs (interact, arrows) if there’s no other options registered.
- Settings - Add controller and input debug to menu
- Settings - Adjusted text on reconnect controller button.
- Controller - Adjusted 8 directional movement sprite choice to be more natural.
- Controllers - Adjustments to controllers for better connection/disconnection
- Adjusted swapping between keyboard/mouse input for buttons to be more responsive.
Events:
- New Game - Fixed issue with starting a new game during the opening cutscenes causing a soft lock.
- Intro - Forced train to spawn regardless of first day status.
- Hotel intro - Update portraits
- Real Estate Window - Fixed first day triggers occasionally not deleting.
- Move ins - Adjust pot placement preventing item spawn in some cases.
- Jake PE 1 - Fixed bird placement
- Chloe PE 1 - fixed bad guy hanging around after the event.
- Ryan PE 1 - Updated portraits and running placement
- Cedar BE 2 - Updated text to require Parlour Palm to be fully grown and mention camera requirement. Note - This will not currently update on old save files!
- MP 3 - Trigger of collecting the stuff checking off the wrong sub task and preventing things from moving forward.
- Demo - Fixed issue with some demo tasks not sending reward after checking wrong sub tasks.
- FoP - Changed how attendance is registered.
Optimisation:
General:
- Camera - clamp movement better
- Removed gmlive
- Replaced draw_rectangle with sprite.
- Smoothed delta timing when entering a new room.
- Update of various collisions, placements, fades etc for this.
- Moved various code from draw > step event.
- Weather - Adjusted for low fps and per platform, decoupled the emitter and timer updates.
- Player - adjust radius checks so they update when we change facing directions.
- Changed room order effecting room start
- Transitions - Added run_load_transition_complete for stuff that needs to happen on load when transition completed
- Transitions - Added optional z placement control
- Started adding positioning struct to all objects
Depth sorting:
- Full rework of depth sorting to group like textures and use passthrough shader. Note - there are still some transparency issues there for stacked objects.
- Updated onscreen checks to stop things popping on and off screen across all objects
- Added z control to depth transparency
- Added tie breaker to prevent clipping.
UI:
- Refactored some UI areas for speed.
- Added UI creation numbers and fixed context menu exit cases.
- Fixed better button memory for tabs.
- Fixed scrolls saving not from context menu refresh.
- Better scroll and button memory for selections.
Sprite baking:
- Added sprite baking to NPCS with compressed sprites in general play.
- Added sprite baking to player.
- Added sprite cache control
Surfaces and textures:
- Added texture and surface tracking
- Fixed UI scroll surfaces not being cleared properly.
- Added texture flushing at various points including room change, dialogue box end.
- Change all platforms back to 2048x2048 texture page sizes
