Rusty's Retirement News

[h3]If you are experiencing a black screen and restarting doesn't help, please follow this step-by-step guide on how to fix it: https://imgur.com/a/7LOAktG[/h3]
[expand]
Black screen fix!

Go to Rusty's Retirement in your Steam library > Gear icon > Manage > Browser local files


Select Rusty's Retirement.exe > Right-click > Properties


Go to the Compatibility tab > check Disable fullscreen optimizations > you should be good to go!


[/expand]

We are still investigating the black screen bug on Windows. We have found a fix but it’s a bit tricky to get it working. For now, please follow the guide above to fix it!

—

Hey folks,

Here are some tweaks that have been made to the game. Hopefully, it will ease some balancing issues and frustrations.

• Splunk no longer wanders off the screen.
  
• Splunk will wander around less if there is work to be done.
  
• Splunk also received a bit of a speed boost + 25%
  
• Feeder bots were still causing a lot of frustration among players, so they will now take the lowest crop that is available in your inventory.
  
• To remove further frustration, Biofuel bots will now ignore the lowest crop available in your inventory. However, they will still use said crop if there is no other option available - this is to prevent the early game from breaking.
  
• Animals will eat less crops and roam around the farm more. They should still poop roughly the same amount.
  
• Added a check to retroactively fix any unlocked lands that were still acting as if they were blocked.
  
• Fixed an issue where the game was getting stuck on Mac when switching to another desktop or fullscreen application.
  

Idea:
Splunk currently seeds a crop patch if it is entirely empty. I was thinking of changing it to > Splunk will seed a crop patch that is half empty. The only problem with this approach is that he will run around the farm a lot more and as a result it may lead to him becoming even less efficient from constantly walking back and forth.
Let me know what you think!

Thank you for all your continued support! :orange_heart:

Hi everyone,

Thank you for all the incredible support you've shown the game during its first week of existence!

It's been a crazy week. I've had lots of support from all different corners of the world, including congratulation messages from Devolver, Among Us, and McDonalds lol



[h3]In one week, the community has achieved the following in-game milestones:[/h3]

• Collectively, you have earned 105 BILLION Spare Parts and produced 52 BILLION Biofuel!
  
• You have also grown 5.4 billion giant pumpkins, 5 billion giant cucumbers, and 2.9 billion giant tomatoes. A lucky few have spawned over 4000 super rare GOLDEN PUMPKINS!
  
• Combined you've collected over 13.8 billion poop from animals.
  
• You've watered 44 billion crops and harvested 32 trillion crops.
  
• And spent over 21 billion on decorations for your farm!
  

I honestly wasn't expecting these numbers to hit billions, so you have no idea how proud this makes me!

[expand]
Real numbers:
Spare parts earned: 105,487,574,857
Biofuel produced: 52,103,705,662
Giant Pumpkins: 5,415,112,070
Giant Cucumbers: 5,027,133,796
Giant Tomatoes: 2,914,193,749
Giant Golden Pumpkins: 4487
Poop collected: 13,821,582,822
Crops harvested: 32,265,433,740
Crops watered: 44,537,802,906
Money spent on decor: 21,548,000,565
And I didn't track how many times people spun the cog, I'm sorry!
[/expand]

[h3]Talking of big numbers, Rusty's Retirement officially sold more than 100,000 copies within the first 5 days![/h3]
(Update: Now 200,000 copies in 2 weeks!!)

This has honestly been a life-changing experience and I can't wait to continue development. I have a few quality-of-life features that I'd like to add and I'm also looking forward to expanding the game with more content.

Right now I'm focusing on fixing bugs as there are a few tough-to-crack cases with performance on big monitors, and now the sudden black screen bug (which can be fixed by following this guide).

[expand]
Black screen fix!

Go to Rusty's Retirement in your Steam library > Gear icon > Manage > Browser local files


Select Rusty's Retirement.exe > Right-click > Properties


Go to the Compatibility tab > check Disable fullscreen optimizations > you should be good to go!


[/expand]

[h3]We have uploaded the official soundtrack to Bandcamp and YouTube![/h3]

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
A few people have asked us if we could upload the official soundtrack for the game onto YouTube, we have also uploaded it to Bandcamp in case you'd like to support the composer as well.

[h3]And here is some cool stuff that people have sent me![/h3]



Thank you for all the kind words you've left on social media, in the reviews, and in the forums! I'm working as hard as I can to fix any remaining issues, and then I'll start on general gameplay improvements - thank you for being patient with me ːorange_heartː

[h2]If you are experiencing a black screen and restarting doesn't help, please follow this step-by-step guide on how to fix it: https://imgur.com/a/7LOAktG[/h2]

This part of the code has remained untouched since launch but there has been a sudden influx of people experiencing no transparency since yesterday.

----

Hey folks,

Apologies for the rollback yesterday, 1.0.8 was live for 1.5 hours, and people were immediately reporting issues with the transparent background, so we rolled back to the previous 1.0.7 build. For now, I’ve removed the performance improvements with the transparent background until we figure out what’s causing the issues.

• Improved performance for bigger resolution / high refresh rate monitors. We’ve updated Unity to a much newer version (2022 LTS) and we’ve removed some unnecessary computing tasks around how the transparency was being drawn. Please let me know how this works, it might not be perfect but it should be a lot better.
• Credited the people who spent three whole days helping me with this issue!
  
• With the improved performance implementation, some of the UI elements had to be shuffled around.
  
