Odd Realm News

Hello friends!

Happy New Year! Hope you all are having a great 2020 so far.

Today marks one year since I released Odd Realm on the Steam store. I wanted to take the time to thank you for coming with me on this journey to make this little game. Your patience, feedback, support, and friendship has kept me going.
I'm also going to talk about what I'm currently working and what's next for the game but first I thought it would be fun to share some of the game's progress and history.

At the end of 2016 I was working as a Gameplay Programmer at a game studio and I desperately wanted to make a game on my own. I had been saving up for about five years to have enough money to live off of in order to do this. Originally, I had planned on quitting my job to make a little adventure game where you played as this sword-wielding, amnesia-ridden, fella trying to solve a mystery in a strange, fantasy world.

This is the first scene of the game. You awake from a cryostasis in this cave/bedroom.

It was turning out to be a fun prototype but the art demand was WAY over my head. At this time I was also playing a bit of our much loved predecessor, Dwarf Fortress. I loved the game but I couldn't stop thinking about a version of it with cute little pixel people moving around the world. The image in my mind was very clear. What you see in the game today, is exactly what I envisioned.

One of the earliest gifs from around March, 2017. As you can see, I re-did everything... multiple times...

So, I made the decision to hand in my notice and try and take a swing at making a DF-lite game where you simply tried to keep some pixel peeps alive. I really didn't intend for the game to be 1/10000 of the depth of DF. I actually just wanted to make a small experience in about a year and a half and release the game and move on. Ha. Ha. Ha.

lol. 'Home Zone.' Another super early gif testing out zoning.

Well, the more I worked on the game, the more systems and features became necessities. This wasn't a bad thing but I only really had two years to ship the game before money ran out. Cut to two years later, Jan 10, 2019, and the game comes out in Early Access! Even after two years, the game was nowhere near what I wanted it to be. Even today, three years later it's not. And I'm ok with that. It has grown into something I really love and I plan to keep working on it until the Ardyn are done. About ten more years. Joooking, of course.

Some more modern gifs from recently.

That leads into what's next!

This has been my first week back to work full time since the holiday began. I decided to start work on adding temperature mechanics to the game. In order to do so, I need to re-write my core code to be faster to allow for the additional CPU overhead of temperature and such. Unfortunately, this means a longer wait for updates than usual. This update has a required a lot of fundamental changes, so I need to slowly go through and test everything because these changes affect a lot of things.

If all goes well with the temperature feature, I should be able to jump onto implementing the Tundra biome! :)

Thanks again for an amazing year. Here's to many more!

Your pal,

Waylon

Hey everyone!

This is a brief post to let you know that I won't be as active on the forum/discord or uploading any updates until the new year. I'll be away visiting family and I need to take a little break from development. I WAS going to move the beta changes to production before heading off on vacation, but it doesn't seem wise to do so as I won't be available to fix things while away. Plus, there are some performance issues in the beta that shouldn't make it into the production version and I want to fix those when I return.

Lastly, I wanted to wish you all a happy holiday and new year if you're celebrating that. Thank you for such a great year. It truly has been an honor to work on the game with this community. :)

All the best,

Waylon

Hello!

Real quick update to inform you all that I've uploaded a small build with fixes for the following:
-Ore not showing up on the mining overlay.
-Ore being visible when it hadn't been uncovered yet. Unfortunately, already visible ore will still be visible on saves pre-0.8.24.1 as they get saved as visible. Post-0.8.24.1 saves should be good to go.
-Incorrect item text showing when items were reserved via the inventory panel.
-Weeds will now have 'time to mature' displayed on tooltips.
-Changed shift increment to ctrl (plus added a special hotkey option in settings so you can change it yourself) in order to avoid overlays being hidden when trying to increment items by 5.
-Removed some debug logs which would occasionally drop framerate.

Thanks!

Waylon

Hey friends!

This week's build, 0.8.24.0, is live on the beta branch. I'm hoping to move this update onto the production branch as early as tomorrow. This will depend on whether or not the build has any major bugs. If it does, I probably won't be able to get the update to production until after xmas as I will be away visiting family. Here's hoping this one is good to go. :)

This update fixes a large amount of bugs and adds some fun things to our good ol' Ancient friends. Namely, the Aeternum which is a new headgear item for them to wear which provides energy and magic skill boosts. There are seven for you to make. Four of which require newly added gems which can be found deep underground.

