Odd Realm News

I know I said I'd have this ready and out in May, but I ran into a ton of issues. So, I'm sorry for the delay. Thank you all for waiting!



I'm still making the Linux and Mac builds, and I'm going to have them out on Monday.

[h2]Beta Caveats & Read Me[/h2]

Please, please do not play the beta if you don't want to encounter any issues. It has been more than a year since I've had any eyes but mine on the game, so be prepared for the beta to be unstable for the next few weeks.

Also, if you notice any missing UI elements from the old version, don't fret, they aren't cut or anything. Because the 1.0 version has a completely new UI system (for performance and feature reasons) I am in the process of porting screens and various UI elements to this new system. For example, the list of settlers has yet to be re-added. I'll be adding in any missing elements as soon as I can.

I'm in the process of tuning, polishing, and adding the remaining content for the official 1.0 release. So, some things are very much in flux. I am doing a whole pass on events, and I have them temporarily disabled while they are being tuned. I also have a bunch of functionality to add to the overworld map interactions with kingdoms. For example, sending out your merchants and raiding parties.

All-in-all, there is still a ton of work to be done to have the beta come out to the main line.

There is a lot that has changed from the last version of the game, and I'm going to make a huge write up detailing everything for when 1.0 comes out of beta in the coming weeks.

For now, if you'd like to help find bugs and provide feedback, I strongly encourage you to join our discord server. I'm on there every day chatting with players and it would be great to hear your thoughts there:

Odd Realm Discord

Thanks so much for your patience, support, and interest in the game. It really means a lot to me how many people are excited about the game.

Cheers!

Waylon

Hi friends!



This will be a short post as I'm mostly just focused on tuning and polish (which doesn't have a lot to show off) but I did want to say that I'm planning on releasing the 1.0 into beta in May. I'm going to need lots of help finding bugs and getting the game ready for the final release. I'm excited for you all to play. :)

That said, here are some of the small things I've been improving over the the last month.

[h2]Uniforms[/h2]



Cleaning up a bunch of different UI windows including the uniforms window. Giving lots more control over uniform permissions and improving the feedback for item stats.

[h2]Family Info On Entity Tooltip[/h2]



I've added a family section to entity tooltips to help communicate the family relationships between entities. As well, this section will tell players if they need a specific room for the entity. For example, Humans need the Home to mate.

[h2]Saga[/h2]



Adding some polish to the saga screen as well as tuning how tomes are earned. I'm going to test out having tomes unlocked at the racial room (each race has their own; Town Hall for Humans) instead of spawning randomly from entities. You'll still be able to find and buy tomes in the world, but this will be the main way to produce them. This will let players unlock tomes and research quicker if they want to spend settlers on writing them instead of working on other things.

[h2]Biome Info[/h2]



Continually adding info to the overworld tile tooltip. Some more info added for the entities found in each tile. Still a bit more info to add to these!

[h2]Settlers Window[/h2]



Many of you will be pleased to know I've made it so skill permissions now fit on one screen. Also added some filter options here.

[h2]Concluding Thoughts[/h2]

I am working on my list of 100 polish and tuning tasks which is slow going, but I should have a better idea of the official beta date at the end of the month. I really haven't had a whole lot of time to fix bugs and optimize things, so a lot depends on doing those before the beta comes out. Will keep you posted!

Thanks for reading and for your interest in the game. I appreciate you all!

Hey gang,

Apologies for the late dev log. I wanted to get a bunch of UI stuff done before writing one, and wasn't able to finish that stuff before the end of Feb. So, here we are! Thanks for the patience.



The final push for 1.0 is going very well and I'm so excited to put the beta build out soon. I'm burning through a lot of UI polish, bug fixing, performance improvements, and content tuning. That said, I don't have a date for the beta build to go live just yet. The UI work is taking me ages because there's a lot of information and features to cover, so I'm not comfortable committing to any specific date at the moment. Again, thank you for waiting.

Now, let's take a look at where we're at.



Even though it takes so long to finish this stuff off and get it to a point that feels good, it is going so well. I feel like I've finally gotten to a point where everything makes sense and is not an absolute pain to use.