• Save file improvements! After talking with the folks who made the save file plugin, we have improved the code, added checks to catch errors, and lastly added automatic backups which will load if the original file is corrupted.
  
• The new save code only writes once to the file when needed so hopefully power outages and sudden crashes will no longer affect save files. While I cannot restore previously corrupted files, I hope this update will prevent files from being wiped in the future.
  
• In-game timer should now update correctly and according to real-time. Previously it would either go faster or slower than real time depending on the frame rate set in the graphics settings.
  
• The first piece of the blocked land on the right side is now actually blocked lol.
  
• Previously, saving while Rusty was clearing a piece of land would lock that piece of land when loading the game back up. This should be fixed now!
  
• Restarting the game should automatically detect your monitor's resolution and set the game to that resolution. Before you had to physically press R or T to reset the camera/resolution.
  
• Added more checks for achievements like 10 Million Spare Parts, 1 Million Biofuel, 1 Million Watered Crops, and 1 Million Harvested Crops. There are now 3 different places in the game that can trigger these achievements (on every load) so hopefully they will work more consistently.
  
• Speaking of 1 Million Harvests, I have decided to lower the achievement down to 250,000 Harvests. This was a miscalculation on my part and to me 1 Million seems a little too far out of reach. Running the game for days on end is not fun - especially when the game’s content does not currently match the hours needed to reach those numbers. I think lowering it to 250k still makes it a grindy-idle achievement but it doesn’t outstay its welcome.
  

What I hope to tackle next:

1. Performance on high-refresh rate monitors
   
2. Balancing patch for bees, butterflies, and berry bushes. Currently, how they behave is too confusing and not very reliable.
   
3. Adding more quality-of-life features and content!
   

Thank you! I was supposed to make a week 1 recap today but that will have to wait until tomorrow now ːorange_heartː

[REVERTED TO 1.0.7]

Reverted the update because people were reporting completely black screens, and missing save files on Mac. Luckily, only the folder where the save files were stored changed. This rollback should restore them.

------

Hey folks,

Here are some more fixes and improvements to the game!

• Improved performance for bigger resolution / high refresh rate monitors. We’ve updated Unity to a much newer version (2022 LTS) and we’ve removed some unnecessary computing tasks around how the transparency was being drawn. Please let me know how this works, it might not be perfect but it should be a lot better.
  
• Credited the people who spent three whole days helping me with this issue!
  
• With the improved performance implementation, some of the UI elements had to be shuffled around.
  
• In-game timer should now update correctly and according to real-time. Previously it would either go faster or slower than real time depending on the frame rate set in the graphics settings.
  
• The first piece of the blocked land on the right side is now actually blocked lol.
  
• Restarting the game should automatically detect your monitor's resolution and set the game to that resolution. Before you had to physically press R or T to reset the camera/resolution.
  
• Added more checks for achievements like 10 Million Spare Parts, 1 Million Biofuel, 1 Million Watered Crops, and 1 Million Harvested Crops. There are now 3 different places in the game that can trigger these achievements (on every load) so hopefully they will work more consistently.
  
• Speaking of 1 Million Harvests, I have decided to lower the achievement down to 250,000 Harvests. This was a miscalculation on my part and to me 1 Million seems a little too far out of reach. Running the game for days on end is not fun - especially when the game’s content does not currently match the hours needed to reach those numbers. I think lowering it to 250k still makes it a grindy-idle achievement but it doesn’t outstay its welcome.
  

What I hope to tackle next:

1. Save files are magically wiped if the game quits unexpectedly. From reports, this seems to be coming from either an antivirus or a power outage on the PC. Unfortunately, the backups I implemented a few patches prior are also wiped, so it's not how the files are saved or loaded, but something else. I use a well-known plugin for saving and they don't understand what could be causing it either.
   
2. Balancing patch for bees, butterflies, and berry bushes. Currently, how they behave is too confusing and not very reliable.
   
3. Adding more quality-of-life features and content!
   

Thank you for all your continued support! Tomorrow I hope to make a nice recap on how week 1 went because it's been pretty amazing!

This one is only a short one because I’ve mainly spent the day investigating the hi-res / high refresh rate monitor issue with some developer friends (more on that below).

• Fixed: Some houses were unmoveable because sometimes another collider would block the ability to click and select the house. Now no colliders are blocking this action so it should work as intended.
  
• Fixed: You can no longer upgrade a building that is still being built which would cause Echo to get stuck.
  
• Fixed: Steam cloud saves for Mac.
  
• Not entirely sure about this one because I couldn’t replicate it on my end but people have reported that connecting to Twitch could be creating an infinite loop in the code. I’ve added a 5-second buffer between connecting and checking whether the game is still connected to Twitch. It’s a bit of a shot in the dark but hopefully it’ll keep the game from crashing.
  
• Added: Crop/building information panels now move to the right when setting the vertical farm to the left side of the screen. Zooming is still a bit wonky but I hope this helps in the meantime!
  

Regarding performance issues on hi-res monitors, we’ve spent the entire day testing and looking into different potential causes, and we’ve narrowed it down to two or three things that look promising. This week we will continue with testing and we will try to get it fixed!

It seems like the issue is easily replicated on high refresh rate monitors (i.e. 144hz), so I would appreciate it if you could send me your specs here in the thread so that we can identify a common pattern. For now, some people have reported that lowering the frame rate and setting the on-demand rendering to 3 helps.

Thank you so much! :orange_heart: