Edengrall News

Sorry for the late report, just got my PC back from the maintenance, it broke down Wednesday, but it is fine now, luckily I didn't lose any data (as far as I am aware right now).

I will go directly to the point now. We won't be able to deliver the game this year for several reasons:

-We didn't manage to make the AI in time

-The cooking and farming systems are still going through some reworks since we are switching from the old UI to the new Unity UI Toolkit

-Grass system has taken a lot longer to implement than expected

-Game won't be polished enough to be playable even if we manage to finish the AI and finish the promised features for the early access

For the release of the Early Access we made a few promises we won't be going back on:

“The complete version will have all the features listed in the store page description. The Early access will have all we can implement in time, which probably means:
*Cooking System
*Farming
*20 NPCs with our experimental AI
*Simulated Economy
*A few festivals
We will add more if we can get them done.”

These won't be done in time, so sorry no release until they are. While the current date is set to 31/Dec/2021 we might release sooner if we get all done and well polished, i picked a far away date to be safe, since we won't be pushing the release date further again. I hope we will have better news next week.

Finishing the upper shopping district

I made many assets and placed most of them already, the top floors of each shop are the owner’s rooms, and these are done.

The tables will be shared between the cafe and the bakery as friendly rivals do



Bakery top floor: Bunnygirl(TODO) and Yui’s room



Cafe top floor: Harpy(TODO) and Angel(TODO) room



Flower shop top floor: Mothgirl(TODO) room



I also finished the bakery basic structure and most of the assets



This also made me notice how empty are those walls, i don’t remember what i was going to do with them, but i think i will reform this part adding balconies to the room floors, also add the wide window to the cafe.



I will be finishing the Cafe and Flower shop this weekedn, and probably most of the bottom floor shops by next friday.

About my brother and the grass system reform: it is 95% done, he only needs to fix cutting grass that broke recently and the grass crop harvesting. I asked him to explain the issue:

“If I were to explain why the development is taking so long, I’d go with a fear of technical debt. I only recently noticed I spend a lot of time doubting and re-thinking my current solution.
This is specially true for the new grass system, which separates wild grass (grown naturally) from crop grass (planted by the player), they are extremely similar, and share 90% of the code, but their differences still stop me from simply solving it with sub classes. I probably could manage to move 50% of the shared code to a super class, or restructure a whole lot of which class does what to move even more, but the effort seem hardly worth the time unless somehow a third type of grass become needed (thinking of bamboos right now). These refactorings could take place after we actually have a game.
Thinking back on the old grass system, I had even forgotten how it actually took almost half a year, maybe more to be done, since I started to work on it little after Breath of the Wild(2017) had released. Even if I now know how to make one that will work nice, it takes a while to code it all and test, especially when issues like reloading a save mid grass generation started to invalidate tiles in the middle of their generation and have some NativeArrays be lost to time without being deallocated. These little unforseen bugs keep taking my time.
Either way, I am on the final steps of making the crop grass being renderable (as it is already being generated), so it should be ready SOON™”

Shopping Edition

I made signs for every shop in the shopping district, the INN, Library and Clinic



The Tavern one you guys already knew, but the Clinic and the Library are new.



The Bathhouse is also getting signs, but just for male and female bath.

I also planned the layout of the shops, there are a total of 10 slots in the shopping building, starting from the top:



And here is the bottom floor:



Here more info on each shop, keep in mind none of those are implemented yet!

General Store (Cat Tails)

Owner: Catgirl*

Will contain most item variation, you buy most crop seeds here.

Smithy & Mechanic (Brass Bolts)

Owner: Dwarf*
Employee: Human Girl*

Here you buy and upgrade most tools, later on when we add some sort of automation (like sprinklers/pipes) this will also be the place to buy them.

Tailor (Tailor Made)

Owner: Bianca

When we have time to make more clothing for Adam this is where you will buy it.

Fishery (Hook, Line & Sinker)

Owner: Sharkgirl*

Fishing equipment and fresh fish here.

Capenter & Furniture (The Main Branch)

Owner: Mint

Furniture for the player house when we add the option to buy/build one.

Magic Shop (Arcanum)

Owner: Devilgirl

Magical items will take a long while to be actually used in game, this place will also sell alchemy stuff in the future.

Flower Shop (Groom & Bloom)

Owner: Mothgirl*
Employee: Anna

Flowers and flower seeds here.

Bakery (Bready Good)

Owner: Bunnygirl*
Employee: Yui

Delicious bread and some ingredients.

Cafe (Maid in Heaven)

Owner: Harpy*
Employee: Angelgirl*

Using special milk supplied by Momo’s ranch and special eggs this place makes the most expensive and exquisite meals.


Characters with * are not done yet.

The reserved slot will be for the player, you will be able to purchase that house and open a shop in there, but if the building is kept for sale for 2 years another NPC will buy it.

My brother is still working on grass, but at least he managed to fix one of the biggest problems the system had, when changing the terrain around grass, all the local grass would flicker and freeze the screen for a few frames, now everything is very smooth, no more flickering. He also made rectangular grass changers, which are elements used to change which kind of grass exist in an area (before there were only spherical ones)

So yeah… the Grass saga continues… we are not out of the boat yet…

First building is the museum/library. The first level is the museum with 30 small pedestals, 10 large ones and one huge in the center, plus 16 displays, those will be filled by the player and the NPCs if the player slacks too much.


The library starts at the second floor and goes up to the forth, right now the bookshelves are all empty, but since they are instances of the same prefab we will be able to modify them all at once later on when we make a script to fill bookshelves with random books.


Third Floor, almost the same as the second, but it has the bridge connections with the INN and the clinic.


The final floor has Elly's room and the storage. Yes, she will live in the library, a true bookworm dream.


View from the second floor, the huge pedestal in the middle will have a dragon fossil.


Right now you can't interact with the furniture, but eventually you will be able to sit in the chairs, pick books and read them. We will probably add steam workshop support for modders to add books with ease or something like that.

My brother has been finishing... guess what?










Yes, grass.

But he says this week is the last one... for the third time, but well can't be helped we need it working.

I made those models this week, feels good to make some new items, they still lack animations and functionality, I will make them into prefabs, so implemented functionality will apply to all existing copies, so i could start filling in the interiors with those now even without animations or functionality.



I made a sign for the INN, i will need to make one for every shop later, it will make easier for the player to know what is where.



My brother finally made some progress and switched from grass to UI. We are migrating our UI from XML Layout (Unity Asset) to UI Toolkit (Experimental Unity Feature), the Toolkit is much easier and faster to develop, it is also incredibly good performance-wise, right now we have the Main UI made in the Toolkit, but everything else still uses the old system.

After some testing we confirmed the new system is great for nesting dynamic tooltips, which is a feature we need for our tooltips since they are so big, with this the player will be able to close parts of the tooltip he doesn’t need and mouseover item references inside the tooltips to open that item tooltip.

The only problem right now is that translating text in the new tooltip requires workarounds, since UI Toolkit is a new experimental feature it is not complete, so we will either have to wait a bit for the feature or use one of the not-so-elegant workarounds.

For next week I will either make more furniture, add functionality to the ones already made or start remaking the UI in the new system, my brother will be back to trying fixing the grass. (argh!)