[h2]Entity Tooltips[/h2]
Entities have a lot of information to show and I'm still adding some things to this UI (relationships and jobs), but it's coming along nicely. I've incorporated the new collapsible list feature into the entity tooltip so you don't need to open the entity window to see things like statuses, buffs, abilities, inventory and more.



Going through each individual element and making sure they have a tooltip is the slowest part of the process, but I'd say I'm 70% of the way there.



Things like item abilities, buffs, and entity statuses now say exactly what they do with a more detailed tooltip. For example, the metabolism status (for those entities that have one) will tell you exactly what it's doing, whereas, before, it would be much more ambiguous. The tooltip text is directly connected to the game data now, so any mods players make will correctly show the various actions for statuses, items, and buffs.



A big thing I'm excited to add is some entity interaction options for players. For example, being able to open up a merchant's trade options when they are in your town. This is to replace the merchant overlay that appears when they arrive. You'll be able to trade with them as long as they are in your settlement.

[h2]Location Tooltips[/h2]

I've already showed off the location tooltips, but there are a couple changes since the last time. Namely, more info about what the location contents drop, their functionality, and--for plants--what seasons they are permitted.



I've also added a visual to indicate what directions an entity can move from the location. This is to help communicate permitted pathing (the red, green, and blue arrows in the bottom left).



[h2]Rooms Menu and Edit[/h2]

This is a big change I'm extremely happy with. This completely replaces the room editing window and makes editing rooms a lot easier because you can look at the room and its settings at the same time. It has really helped me make the connection of what rooms I'm actively editing.

You can still select and designate rooms from the bottom right rooms menu like normal. Now, though, you can see all the rooms and create new ones from this menu too:


If you wish, you can also select rooms just by clicking on them in the world. Makes it super easy to jump around and edit rooms.

I've also added a "Settings" to each designation window (you'll see this in practice a bit later) to help organize menus with a lot of options. i.e., only viewing stockpiles, or only seeing blueprints of a certain resource.

With a room created and selected, an edit window will appear in the bottom left of the screen:


Much like the entity tooltip, this lets you view and edit all things related to the room including: occupants, jobs, and items:


[h2]Job Menus[/h2]

Job menus (such as the build menu seen below) are now organized by job type. i.e., Blocks, furniture, doors, etc.


You can imagine that these lists get quite big when you unlock a lot of blueprints. So, I've also added a handy settings menu (mentioned before) that lets you filter blueprints by things like "resources":


I'm going to add some other options to allow players to view these lists comfortably. For example, being able to toggle the large icons for blueprints. With it disabled, many more entries fit into a list.

And, of course, I'm always working cleaning up tooltips for all these things:




I'm always trying to polish some of the art in my free time. Did a pass on the trees so their roots look more.. idk.. tree-ish.





I'm slowly getting through all the icons to make their bigger versions. Am about 60% of the way through those!



So, I've still got lots of UI polish to finish as well as a ton of overall tuning. I know I'm way, way behind on my initial estimates for when this would be ready. Sucks being so slow, but I hope these dev logs give you some idea of why I am taking a long time.

As I've said a million times, thanks so much for all the support and good vibes. I would not be this far without it! Thanks for reading and hope you are all well.

Hello and happy new year!

Today I wanted to show off some terrain stuff which will be in the next update as well as some of the other improvements.





The game's terrain gen has taken up a lot of my focus, and I'm super proud of where it's at. With all the biomes, plants and animals in the game, it's an extremely laborious process to work on improving terrain. And it's a big reason why this update has taken so long. But, it's juuuust about done. Let's dive into some things to look forward to.

First off, caves.



The new generation system has a robust set of tools for generating unique and diverse caves (when I say caves, you can assume I include dungeons as well). This is something I'm working a lot on because I want players to have more things to find while exploring underground. That was a big reason for increasing the depth of the world to 256. Caves will vary depending on two main variables: the biome, and the depth. Caves near the surface will be a bit smaller, and have fewer threats and rewards. As you get closer to bedrock at the bottom of the world, the caves will increase in size and complexity. As well, you'll find more interesting entities and items. Big underground lakes with fish. Web-filled spider dens. Tomek mining away. That sort of thing.



