Edengrall News

Sorry I could not finish the shop and workshops interiors yet, I needed more assets, and wanted them to be accurate so i had to research, i finished the 3 last rooms of the second floor, made the smithy and most of the carpenter shop, 4 shops remain, will be done next week.



Tailor workshop left (missing spinning wheel, gonna make today)
Smithy assistant room in the middle
Smithy room right (he is a golem, thats why his bed is weird)



Forge, Anvil, Crafting table and Whetstone are done and rigged, they can be animated when we make them interactable.



The carpenter shop mostly has furniture piled on, I haven’t finished most of the tools here yet.



For the tailor I made this loom, despite being a simple model it has a ton of movable parts, so I haven’t rigged it yet since I wanted to speed it up, I might make the rig and animate if we implement tailoring as a feature in the far future.

Only a few more assets are needed, so I will finish it this week and move to the INN.

My brother is finishing up a editor he made to create UI behaviors (will make coding new UI much faster and simpler), he is also improving the implementation of the farming system features so we can have more plant Traits types to make plants more unique and interesting.



It is possible that we will be able to release this and some other stuff we use as modtools in the future.

In case you missed the last week update, we have decided to delay the game for up to a year (up to, means we might release earlier if we can), we want to release something worth of your money, right now all current features are very unstable and unpolished, and we haven`t even begun the biggest and hardest of them, the advanced NPC AI.

But, that doesn't means there is nothing to look forward this year, we have two big things planned, first is the demo, as soon as we tie all loose ends, replace old systems, review and polish what we have we will release a new free demo with the new crop system. The second is a trailer, so far I have been against using anything that is not direct gameplay on the game promotion, but we need something catchy right now as the demos we released haven't pulled any eyes so far, the trailer won't have any fake "in engine" bullshit, just a cute animation with the characters interacting and cooking, raising crops and such, all new animations I will make for the trailer will be in the game later.

Now for this week progress

GRASS IS DONE (for now)

The new structure works, the system can now support a lot more features, like many more different types of grass and crop traits on grass type crops, it is also much faster to generate (lower load times) and a better optimized (FPS)

My brother is now working on the new UI, starting by the universal tooltip, the one that shows up in the bottom left corner and will give info about anything intractable.

I have been reviewing some legal issues, we live in a very tax heavy country, so I gotta make sure we won't be doing anything wrong when we start actually making money, but i still had time to work on assets.



Unfortunately I still couldn't finish the shopping district, as soon as i got to the blacksmith room I stopped filling the rooms to make new assets, stuff like Forge, Anvil, Saw, Work tables, grinding stone, some of them will have animations, so i had to make a rig for the them and it was extra work, but most are ready now and I will finish the building this week.



Here all the assets I made since I started making the town interiors.

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…