Black Forest News

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.

• 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.