Iron Village News

I’ve talked a little about progression level 3 in previous dev diaries, especially in previous release notes and in Diary #28 – Train Cars, but I figure I’ll go ahead and spill more info about what’s included. First of all, for the release of the game I’m planning on having 5 progression levels, stretching from a tiny settlement to a productive town. I’m planning on “rebranding” the levels as permits – basically, you get permission to build a certain new set of buildings. The first level is initial basic infrastructure: small houses, a well, basic farm fields, and dirt roads. The second level permits basic industry: turn the wheat into bread, turn the mushrooms into potions, and dig for stone and coal.

The third level is an advanced agricultural permit. The timing might seem a little weird – shouldn’t most agriculture be in the beginning? Maybe, but this level adds a lot more variety, and sets up for more advanced industry later on. In this dev diary I’ll go through the broad categories of what’s included: food crops, farm animals, double tracking, and town expansion.



There are *six* food crops in level 3, four of which are grown on fields and two on orchards. Unlike the previous two agricultural buildings, which are primarily for making other goods (wheat for flour/bread and giant mushrooms for potions), all of these are usable as food. I’ll note that the concept of hunger and thirst doesn’t currently exist, but I’ll probably be implementing it soon for the purposes of game balance. The new crops are carrots, corn, potatoes, peppers (which will have magical applications as well), apples, and manafruit (a magic-infused fruit with further applications).



No game that claims to be cozy can get away without having farm animals, so cows, sheep, and chickens make their debut in progression level 3 as well. Like everything in Iron Village, they come in via train, where you have the option of buying them. You do need to make sure you have enclosed space for them first, which acts as their storage building. The pens double as workplaces though – a villager can come by and milk the cows/shear the sheep/collect eggs. Unlike other resource producing buildings, the input product (also known as an adorable farm animal) doesn’t get consumed, so you get a nice renewable resource production system. Cow milk has the added bonus of being transformable into cheese, which allows you to make more delicious profit.



Another piece of infrastructure you may have noticed in other screenshots is double tracking. Once you reach level 3, another line of track is built, which allows trains to go both ways through town. The main benefit to you is increased train frequency, allowing for more frequent trade opportunities.

Finally, there’s town expansion. I haven’t actually implemented this yet, but more land will be opened up to the south of the tracks. With the amount of space on the current map, if you try and build some of everything you’ll run out of space. Unlocking the south should help alleviate that, although I’ll probably end up expanding the map in the north as well.

Anyway, that should summarize what’s happening in level 3. Don’t forget to wishlist Iron Village on Steam! After next week I’m going to be down in Florida for 2 weeks (Thanksgiving with the in laws & a wedding), so I’m planning on releasing another update to the demo this week. That 2 weeks may ironically mean more dev time, thanks to my day job’s “return to office” mandates I will run afoul of work from home quota if I try and get any of that work done.

So uh, this has been a week, right? I did actually manage to get some work done before the election shitshow, and a bit last night and this morning, so here's a surprise demo update!

Also of note, the Android version should finally be properly available on Google Play - apparently there was one more button I needed to press to activate the open testing track.

Final note before I list off the release notes - I'll soon be setting up a separate store page for the demo on Steam. This shouldn't affect anyone really, but now there'll be a way to leave reviews for the demo itself, so please do so if you'd like to leave feedback!

• Fixed an issue where buildings with no refund resources couldn't be demolished.
  
• Fix passenger trains to have at least capacity for 8 emigrants.
  
• Sorted out a garbage collection issue where the "chop trees for wood" bubble complained that its trees were gone.
  
• Dealt with an odd situation that came up in playtesting where a villager was "Going to Work", but their job was null.
  
• Hide the Train UI tutorials when the Build Menu is open
  
• Added an option to change the town and railway names in the middle of the game, rather than just at the beginning.
  
• Fix a significant source of mid-game (i.e. later than I expected most people to play in the demo) lag. When villagers are looking for work, they look at every single building that
• might* have a job, and the way they were iterating through them was very slow.
  
• Villagers now pick a random job (with demolitions prioritized), rather than the first one they find, which should do a better job not leaving some workplaces unattended.
  

Hi all - it's time to drop another demo! Huge shout out to Bea for testing and logging a bunch of bugs, this new build doesn't cover everything but should address the majority of issues raised.



Also, we have new store art! Thanks to Nico Square (https://nicosquarepro.myportfolio.com/) for that, I commissioned him to put together the "capsule" art and it is fantastic!