As for the overall terrain generation, I've been tuning it like mad. I want players to experience a unique landscape each time they start a new map. A large amount of effort has been put into each biome's features and shape. Mountainous terrain have towering, snow capped peaks with wide, flat valleys. Islands have sandbars and lagoons and deep ocean trenches. You can choose from the hilly landscape you are used to, or flatter plains to work with more open areas.



This is all combined with the new simulation stuff I've built for plants and animals. So, you'll see huge trees, and expansive vegetation that has grown untouched since the Fracture.


[h2]Better Notification Previews[/h2]
You know I'm always trying to improve the game's UI. I've updated the notifications to provide more info for important messages in the game. This is to communicate exactly what you are missing instead of a generic, "Missing item!" notification. For example, when you don't have enough of an item when you are building things, it shows you what blueprint, and what item:



These will appear in the top-left of the screen for various things which, in addition to missing items, include enemies sighted, dying/hungry/thirsty entities, new discoveries (caves, items, tech), and all manner of important info.

Now, I know some people probably don't want to see all these things, so you can also disable them from the notification settings window. From here you can also enable the ones that are disabled by default.

[h2]Selected Blueprint Preview[/h2]
I've also added--not sure why I didn't ages ago--the feature which shows what you are currently going to place as a job.



This is especially handy when you want to rotate things before placing them, or just want to see what they look like without needing to be built.

[h2]Tooltips[/h2]
Always adding more info to the tooltips. I've added a bunch more descriptions and surfaced a ton of item, plant, entity, and block info. Added artwork for each biome, and am just adding the additional info for them now to show things like fauna, nations, and other tile features.






I'm testing out having entities live longer. Many have mentioned that they'd like this and I'm going to see how that feels. So, instead of a human living 60-100 game days, they'd live 60-100 game years. Essentially, you'd probably never see your settlers die of old age, unless they were old when they arrived. But, I'm curious how different this will play. As well, the Ardyn would age per day, instead of per minute (how everyone else ages in the old version).

I'm honestly not sure which is best and I might have the option to select either when starting a new game. On one hand, short lifespans means you get to see a settlement progress at a super fast rate, but lose their individual progress quickly. On the other hand, with long lifespans, you get to have settlers keep their levels and skills for long periods but you might never see them get old, and never see their children grow up. It's a tricky little design challenge, and I'd like to put it into the beta to get some feedback on it. Either way, I can easily change between one or the other depending on which is the most fun. :)


I'm in the middle of about five different big-ish tasks, and 100 small-ish tasks. Some of the big ones being UI screens and game content. I'll be honest, it's tedious stuff. I'm trying to juggle all these things as best I can but it takes a long time to finish out each one. So, thank you for waiting, and providing all your extremely kind and supportive messages. I know it seems like this will never come out, but I swear, I am close. You are all amazing and I appreciate you!

Hello! Welcome. Come on in. Have a seat!

Hope everyone is doing well. I am making great progress on the game and have been working on finishing up all the UI changes for 1.0. This post won't be extremely long as most of my work the last bit has been focused on polishing up the UI, which isn't terribly exciting stuff. But, nonetheless, I wanted to write something to show off the new UI as I'm very happy with where it's going. It's finally starting to feel polished and not annoying. Yay!



I've changed the font to a more legible one that isn't bold, blocky letters. This should help distinguish the inline icons and make things easier to read overall. I, personally, love it and it has made a huge difference for me just developing the game, let alone playing. I'm very happy with it. And I have to give credit to Chevy Ray for making it.





A lot of the UI elements now have collapsible lists. This is to help organize all the data that can come with a UI panel.

For example, below, the room designation now organizes rooms into categories based on function. As you discover new rooms to designate, they'll be organized under their respective category. As well, I've cleaned up 'active' rooms to appear at the top so you can quickly select and view those.



All the tooltips take advantage of these lists too. As you'll see below, the block tooltip shows all its contents in clean lists. And you can open these up when you select the block (holding TAB).



This is very useful when you need to view and select/deselect entities when a group of them is selected.



All the game screens are being updated with this functionality to clean things up. Here's a look at what the new game screen looks like.




There is so much UI in the game to update, and I'm currently updating the room management, uniforms, diets, and settlers windows. It's a tedious process but I feel like I'm making great progress and I'm getting close to having something ready to play. We're getting there!

Thank you for reading and, as always, for the patience and support which you give the game. Hope you are all well, and have a great new year.