Industrial Petting News

Hey everyone!

A small update this week: some refined world generation and fixing broken pet behavior.

The world is no longer an uninterrupted forest, there are now some open patches, and different pets in those open areas. This tech is to help the next update, which will have a completely different area to explore.

The last update broke pets, they just sat around and looked at you. That's been fixed, and there's currently some work being done to make it clearer what they're thinking and why they do things.

Features
- New world generation!

Bugfixes
- Pets no longer get less hungry as time goes on
- Pets wander correctly again
- Pets no longer have exclamation points over their head in the distance
- Edges of terrain better connected further away
- Controllers working again
- Audio settings now loading up correctly on start

Optimizations
- Reduced animator overhead

Gardeners are now in-game! These little bushes will take care of and “water” your plants for you, giving huge farming boosts!

On the development side, we’ve added a new concept artist to help with the art, so future posts should have some shiny concepts to look at!

A large chunk of the last month has also been updating the game to the new version of Unity. I’ve added a bunch of optimizations with the new ecs system and burst compiler, along with a switch to their new lightweight renderer. This should help performance for most people, and things will only get faster in the future. This does mean that there may be some visual bugs that cropped up in the port, be sure to send emails to support if you see anything.

As always, join the discussion in Discord, and be sure to wishlist and/or follow the game on Steam!

Features:
- Can now manually control builders
- Added Industrial Petters!
- Added some more pets in the forest
- Added third person mode

Changes:
- Added tip and reference to explain how to rotate objects
- Added tip and reference explaining what miners do
- Removed FPS counter
- Upgraded to Unity 2019
- Switched to new unity LWRP renderer
- Moved off of obsolete network serializer
- Greebles now much more efficient
- Removed greebles checkbox
- Added some postprocessing

Bugfixes:
- Fixed bug when flipping pipe directions
- Research window titles no longer overlap text
- Opening up options menu no longer switches resolution to 480p at random
- Players can go underneath pet builders again
- Countless tiny fixes

This last week has seen some internal changes to make adding new pets easier, which should help speed up development. More importantly, some artists are being hired to make adding new buildings and pets much quicker.

Features

• Trunks added!
  
• Added Nibbler!
  

Changes

• Gatherbots now search for objects they''re gathering
  
• Rearranged research tree
  
• Junctions can only hold 3 items now
  
• Can poke things now
  
• Can reverse pipes now
  

Bugfixes

• Fixed oe missing character in french
  
• Pets should go through fences much less often now
  
• Chunks of various bugfixes'
  

Features

• Added the Gatherbot!
  
• French language support!
  
• Added music to the title screen
  

Changes

• Bunch of new sound effects
  
• Autobuilder renamed to Construction Cannon
  
• Slimecuddle renamed to Slimecuddler
  
• Distance Box renamed to Booster Box
  
• Box renamed to Junction
  
• Added error popup for corrupt save, server shutdown, can''t connect to server...
  

Bugfixes

• Honestly, too many to count
  

Changes

• Upgraded to Unity 2018.3
  
• Added control remapping