The demo is up on Google Play too - it's out as a public test, which should make installation a bit easier than sideloading it from Itch.

I've got a list of release notes if you're curious about all of the changes.

• Adjusted the Build Menu to fully block the Train UI when open.
  
• Upgraded Godot to 4.3
  
• Fixed the Build Menu to make click and drag work as a scroll method. (Mainly to make the Android version work better, but this is technically cross platform.)
  

• Add a "Loading..." pop-up, and load in background thread(s)
  
• - Known Issue: Single-threaded loading in MacOS, for some reason multi-threaded loading caused the game to crash.
  
• Make sure controller hints stay hidden at the start - this would be confusing for Android players (assuming they don't have a controller connected).
  
• Added new settings:
  
• - Enable/Disable Tutorial Hint Bubbles
  
• - Toggle "Extra Zoom" - Adds +1 to the scale factor between the game's coordinates and the screen coordinates. See Diary #11 – So You Want a Resolution for more info.
  
• - Fullscreen is no longer an option in Android - it's always on.
  
• Certain in-game pop-ups are shifted to the left on Android, to allow room for the on-screen keyboard.
  

• Change the Build Menu to put buildings in separate tabs.
  
• - This also includes an ordering system, so that within each tab there is a logical ordering.
  
• Add steam engines that can travel to the right. (Not available in the demo.)
  

• Create a more in depth tutorial system. (Still not huge, but should be enough to get most people started.)
  
• Fixed an issue where selling goods to a train would replace the goods already present.
  
• Can now click and drag a stone road over a dirt road to upgrade it. (Required demolishing and rebuilding prior to this.)
  
• Fixed an issue where one type of tree said "Demolish" instead of "Chop Down".
  
• Fixed an issue where a transparent part of the Train UI was blocking clicks to other UI.
  
• Rather than displaying the next train's spawn time, the UI will show an estimated arrival time.
  
• Finally fixed a navigation map generation error that occurred on the second load since start.
  
• - I'm not sure how often this actually had any real impact, but there would always be a weird log message about the navigation mesh having overlaps whenever I started a game, exited to menu, and then started or loaded another game. Turns out I just forgot to do some cleanup on exit.
  
• Switch LT/RT with LB/RB - Train UI now uses the bumpers for navigation, time uses triggers. This allows us to use bumpers for build menu tabs as well.
  
• Later steam engines require more water.
  
• Adjust cargo train/passenger train ratio in favor of cargo, to reduce immigration rate. (Having too many people was making the game too easy.)
  
• Block demolition (or chopping trees) when the storage is too full to hold the resulting refund.
  
• Keep the cursor in bounds when the camera moves, and vice versa.
  
• Reserve capacity when demolishing. This prevents a workaround where you queue up a bunch of demolitions, and then go over wood capacity when they finish.
  
• Fix a issue where trying to overwrite a save in "Save As..." would still hide the dialog, despite requiring further player input.
  
• Use Godot's own translations for built-in UI (i.e. Save & Load Dialogs)
  

Those of you who have followed Iron Village for awhile may have noticed the train cars getting a little more colorful recently - some parts get a little splash of color, others getting a full paint job. For today's Dev Diary, I wanted to talk a little about the train cars and their designs.

The first train that arrives at the station, consisting of a 4-4-0 steam engine, a tender full of coal, a passenger car, and a box car with gold.

First, the steam engines - the locomotives that pull the trains. Unlike with a lot of the art in Iron Village, these were put together by me from the start (with the help of references of course, some of which were in Minifantasy anyway). The very first train asset was the engine you predominantly see in progression level 2: a 4-4-0 locomotive.

A note on "4-4-0": that is an example of Whyte notation. Basically, there's 4 wheels (2 per side) in front that are basically just supporting the engine, 4 wheels that actually drive the train, and 0 wheels behind the drive wheels. (This makes me sound like much more of a train nerd than I really am, please don't give me that kind of credit, haha...)

The key to success in the first progression level is selling your agricultural goods to this train. It's led by a 0-4-0 and a tender that's nearly as big, and carries a hopper for grain and a box car for harvested giant mushrooms.

Since the trains are the stars of the game, and the locomotive is the face of the train, I figured there should be some variety and a sense of progression with them. So the next locomotive is the first one - the little dinky 0-4-0. This one basically involved shrinking the height by a few pixels, and then chopping off a section from the front, resulting in a locomotive approximately 200% cuter. Because yes, apparently that is an adjective you can apply to coal burning steam tanks.



