World Turtles News

Good day, fellow Meeps!

I've been working on the UI functionality during the last week, and have made some good progress towards making the UI more intuitive and less clunky to get around to information / functions applicable at specific points. We've not updated the visuals /theme yet, but the upgraded Building UI panel will make it easier and more intuitive to give orders.



The Building UI panel now contains separate tabs, giving the player focused access to the information and actions specific to that building:

• Tasks: As before, the player sets task priorities, order roads and upgrades the building on this tab.
  
• Research: The research "wheel" (as currently on the Research Overview panel) is displayed here, but for this building type only, allowing the player to focus on, and change, the research of this building type in isolation.
  
• Annexes: Displays (and links to) all currently existing Annexes commissioned by this building, and also shows how many Annex slots are still available. A list of all Annexes commissioned by this building type is also displayed and the player can order an Annex straight from this panel.
  
• Resources: For Farms and Fishmongers, this panel displays all the workable hexes, as well as what livestock / seafood / crops are currently growing on them. The player can also schedule crops straight from this panel, and a color-coded frame around foodstuff icons now show the suitability of each crop given the climate of the specific building. When scheduling foodstuff on the map, these frames are now also present on the icons there.
  

I've also fixed a few minor bugs and made some small changes:

• Some of the zooming on certain UI elements (especially when they appear) have been removed to make them snappier and feel less laggy.
  
• Farming, Research and Combined Tutorial achievements did not fire.
  
• Builder's Yard Achievements did not fire (this was a fix on the Steam backend, so they would have already started firing without the game update).
  

See you soon with another update!
Gideon

Hi all,

Thanks for the support so far! I've updated the game to fix a few small Gremlins:

• I've noticed from YouTube videos that the Rain, Snow and Clouds are not switched on by default (you have to switch them on in the Game Options | Accessibility menu - people with simulation sickness could be bothered by them). This means you've been losing out on some ambience! I've corrected this that the setting will always be set to true when the game is started, and needs to be switched off if desired.
  
• When performance is extremely low (huge Realms or possible difficult path finding), it can happen that another AutoSave gets "chained" before the first scheduled AutoSave could complete, leading to a string of AutoSaves in a row. This has now been fixed.
  
• Some players have reported not being able to set 4K resolutions. It seems Unity does not pick up 4K as a viable resolution for their monitors. I've included a toggle in Game Options | Graphics to allow forcing 4K to try to be set, to obtain some feedback from the players with this problem. Please leave 4K untoggled if this does not affect you.
  

The Windows build has been updated. We'll update Linux and Mac soon...

That's it for now. Please log any bugs on our Discord server, so we have them in one place: Bug Reports
Gideon

Today is the day, fellow Meeps!

I hope you’re just as excited as I am!

Let me be the first to celebrate that World Turtles’ Early Access is now live on PC! 🎉

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Thank you all for your support throughout development! I’m super excited to show you everything we’ve accomplished so far, and I hope you enjoy saving the turtles as much as I do.

You can follow us on Twitter and join our Discord to interact with our amazing community! 😉

Don’t forget, you can leave us a review (which really helps a lot), share part of your journey, tell us about a bug you’ve found, or just give some feedback in our Discord.

Save the Turtles!

De Chelonian Mobile!
Gideon

Hi all,

There are, understandably, two very frequent connotations being made between World Turtles and existing popular culture. I wanted to address those briefly here.

TL;DR We all have a very positive relationship and mutual respect for each other’s efforts and intentions! 😊

The Wandering Village
I have actually become online friends with Philomena (team lead of The Wandering Village), and she's been very friendly and helpful towards a noob solo dev. The two games' designs were done completely independently - we only found out about each other later, and became friends due to it. I've been working on World Turtles since 2019, long before I heard of The Wandering Village. I've also purposefully not played or watched TWV since I didn't want it to influence me. I actually have a YouTube channel with dev logs from 2019 (and there exists some early independent YouTube coverage as well) showing my progress, I'm just a lot slower than the TWV team!
Many of World Turtles' Discord members came straight from the Discord of The Wandering Village!😊

Discworld
I am a huge Sir Terry Pratchett and Discworld fan. It is indeed why I chose this setting. However, the World Turtle myth has appeared in various forms via various civilizations across earth and is, in itself, not a problem. I actually contacted Rhianna Pratchett about this very early on to make sure I would not be stepping on any toes. She is completely fine with me using the setting, as long as I don’t make it “Discworld-y” by basing my characters, places and ideas directly on those of Discworld.

To add to all of this, there's also Beyond These Stars coming out fairly soon, but I also know their team lead, Sam, and the situation is similar to the other two discussed above.

See you in the game!
Gideon