Black Forest News

A big update containing a ton of bugfixes as well as gameplay improvements and features.

[h2]New[/h2]

• Monsters will now attack peasants that they encounter, so beware of peasants returning from the forest late.
  
• 2 new tables for the Cosmetics DLC furniture set
  
• Peasant Details window for every peasant - still a work in progress, post your feedback and comments to the Steam forum.
  
• The new peasant show button shows you the graveyard if the peasant is dead
  
• On the detail view, you can send peasants to rest for the day (so they heal and don't do dangerous work)
  
• On the detail view, you can assign adult men to stand guard during the night (and rest the next morning)
  
• New Building: Armoury - stores weapons that are produced in the smithy.
  
• New Building: Guard Post - where guardians or armed peasants will stand guard at night
  
• New Mercenary: Guardians are now available for hire
  
• New Monster: Giant spider (only on some maps and appearing fairly rarely)
  
• New font (minimal visible changes) to allow for Cyrillic characters.
  

Language support/translations are coming. I've added the code now, but only a few words in a few languages are translated at this time.

[h2]Fixed[/h2]

• Peasants are now assigned the correctly gendered visual model after loading a game.
  
• Manor house (in the Friedmarkt story "Darkest Nights") now loads correctly from save games.
  
• Buildings can no longer be both repaired and demolished at the same time.
  
• Correct gameObject names on peasants after loading a save game - was never visible to players, but will make my debugging easier
  
• Hellhafen initial dialog should have proper UI scaling now
  
• Hellhafen houses should be initialized properly now
  
• Correct icon on the "look into the manual" tip on the loading screen
  
• Reworked smithy and smelter: Smelter now allows metal gathering, smithy produces tools and weapons
  
• Forging tools and weapons now uses up metal.
  

[h2]Updates and Balance[/h2]

• Added some more variety and beauty to the peasant models
  
• Updated tutorial dialogs and in-game help texts to reflect the new smelter/smithy roles
  
• Smithy now requires 10 metal to be constructed.
  
• You can now buy and sell weapons on the market
  
• Added smelter building to Friedmarkt and Ziegwald levels
  
• Moved the trapper from workshops to defenses
  
• Construction speed bonus of tools doubled to 20%
  
• Hellhafen fields updated (replaced 2 wheat fields with carrots and cabbages)
  
• Score now considers monster attacks, so if the dice roll against you and you get unusually many monsters, you also get a higher score.
  
• Some monsters do slightly more damage now
  
• Improved steward texts (was in a previous update, I forgot to put it into the changelog)
  
• Added some tooltips to various UI elements to make the game easier to discover for new players.
  
• You can now click on the status icons (damaged, destroyed, unmanned, etc.) and it will select the proper building
  
• Reworked the main menu a bit
  
• Updated Unity engine to 2021.3.22
  
• Some performance improvements
  
• Lots of behind-the-scenes improvements to make the game easier to maintain in the future
  

Remember to join the Discord server to stay up-to-date on development and provide me with your valuable feedback!

Hello everyone!

I have a couple of different updates for you this week.

Now that I have a publisher, I plan to swap to being a premium (paid) game. Current owners of the game will keep the game! This swap will occur later today

Having a publisher has opened up new opportunities to do more with the game and I’d like to take that opportunity and run with it!

Aside from the usual bug fixing and polishing, the next upcoming main update is the addition of buildings, actions and code to enable night guards in the village. Peasants can be armed and ordered to stand guard (they will sleep the next morning) or mercenaries can be hired in the tavern. The code is still simple and will need player feedback and improvement, but it’s there now and will be continuously improved in the next updates. Also, I have added more peasant details, which can be opened by clicking on a peasant in the 3D view or on their name in the peasant list. This also allows players to send peasants to rest (if you want them to heal faster).

Some upcoming minor changes:

• Fixed: Manor house (in the Friedmarkt story “Darkest Nights”) now loads correctly from save games.
  
• New: Peasant Details window for every peasant - still a work in progress, post your feedback and comments to the Steam forum.
  
• New: Peasant show button shows you the graveyard if the peasant is dead
  
• New: On the detail view, you can send peasants to rest for the day (so they heal and don’t do dangerous work)
  
• New: On the detail view, you can assign adult men to stand guard during the night (and rest the next morning)
  
• New Building: Armoury - stores weapons that are produced in the smithy.
  
• New Building: Guard Post - where guardians or armed peasants will stand guard at night
  
• New Monster: Giant spider (only on some maps and appearing fairly rarely)
  
• Reworked smithy and smelter: Smelter now allows metal gathering, smithy produces tools and weapons
  
• Updated tutorial dialogs and in-game help texts to reflect the new smelter/smithy roles
  
• Smithy now requires 10 metal to be constructed.
  
• Forging tools and weapons now uses up metal.
  
• Balance: Construction speed bonus of tools doubled to 20%
  
• Added smelter building to Friedmarkt and Ziegwald levels
  
• Move the trapper from workshops to defenses
  
• Improved steward texts (was in a previous update, I forgot to put it into the changelog)
  
• Balance: Score now considers monster attacks, so if the dice roll against you and you get unusually many monsters, you also get a higher score.
  
• Balance: Some monsters do slightly more damage now
  

We’ve got more coming, so stay tuned! Don’t forget to join our Discord for sneak peeks and more.

Hello everyone!

I am pleased to announce that Black Forest is now being published by Freedom Games (freedom.gg) For those of you who may not know, a game publisher can take care of a lot of the business and marketing side of releasing a game. That includes managing our store pages, marketing and advertising the game, helping showcase the game at digital and live events, PR, and much more. Having Freedom Games as a publisher is pretty motivating as it will allow me to reach more players and make Black Forest the best it can be!

The best thing about Freedom Games is that they are fully behind my creative vision of the game and I’ll have all the freedom (heh) going forward to build the game in the way I think is best. In other words: I have complete creative and development freedom and that’s exactly what Freedom Games and I want from this partnership.

You may also be concerned about the stories of publishers ruining the vision of a game or forcing arbitrary restrictions on the dev team. For Freedom, that can’t be further from the reality I have experienced with them. Freedom has been a great partner to me, only enhancing and supporting my vision. I was conscientious when considering whether to go with a publisher or not, and selected Freedom because they are committed to my vision of the game, and only want to see it reach its full potential as I see it. I maintain complete creative and development freedom, and Freedom (heh) wouldn’t have it any other way!

We’ve got more updates coming, so stay tuned! Don’t forget to join our Discord for sneak peeks and more.