As well, I've added some voices and new portraits for them to slowly bring them up to the same level as Humans in terms of content. Oh, and I also added in three events for 'Unworthy' Ancients to appear and ask to join you. This is similar to the Human settler wave event. Here's some lore for the Unworthy: Within the Ancient class system, Unworthy Ancients are those that acquired immortality without permission of the council several hundred years ago. Immortality was only given to the most deserving Ancient. Having achieved it secretly was blasphemous at the height of Ancient civilization. Nowadays, it's less severe because Ancients are so few in numbers. The Aeternum is a symbol of class standing for Ancients and you'll notice the Unworthy will appear with the Makeshift Aeternum, which is the weakest of them all.

Here are the patch notes:
-Merged blueprints and workstations into one screen called Production.
-Added a sub-screen to Production called Active Jobs which displays jobs currently being worked on by settlers.
-Combat music will no longer play for taming/training.
-Fixed a bug where settlers could lose their targets in combat.
-Fixed a bug where some build jobs would become invisible and keep players from being able to deconstruct props.
-Human Settlers will now also start with wool boots.
-Void Woken are now able to use magic skills.
-Deconstructing the void cell will now drop a crystal rather than shards.
-Smelting ingots now produces 3 bars.
-Rooms will no longer auto-select item designations for you.
-Workstation tasks are no longer based on the prop being worked at and will now be based on the blueprint.
-Removed room quality. This feature is soon to be replaced and, in its current state, doesn't provide the experience we're looking for.
-The room placement window will now fit on 768 height monitors.
-The room edit window will now fit on 768 height monitors.
-Added more detail to the working state display on an entity's tooltip.
-Added sfx for Ancient voices.
-Fixed a bug where harvest/cut jobs were occasionally not being started.
-Fixed a bug where animals on islands would slow down the game.
-Fixed an issue where migrating animals were showing up even though the map was chalk full of animals already.
-Fixed a bug where infinite water could spawn from the map border when putting out fires.
-Holding shift will now hide overlays.
-Fixed a MAJOR bug with pathfinding.
-Fixed a bug where Ancients were trying to path to their sarcophagus even thought there was no possible path available. This caused them to stand around until the path opened.
-Fixed a bug where putting down blueprints on walkways would close off pathing that was provided by the current block.
-Added three scenarios where one 'Unworthy' Ancient will appear at settlements with less than three Ancients.
-Added six new portraits for the Ancients.
-Fixed some input field layout bugs for the new game and new settlement screens.
-NPC's will no longer get XP for doing tasks and fighting.
-Fixed a bug where newborns would create the no profession assigned notification.
-Fixed a bug where if an item was reserved by more than one entity it would show 'reserved by multiple' for each entity.


If you run into any game breaking bugs with this update, please let me know as soon as you can and, if possible, send me your save file. I need to make sure this build is ready to move to production very quickly.

Thanks and have an amazing weekend. :)

Waylon

Hey all!

I'm running behind on today's update so I'm going to push it out until Sunday or maybe just hold onto it for another week. I'm currently in the process of adding some new things and they're taking a bit longer than usual. Plus, a few people have brought up bugs that I still haven't been able to look at and I wanted to get fixes for them into this build.

Here's a brief on some new things that I've added to the next update:
-4 new 'lodes' which can be mined for: Amber Opals, Sunrise Opals, Forest Emeralds, and Seabreeze Sapphires. These are found pretty far under ground.
-7 new 'Aeternum' items. Aeternums are a headband item that Ancients use to increase their energy as well as improve their magic skills. The new gems will be used as regents for the making of these. Ancients will start with the Fledgling Aeternum which is the second worst one. In lore, Aeternums were only given to Ancients that were permitted to perform the passage of immortality. There are some Ancients in Odd who have done so in secret and you'll see them wearing the Makeshift Aeternum which is just a rough facsimile, providing terrible benefits.
-Re-work of jobs and new job screen. In the past, all jobs used blocks and their HP/Toughness to determine the progression of the job. This works well for things like mining but is awkward and hacky for training, building, doing workstation tasks, etc. Now, I have a job wrapper which looks at either a block or blueprint to determine progress. This fixes the issue of builders 'destroying' a stool in the work shop in order to build a wood bow. I'm sure most didn't notice this happening as I'd always reset the stool HP to 100% on completion but that was my hacky solution from ages ago. In addition, I've added a new window which displays all the active jobs being done. From here you can go to the worker/work point, cancel the job, see its progress, see what's being done, and so on.

There are quite a few changes and fixes on top of these three main points but I'll save those for the patch notes.

Thanks and have a great weekend!

Waylon