Dorfromantik News

Hey everyone,
we have bundled a few things that we would like to share with you:



While waiting for new content and the creative mode which we are hard at work on, some of you might want to try out similar games to Dorfromantik. For this we want to give a shoutout to our friends and fellow students from GrizzlyGames, the developers behind the fantastic ISLANDERS!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1046030/

It's a game with a very similar relaxing approach to the city building genre and we think that players who enjoy Dorfromantik might also enjoy ISLANDERS, so feel free to give it a try!



We're super stoked to be part of Midweek Madness this week with a huge 20% discount on Dorfromantik! It is the first discount since the Early Access release in March and the biggest one yet.
So for those of you who have waited for a discount or who have held off picking up Dorfromantik, now might be a good opportunity!



We have had overwhelming months since our release with many of you contacting us with ideas and inspirations and general positivity. For this we want to again say thank you! We are happy and proud to have such a positive and welcoming growing community around Dorfromantik and we are excited to bring more features and content to the game.



Regarding the community itself, we have of course taken your feedback and are now happy to announce that we have expanded our team with someone who comes from our community itself. Dom has already helped us out a lot in our Discord and also more often in the Community Hub. We are very happy to welcome Dom to the team and would like to give him the opportunity to write a few things about himself:

Originally posted by Domin0e

Hey everyone!
First of all, I would love to thank the rest of the team for the warm Welcome.
My name is Dominik, or Domin0e, but please call me Dom! I will be your Community Manager slash Community Developer slash Punching Bag from here on out, happy to make all y’all’s acquaintance.
I have just started at Toukana and will be working here part-time, so you might not see me all the time, but I will do my best.

Like the others, I am living in Germany, although quite far away from Berlin. I hail from the lower rhine area, close the dutch border and the Ruhr Area. If you are interested in football you might have heard of a lovely club called Borussia Mönchengladbach, which is my hometown club. That said, I’m not much of a fan of the sport, so don’t expect any enthusiast chat from me.
When I am not busy supporting the other Toukans, and pandemic situation permitting, I do enjoy throwing some hoops and taking out my bicycle for some (local) touring.

As a community manager I will try to, well, manage y’all. That means I’ll support the others in collecting feedback and bugs, communicating with you on here and Discord, mostly. At least for now. I’ll also try to pop into streams every now and then (No, really. It’s important for work. I think!) and will do my best to also collect other content you create so the others see all the cool stuff you guys put out! In the coming days I will give the Steam Discussions a thorough sweep, and probably change a couple small things to hopefully make it better for everyone.

If you have any more questions about me, my role at Toukana, or related to Dorfromantik (that I could reasonable answer), you can find me on the official Toukana Discord or here in the Community Hub. If there is enough interest I would be down for a potential AMAA here on Steam.
Please take good care of me!

As you have already noticed, we have been working intensively on balancing & performance updates for the last few weeks. Currently the patch 1.0.3b2 is currently live in beta and 1.0.3b3 will be released this week as well. If you want to join the beta, feel free to read this guide how to access the public beta program. Next, we'll get to work on the first content update in which we'll work on new content such as the creative mode.

Team Toukana

💛 Community Screenshots by NightowlLuke & keatches via Discord

Hey you wonderful people!

GOOD NEWS!

We're part of the BIG Festival this year, nominated in the category "Best Student Game" which is fantastic!
Thank you Team BIG!

For the duration of the festival we've been in contact with the BIG Festival crew and as they are hosting a special "free play" event, we have created a NEW DEMO for Dorfromantik, which you can try from the 27th of April to the 9th May.

So, for all of you who have watched our game since release and are unsure if it's the right game for you, please check out our DEMO and make a more informed decision.

Also make sure to check out all the other fantastic games which you can try for free on the BIG Festival page

As always thank you all so much for being a fantastically welcoming and supportive community, thanks for your understanding that we're doing our best to handle the huge amount of tasks that have to be taken care of daily by us, now that Dorfromantik is released and enjoyed by so many players.

We're truly overwhelmed and are doing our best to improve the game and our activity here in the community hub.

Best,
Team Toukana


💛 Screenshots by André & Stalliarus! via Discord

🧪 Beta: If you also want to test new features earlier and help with your feedback the development of Dorfromantik, then find out here how you can participate in the public beta.

🌻 Community Feedback: We highlight items that we have implemented based on community feedback or suggestions. We look forward to your feedback in our Steam Community Hub or on our Discord server.

