Heard of the Story? News

Since it's been some time since the last update, I thought it would be fun to talk about some of the developments that are coming soon! The next patch (V0.8) will aim to fundamentally transform the importance of villagers by introducing trading.

These developments have been guided by your votes over on the Discord where you have selected Markets as the most wanted feature! At a high-level, the described feature consists of three pieces: trading, merchants, and marketplaces. The 'trading' part will come in this patch!

This mechanic will drive a gameplay change that can be conceptually split into two parts: the demand and the supply. Right now, it's fairly easy to learn how to craft most items in the game, which creates less incentive for cooperation. In this update:
- the difficulty of learning recipes will increase,
- and tools will now have a durability.
This will create a regular need to get your hands on these items, manifesting a more consistent and realistic form of demand for both you, and villagers.

The second part, is the supply to fit this new demand. With the ability to trade, you will have to cooperate with villagers to meet your needs. You'll have to make friends with the right people, learn who's skilled at what, and ultimately, strike them a bargain.

Since this change will drive demand for more resources, it will also feature a new Mine building. This will enable you to regularly extract minerals, as well as craft new items to make use of them. Likewise, the organic vegetation (excluding trees) in the game will now re-grow with every passing night.

All in all, I'm very excited for the new kinship and deepening of emergent civilisation this update will unlock!

This patch features a whole range of optimisations targeting the performance of villager AI. As the number of experiences, knowledge, and other details about a villager grows, it takes longer for them to think it all through. In the late game, this was especially noticable when you start having 30-50+ villagers and play for many hours. This update drastically speeds up the slowest parts of this thinking, resulting in much much faster conversation responses, quests, and overall responsiveness in this late-game.

There are still some things to be aware of for these large towns. For instance, when a new villager would like to join your village, it can take some time to properly generate all their details and fit them into the existing large data store. Likewise, when you first load a large save, it can take some time for all villagers to decide what they are doing (since this happens all at once right now). However, in both cases, after these situations pass, the villager AI performance tends to return back to normal performance.

Of course, there is still a lot of potential for improvement, and I definitely have ideas for even further optimisations. These will definitely come in the future too!

PS: We are also working on other exciting things behind-the-scenes - stay tuned!

Running the database under-the-hood was sometimes inconsistently handled where if a game crashed or was forcibly closed, the database would be left running which could cause future game starts to fail. Fixing this involved some refactoring but overall a much safer approach to both starting and stopping the database, making sure this, and other related issues to database starting should be fixed.

Furthermore, complete logging to the database and all related AI components has been added. This will allow for much easier and faster debugging of any future issues!

Although these are fairly behind-the-scenes changes you probably won’t notice, I’m quite happy about them as they represent a big step forward in improving the overall stability of the game!

• You can now press CAPS LOCK to permanently toggle running
  
• Changed some metal objects to be shiny (such as the pauldrons)
  

• Fixed being able to craft signposts and braziers outside their required buildings
  
• Fixed villagers talking about relationships with themselves
  
• Fixed some typos
  
• Fixed cancelling a story continuing to play the story music
  
• Fixed gold pauldron not appearing in-game
  

Though some players have requested that the skill system be improved and streamlined, the next big update should completely avert these issues through a brand new mechanic - more on that soon. Therefore, the current skill system will remain as it is for now.

The first major patch is here! Introducing walls, gates, hedges, improved features, and other new content! This patch ended up taking longer than expected due to the dynamic nature of walls and how they play with uneven terrain, so the next patches should come much faster!

Also excited to say that for this patch I’ve been working closely with a new artist (@ruslana_rv). Over the last few weeks, she has helped create the new buildings and items for Heard of the Story. I’m looking forward to the new stuff we’re developing for the next update!



This patch introduces:

• 2 new building types: wall and gate
  
• 6 new wooden buildings in total: small tower, wooden wall, wooden gate, large wooden wall, large wooden wall with staircase, large wooden gate
  

Now, walls and gate can be constructed by joining two towers. The small walls are a great fit for smaller, cozier villages, whilst the bigger double-walled walkable fortifications can be better for grander medieval towns.

Villagers are also aware of a new action to walk and look out from walls - which comes along with its own new stories!


There are a total of 9 new items in this patch.

• Expanded carpentry: signpost and a crossroads signpost
  
• Expanded smithing: brazier
  

The bushes you’ve seen around have now turned into a resource you can gather, and use for crafting for hedges!

• Expanded horticulture: hedge, short hedge, long hedge, tall hedge, arched hedge
  

A much requested feature has been to be able to cancel buildings. With this patch, the ability to cancel on-going constructions has been introduced - so if you misplace something, you no longer have to start a new save! However, the ability to destroy entire finished buildings is not yet available, this will eventually become a more sophisticated process that will take require some a few actions to complete as you have to take apart the building materials.

Note: right now, the player house is the only construction that cannot be cancelled due to the way that house assignments currently work in the game.

• Added a rescue button to the map section of the book in case you block yourself somewhere, get glitched, or simply get super lost
  
• Allowed minerals to respawn upon restarting if they are completely depleted
  
• Disallowed villagers to place decorations on top of paths
  
• Increased size of speech bubble when placing buildings to make it easier to see invalid reasons for placement
  
• Changed the buildings section of the book to support multiple pages since there are now more than 12 buildings
  
• Changed settings on the navmesh to improve accuracy and reduce invisible walls
  
• Fixed bushes not being cleared from farm fields
  
• Changed flower decorations to be walkable
  
• Added a quick-sleep which happens automatically when the night passes without sleep to make events related to days passing consistent
  
• Fixed not being able to scroll with the mouse wheel in the villager section of the book
  
• Fixed villagers in previous save files not being able to decorate with items from new updates
  
• Slightly improved and changed the progression arrows and icon sizes
  

Some of the refunds have mentioned too much lag, specifically for lower-end computers. Unfortunately, I learnt about this quite late after release because I wasn't aware of the refund notes section of Steam and did not find performance concerns in the Steam community section :( So I apologise for taking a long time to issue this patch!

However, I finally got around to introducing some new graphics options to significantly improve performance (up to 3x more FPS) for slower computers. The new options are:

- Fog distance (small / normal / far)
- Grass quality (low / high)

Using the low variants of these new settings can now give you up to 3 times more FPS than previously possible, while still keeping the cozy and warm charm of the game :)

The next big content patch - called 'Fortifications' - has been in the works for a while and is coming in November. This is just a small patch to address this issue while the main patch is under development.

Really excited for the Fortifications update, so stay tuned!