Update v0.60.0 - Troodon, flowers, many fixes and improvements!
This update SHOULD BE compatible with old savegames!
But it's still advised to start a new game, as the amount of changes is enormous.
Check the FULL CHANGELOG for the complete list of changes in this update!
New animal: Troodon:
Troodon is a small, nimble and smart meat eater covered in feathers, it is more active at night and can hunt in packs. Troodon cares for its youngs even more than the T-Rex, youngsters will follow their mother until adulthood, but they have the bad habit of stealing stuff from other animals nests and.. you, especially when you're sleeping.
Player footsteps:
This is a little thing that enhance the feel and the variety of the game; the character will now leave footsteps on sand or when the soil is wet...
Flowers - for a more colorful world:
Flowers will now bloom in spring and, depending on weather and environment, can continue appearing until summer or even autumn. Flowers are not harvestable yet, but will be in a future update, for now they contribute to enrich the environment with colors, especially in spring.
Also, the new "small plants" system built to implement flowers will allow me to add more type of plants and plant-like things, like mushrooms, that will probably come in the next update.
Tons of little (and bigger) improvements:
The update brings much more to the table, especially tons of fixes, Survival tweaks, AI improvements, ecology balance fine-tuning, and so on!
Player now inflicts more damage with attacks, especially headshots, T-Rex will no longer chase you during the tutorial (unless you're so stupid to provoke them :P), and you can even start the game in "Peaceful mode", with no T-Rex on the map (especially useful for smaller maps).
Stomach fullness has been reworked to be less restricting, and a simple leaf can be used to threat bloodloss, even if not efficiently.
The amount of tweaks is enormous, and I really recommend to check the full changelog for a more detailed view on this update.
A warning about ecology balance:
Reaching a point where the ecosystem is perfectly balanced is no easy task, it requires weeks, if not months of work. Before the Troodon was introduced, the balance was quite good, but everything changed with this new actor, and this required me to rebalance many things. Remember that the game does not "cheat" by spawning new animals or killing the ones that are overpopulating, so it was needed to make little changes in reproduction rates, AI, age process and strength of all animal species.
At this time the balance is not bad, but not as good as it was before this update, and it will require some time before it will be balanced again, so don't dispair if species go extinct too soon or take the upper hand.
Development plan:
As announced in the previous post, big updates will now come on a monthly basis, instead of every two weeks, this will allow me to make more important additions in a more relax manner. But smaller updates (for addressing bugs and balancing) will still come often, even more often than usual.
In the upcoming days, I'm going to overhaul the development roadmap, making it more detailed (like UnrealWorld RPG or Dwarf Fortress did), in order to give you a better idea of the general plan.
Thanks for reading all the badly written stuff, and have fun!
(but pls report bugs :P)
Daniel