To wrap up the locomotives so far, here's what the star of the third progression level is going to look like - this bigger 2-6-4 engine. It is "done", but I'm still not entirely happy so far. Maybe I'll like it more once it's actually in the game, or maybe I'll be redoing a decent chunk of it, who knows.

Next, you need fuel for your train. For these steam engines, we're using one of the most dangerous chemicals in history - coal! Rather than take up space on the locomotive though, we can just tow along our fuel in a separate car - and that is the tender. It's just barely big enough to fit four Latin characters, giving the railway some identity. (Can you change them? Not yet.)

A passenger train consisting of a steam engine, tender, and one passenger car. Typically trains will either serve just passengers or just freight - but this isn't always the case!

The locomotive exists to pull other things though - so now we dive into all of the train cars. Your villagers arrive (and depart) on passenger cars, which are designed to at least be somewhat comfortable for people to ride on.

Everything else is a freight car. Depending on the particular good's size, shape, and sensitivity to outdoor exposure, they can go on flat cars, hoppers (both open and closed), tankers, or box cars.

Two flat cars - one with logs and one with stone slabs.

Flat cars are good for carrying big goods that don't mind getting a little wet. In Iron Village, that means stone cars (although they have a raised lip) and log cars, which have stakes on the sides to keep the logs in place.

Hopper cars are basically big buckets carrying loose resources. These are ideal for things like coal, and you can slap a roof on top to protect loads of grain. Then there's tankers for when the resource is so loose, it's literally liquid.

The more boring box cars still have a little logo on the side.

I've saved box cars for the end though, because they are the most versatile. Containerization isn't a thing in Iron Village, so most goods are just going into boxes. The exteriors also serve as blank canvases, so of course I had to get a little creative!

The pride train returns! Unlike during its debut, the doors actually work.

That flexibility of colors was also what let me put together the pride train for my 2024 Pride Month demo release. (That train has since been rotated into the regular cast of trains in progression level 2.)

Hope you found that interesting, or at least enjoyed looking at the pretty pictures! To close out, here's a preview of a couple of level 3 freight cars!

Thanks everyone for playing the Iron Village Demo - the feedback so far has been really helpful! I took care of some of the more urgent feedback (IMO) and put out a patch on Monday, but I've only just now been able to put together some release notes. Keep in mind that I cut the original demo a couple weeks before releasing it, so the 0.6.16 release includes a few extra goodies that weren't just bug fixes.

• Reworked the Train UI to be fixed in the bottom
  
• Originally this was attached to each train, and would toggle itself on when the train arrived at the station. This would anchor it to the train, and move if you moved the camera. Ultimately, getting it to play nicely with the static UI didn't seem worth the added complexity, so now it just lives at the bottom. The build panel will cover it up when you are building.
  

• Train UI elements that are just notifications are now in the top left of the screen.
  
• Gifts & passenger exchanges don't have any need for player input. The train UI that showed changes to these values took up a lot of valuable space, in the bottom, when it seemed more reasonable to display them next to the values that are getting changed. Since the resources and populations are displayed at the top left, I figured it made sense to put little notification bubbles there too.
  
• Unfortunately today I discovered that when villagers get on a train to leave, the number of outbound passengers doesn't update. This will have to be fixed later.
  

• Added smoke effects to houses (that have chimneys) that villagers are sleeping in.
  
• Demolishing stone roads gives you back the stone, as intended.
  
• Exiting a submenu of the in-game menu restores focus to the button you had pressed.
  

• Show a little bubble to indicate the player should chop down trees for wood.
  
• There was earlier feedback about this - that it was tricky to figure out how to get wood - or more accurately, "how do I get this weird brown thing?" I just hadn't prioritized it as much as I maybe should have, and it came up again.
  
• Adjusted the wood icon to be longer.
  
• All of the icons are within 8x8 pixels, so I ended up having to remove a bit of the outline - hopefully it looks a bit more log-like though.
  

• Custom Demolish Button
  
• The button to "demolish" trees is now an axe, and says "Chop Down".
  
• Fix an issue where typing a save name with W, A, S, or D causes the game camera to move as well.
  
• Passenger car doors now open when at the station.
  
• Clicking and dragging the mouse will no longer open the info box at the beginning or end of the click.
  
• You can now mouse over resources in the top left to get the name to pop up.
  
• All of the resources for the current progression level are now shown, even if you have 0 of that resource.
  
• In combination with the mouse-over tooltips, this should help players realize what the "brown thing" is.
  
• Fix a few instances where level 3 buildings are showing up in the build panel in level 2.