Accessibility
• 🌻 Fixed tilestack to be cut off on 16:10 & 4:3 screens when starting a new game via the "start game" button in tutorial or the "try again" button
  
• 🌻 Fixed tutorial textbox overlapping the tile counter on 16:10 & 4:3 screens
  
• 🌻 Cleaned up the resolution settings (not every single resolution & refresh rate is displayed anymore)
  
  Balancing
• 🌻 Preview Tiles keep spawning after challenges are unlocked
  
• 🌻 When completing a challenge during a session, the next level of the challenge starts immediately
  
• 🌻 Tile Generation: less sharp train track & water curves
  
• 🌻 Balanced some challenges to make them more likely to be fulfilled
  
• 🌻 Preplaced tiles can no longer be 'exactly X tiles'-quests and only 'at least X tiles'-quests
  
  Clarity
• 🌻 Increased intensity of group edge highlighting while hovering over a flag or quest bubble
  
• 🌻 Increased intensity of group object highlighting while previewing a valid tile on an adjacent slot
  
• 🌻 Added effect at tilestack counter showing whenever a gameplay action grants new tiles
  
  Happiness
• 🌻 Changed the game over sound from grumbling to smiling
  
  Localization
• 🌻 Added Turkish localization
  
• 🌻 Added Spanish localization
  
• 🌻 Updated Latin-Spanish localization
  
• Perfect Placement Text is now localized
  
• Fixed settings language dropdown items order (selected language should stay the same as before)
  
  Performance
• Depending on individual System specs up to 300% performance/FPS increase due to various performance improvements (tested on Intel HD 530 integrated graphics)
  
  Usability
• 🌻 Hold down Shift while panning with WASD to pan with double speed
  
  Other
• Clear progress in menu now also resets the local highscore. If a leaderboard entry exists, this local highscore is overwritten by the leaderboard highscore
  
• Fixed preplaced tile hint that sometimes disappeared and/or changed its type after saving & loading the game
  
• 🌻 Changed preplaced tile spawn behavior: it is only possible to spawn the same preplaced tile on the map if all of them have been already discovered otherwise there is always a new one to discover
  
• 🌻 When a preplaced tile is connected, newly spawned tileslots are no longer invalid, falsely preventing fitting tiles to be placed on them
  
• 🌻 Challenge completed does not trigger automatically on start of the game anymore if the requested quest goals were already achieved due to the balancing adjustments
  

💛 Screenshots by Solosolid & agath via Discord (congratulations to both for joining the 100K club on Discord last weekend!)

💛 First of all, big thanks for your awesome support! 💛

The last few days have been completely overwhelming for us and despite all our hopes, we didn't think there would be so many of you playing and enjoying Dorfromantik. We have spent the last few days mainly collecting your feedback to give us an better overview and working on the first new patches.

As we already stated in our FAQ we are still planning to come out of Early Access with Dorfromantik in the middle / end of this year and to release it as a full version for PC.

The core mechanics of Dorfromantik are complete for us and we would now like to build on them with more complexity and variety. Next to a creative mode, we envision more biomes, more unlockable tiles (some with special behavior), more options to collect points and more supported languages. But we also want to communicate quite openly and transparently where we don't want to go with Dorfromantik, namely: 4X strategy, trading & resource management, combat and multiplayer.

The way we envision it is that we want to release 2 major content updates during Early Access containing the creative mode, more challenges, more biomes, more tiles, quests and rewards. But before tackling these, we want to work on the games performance and accessibility.




[h3]Phase 1 - Bug fixing / Accessibility / Usability / Performance[/h3]

• similar to the first patch, for the time being there will follow some similar updates that address the most necessary existing problems
  
• some features and game mechanics are not clearly enough communicated or can be further extended by additional information such as a tooltip system
  
• the current balancing will be changed only very minimally, because we are already quite happy with the current state and are tweaking minor changes
  
• We would like to improve and expand already existing systems. Here we think for example of the settings menu and the possibility to assign certain controls themselves.
  

[h3]Phase 2 - Content updates [/h3]

• We would like to add additional game modes to serve different preferences on how to play Dorfromantik. First, we would like to serve all those who want to be more absorbed in the creative building of small worlds in the form of a creative mode. We can also imagine trying out a smaller quick mode by establishing a more limited rule set to crack the high score. We'll definitely tackle the creative mode, but for everything else, we'll be happy to get feedback from you on what you'd like to see in the game.
  
• We have planned to expand Dorfromantik with more content, such as additional biomes, new tiles and challenges to explore.
  

As you already noticed, we want to be very careful not to inflate Dorfromantik with too many features. Rather, we want to focus on refining the existing game mechanics and ironing out any inconsistencies. This is very important to us, because we don't want to create false expectations within the community. We have to stay realistic in our scope as a team of 4 students and do our very best to make Dorfromantik a well-rounded game.


💛 Screenshots by Pianfensi & cajumjoe via Discord

Today we are happy to announce that we will officially launch our public beta program for Dorfromantik.

In the beta program we take new features that we developed for Dorfromantik and put them in the hands of players that are participating in the beta program. This benefits the players to have the opportunity to test things out earlier and provide valuable feedback, which in turns helps us to build and improve Dorfromantik.



Feedback is essential for us to successfully add new features and improve Dorfromantik together with you. Of course, it helps us a lot if you are specifically trying to test features that we have listed up in the Beta Patch Notes for the current update.

Find out how you can participate in the public beta in this detailed guide here.

The next patch patch 0.1.2b1 is already available. Enjoy!


💛 Screenshots by Sarah Saki & applecore via Discord