DD#116 A Bit Green Diet
Hi, everyone. Welcome to another week's developer's diary.
Unfortunately, I still have a fever at this moment. So, there will be no fancy images this week. We will go directly to what content we got this week.
1, Vegetables
Among many of my doctor's suggestions, one thing has been specifically mentioned. That is to change the diet behavior to have a more healthy balance. Then, I realized we get a problem with our game. We don't have any vegetables except potatoes in our game. And, of course, eating potatoes alone is not quite healthy. Thus, we now have cabbages and cactuses in our game.
First, let's talk about cabbages. Surprisingly such a humble vegetable was a table luxury in the Roman Empire thousands of years ago according to The Natural History of Pompeii. Cambridge University Press. 2002. p. 94. ISBN 978-0-521-80054-9. It's also widely consumed by people all over the world nowadays. In the game, you can now plant cabbage seeds and harvest them. To those who don't want to get their hands dirty to do farming, cabbages are also purchasable from random food ingredient vendors.
Next is the cactuses, many people may not know cactuses can be used as food. However, after some research, I learned it's a common ingredient in numerous cuisine dishes all over the world especially in Mexica. In ancient China, people also recognized its medicinal usage. Thus, in the game, cactuses can be used both for cooking and alchemy. Unfortunately, I have not gotten enough energy to integrate it into our gardening system so far. You can purchase cactuses from food ingredient vendors and there is also another interesting way to get them that I will cover more details about later.
2, Cooking
Now that we got some vegetables, we shall go on to cook them. I intended to make vegetables as generic as possible right now so that code can be used like templates. As a result, we now have three very basic recipes for all green vegetables for both that we currently have and those that will come in the future. Those are vegetable soups, vegetable juices, and fried vegetables. Any green vegetables can be used for those cooking purposes the result is depending on your cooking skills, the cooking device that you are using, and the vegetable you are using. As always, if you use holy water instead of normal water when cooking, you will get the blessed version.
3, Cactus People in the Desert
Alright, this is a quite wild idea just for fun. From now on, when you go to the desert area in Egypt, you may find some cactuses are actually not what they look like. Those are the cactus people who pretend to be cactuses. They are mostly harmless. After all, why would a cactus want to hurt you? By nature and evolution, they have grown into a very defensive nature with almost no intention of aggression. However, in case anyone wants to attack them for any reason, they shall be aware that those creatures have thorns on them, they have passive physical attack reflection. Should you defeat them, you may get some cactus slices that you can use for cooking or alchemy as mentioned previously. The possibility to turn them into pets is planned, but, has not been implemented yet.
That's for our green diet parts of the developer's diary. Now let's move on to see other major content updates of this week.
4, A bit of control over public awareness of the supernatural world.
You may have done something terrible in the normal town of Liu. Now, people are getting more and more aware that the supernatural world exists. Shades are spreading everywhere. Is there anything we can do to amend this? Now, there is. When people's awareness of the supernatural world gets above 15, the bartender of "This is a Bar" will be annoyed as her job is to keep people stay in blessed ignorance. Thus, she will ask you to fund some "Wine Festivals" so that people will all get drunk with her amnestic drinks. It will result in public awareness getting reduced slightly. Meanwhile, the cost of such "Wine Festivals" are scaled with the value of current public awareness. If you do it too late, you may get bankrupt and lead things out of control. Basically, you now have the tool to somehow fix the problem. However, if you keep revealing the supernatural side of the world to local citizens. Eventually, it will become less efficient.
5, Relationship overhaul for the exiled Aztec prince
It has been a while since we met Tlilpotonqui. Back then, we do not have a relationship system and a gift system as developed as we have now. Thus, he was still using an old system where you can only give him chocolates and he is not quite helpful to your adventure as well. This issue has been fixed during this week's update. You can now use the modernized gifting system to send him anything that you think he likes. (Tips, he still loves chocolates.) Moreover, he can now teach you various necromancer skills one of which is quite unique. The costs of learning those skills are further scaled with your relationship with him. He will give you discounts if your relationship is good. We now also get him a Wiki page to document all his legendary passed life to this point. Maybe one day, the girl he has been waiting for all those long times will eventually return to this town.
6, More colorful persona masks
Previously, persona masks have a similar appearance no matter what pet you used to turn them into masks. Now things are getting a bit different. You may get some different results depending on which pet you use. You will now get skull masks if you use undead pets, you will now get bunny masks if you use a bunny or a tiger bunny, and you will get Greek Tragedy masks if you use a mannequin or a statue, and if you use a machine pet, you will get a mask that looks like a VR headset. A sneaky peak, the Steam Achievement icon for the "Persona" achievement is also changed.
7, Push forwards in the main story
We now reached the outside area of the Black Pyramid. The journey is not easy, as along the way when we pass the Path to the Black Pyramid, we also got dangerous new enemies such as those Cruel Slavedrivers and those giant poisonous snakes known as "Naja Desertus." On the good side, we also get more rewards if we defeat those enemies. For example, Naja Desertus now drops snake fangs that you can use for alchemy.
That shall cover most parts of this week's updates. I will likely need to have some sleep. See you around.
Today's changelog:
############Content#################
[Steam]Changed the "Persona" Steam achievement icon.
[Item]New Item: Cactus Slice (When you use it for cooking, it works similarly to green vegetables. When you use it for alchemy, it has components to remove poison.)
[Commodity Market]Random food ingredient vendors now sell Cactus Slices at a relatively high price.
[Egypt]Some cactuses in the Desert of the Trapped may no longer be what they look like.
[Wildlife]New wildlife: Cactus Person. (Non-aggressive. They may drop Cactus Slice. They have physical damage reflection.)
############System#################
Added code support to set parameters to make dropped pets not move.