Black Forest News

• Updated geographical locations of villages, which slightly changes the sunrise and sunset times depending on the map.
  
• Fixed: "Children's Tale" can now be won by hiring mercenaries (3-4 rangers should do it)
  
• Fixed: Village names should now display correctly after loading a save game
  
• Fixed: Kroburg story no longer forces you to click on responses when there's only one response available (like in the intro)
  
• Fixed: "Darkest Nights" story should no longer make you go through duplicate dialogs
  
• Fixed a few minor dialog issues in the "Founding Kroburg" story, and added a filler quest to ensure continuity.
  
• Fixed ranger logic slightly, improving their chance to find monster lairs
  

Not everything I'm working on becomes immediately visible in the game. Some things just take a long time to work on. (cough, mercenaries, cough)

One thing I've been working on for a while and am somewhat close to figuring out is dynamic paths. The following screenshot does not look spectacular:



...until I tell you that only the main village path near the right edge of the screen was placed by me during the level development. All the paths connecting the houses to each other and to the main path are dynamically calculated and placed when the house is built.

They connect to each other, wind around other buildings, arc naturally, clear grass and other vegetation in their way and eventually end at a larger road organically.

I still need to test these in larger amounts and make optimizations, figure out edge cases and other stuff, but I've wanted this for a long time, to make the villages look more real.

Oh yes, and these roads will also disappear again when the house is demolished or destroyed.

It's been a while, and I'm starting slowly, so here's mostly bugfixes and small things such as balance changes:

• Major rebalance of difficulty levels - easy should be a bit easier now, hard a bit harder and doomed somewhat more hard
  
• Fixed: Several text errors
  
• Fixed: Animal pen fences and pathfinding - animals should no longer wander outside of their pens
  
• Fixed: Mill now correctly in the manual (on the page about fields)
  
• Fixed: Peasant log wrapping of long lines
  
• Fixed: Animal pens no longer show collection icons (milk, eggs, meat) when they are destroyed
  
• Fixed: A small error in victory calculations that also caused the victory sound to be played twice
  
• Fixed: Idle peasants now heal properly
  
• For most buildings, you can now click on the status icons (damaged, harvest ready, etc.) to open the context menu
  
• Updated a number of assets and tools
  

Attention "testing" users: With this update I'm inverting the branches. "Testing" now becomes "stable" for those who intentionally want to be behind the regular schedule or to go back to if the default branch breaks. The default branch will now always be ahead of the new "stable" branch.

• Updated Unity 3D engine (to 2021.3.16) and many packages and assets
  
• New decoration object on the winter maps.
  
• Experimental fix for cows escaping from cow pens. Please have an eye on them and let me know if it works, so I can apply it to the other animal pens as well.
  

Patching a few important bugs and adding a new level for teaser testing:

• Fixed: Antoburg vegetation should show up properly again
  
• Fixed: Startup error on Antoburg map for some quality settings
  
• Fixed: Voices volume control should now work for everyone
  
• "Betrayl" DLC Story first glance available now (just 5 days)