Odd Realm News

Transparency with the community is extremely important to me. That's why I want to let you all know that the price of Odd Realm will soon be going up from $10 USD to $15 USD in about a month. The game is currently on sale for 20% off to help players get the game at a lower price before I make this price change.

Now, I've always tried to keep the price of Odd Realm low for a few reasons but, namely, being an early access game, I wanted to make sure the price was fair to the consumer. If they're buying a half finished game, it should be half the price. That's why I started the price at $10, half of the $20 price that the 1.0 game will be. Now that we're getting very close to that 1.0 finish line, and there is a third race to play in the game, I feel it's time to raise the price to $15.

Normally, that content to price conversion wouldn't be on my mind and I'd keep the price low. However, a big part of raising the price now is that things are starting to get much more expensive where I live and $10 is no longer a feasible income price point.

Lastly, and this is a small thing but still a thing, I think many dismiss cheap games as amateur or small projects. I think it's easy for folks to see $10 on Odd Realm and think, 'eh, that is probably not a serious game or it's extremely short.' It's not, and it's not. I hate, HATE the marketing side of making games, but at the end of the day, I have to also consider how these things affect the development of Odd Realm.

Anyway, I hope you can understand my intentions here. To all of you supporting the game and telling your friends about it, I want to say thank you. I wouldn't be able to make this game without that.

Hello my friends!

There is lots to talk about for the new 0.11.0.0 version on beta so let's jump right in.





You can now select and play as the Ardyn!

[h2]Senectia[/h2]

They are a completely different race from Humans in pretty much every way. The main difference being that they don't need food or water to survive. Instead, they age much faster than all the other races. For them, every hour is equivalent to one day of aging for normal entities. This means that they die of old age (Senectia - an aging disease unique to their race) much faster.



They prevent themselves from getting old through a process called retroanimation. Retroanimation takes the life-force from one entity and gives it to the Ardyn, stealing their youth to keep the Ardyn young. This requires the Ardyn to constantly need to maintain large populations of captured entities to survive. Many other races fear the Ardyn because they ruthlessly hunt and capture all living things.

[h2]Reproduction[/h2]





The Ardyn also differ from Humans in how they reproduce. They can have companions but they don't procreate with a partner and spawn offspring. Instead, when an Ardyn dies, their bodies can be turned into Astrasomes. These organic seed-like pods are used to grow a plant called a Chronoblast. Caretakers of Chronoblasts must feed them life-force to help them grow, and when they are mature, they produce one adult Ardyn settler.



There are three new rooms for the Ardyn to use. These can only be unlocked by having an Ardyn settler.

[h2]Astralarium[/h2]



This is the main fabrication room. It is where Ardyn workers can create items like Astralite, Astrasomes, and Nyctium. As mentioned previously, Astrasomes are used to create more Ardyn settlers, but Astralite and Nyctium are mainly used for constructing things.

[h3]Astralite[/h3]



Astralite is a dense material that is the biproduct of Nyctium being fused with the life-force of an Ardyn. It is extremely valuable because of its difficulty to make and is often used to make advanced containers like Astracubes.

[h3]Nyctium (and the Nyctoid plant)[/h3]



Nyctium is an organic material that is heavily used in Ardyn construction. It is unique in that it can only be harvested from the Nyctoid plant (more on that later).

[h2]Somnic Pools[/h2]





The Somnic Pools are where the Ardyn use retroanimation on entities to remove Senectia and make themselves younger.

[h2]Hortichron[/h2]



The Hortichron is where Chronoblasts and Nyctoid plants are grown.

[h3]Nyctoids[/h3]



This plant is grown by Ardyn Technochrons to produce the rare material, Nyctium. It requires the remains of an entity to be planted, and, over its lifetime, must be fed life-force by the Ardyn farmers.





With the Ardyn basics covered, let's talk about some improvements that have been made to the various windows and UI elements. First off, the production window. I've received so much great feedback about this screen. It is a complicated beast. This has made it quite tough to present in a clear way but I've done a lot of work with this update to help improve its presentation and how the various jobs communicate their requirements.

One change that I think makes things much clearer is that the jobs are now immediately placed in the room, and no longer queued. If you manually add a job, it will be placed in the room. However, this can only happen if the requirements are met.

Lots of work has been done to better communicate job requirements. There are five main areas of requirement:

• Skill - i.e., Carpentry
  
• Items - i.e., 2 wood logs
  
• Blocks - Where the job is done. i.e., Workbench
  
• Entity - The one doing the job. This may require a race, status, or intelligence type. i.e., Human, with Tired (Status), with Sapient Intelligence.
  
• Target - The one being used for the job. i.e., The victim of retroanimation. This can have the same requirement specs as Entity (seen above).
  

[h3]Job Scheduling[/h3]





You can now specify the hour and season jobs get created. This could be handy if you only want people to farm certain crops in winter, while switching over to something else for spring.





I've added three new features to this window:

[h2]Stockpile Priority[/h2]
This lets you make stockpiles a high priority if you want items moved their first.

[h2]Item Prohibit List[/h2]
This lets you specify items that you don't want in a stockpile.

[h2]Min/Max Settings[/h2]
This lets you choose the min amount of items you want in the stockpile at all times, as well as the max amount. The settlers will do their best to keep the item inventory count in between these values.





Characters now show the items they have equipped on their sprite. So, if you deck out an entity in full rutile armor, you'll see a little red settler running around. If they have a pickaxe equipped, you'll see this on their back.





This is a new sub-window that is part of the Settlers window. Its purpose is to let you specify which skills start enabled when an entity spawns. So, for example, if you want new Void Woken summons to not have mining on, you can set that here.



You'll notice a new 'room' called Region in the production window. This room represents the entire map, and it houses all of the core jobs that entities need to create in order to do basic jobs to survive. For example, eating and drinking can be found here. Players won't really need to edit these jobs, but I wanted to surface all of these to players to make sure things are clearer. Before, all of these jobs were created under-the-hood, and it was tough to know what requirements were used to create them. Now, you can see all of these from Production.



Ok, I put in an absolute ton of work into this for the update. In fact, I completely changed how the game's data was handled to allow for modding. Before, everything was part of a big ol' JSON text file. Yes, this let you mod but it was really not fun. It also made it impossible to have multiple mods at once. Now, all the game data is represented by Unity's scriptable objects. I've also expanded my build pipeline to export a separate Unity Project which houses all of the scripts and data required to make these. This project can be accessed by anyone through github. It can be used to create and edit the data which can then be built and used as a mod. All the modder needs to do is put this data into the Mod folder in the game's folder, and the game will try to use this new modded data. Either overwriting old data, or adding it into the game. I am going to make a video to fully explain this process in the next couple days. I'll go into much, much more detail about how this all works.

One thing I still need to add to the mod pipeline is the ability to have multiple texture atlases. Right now, if players wanted to have multiple art style mods, that wouldn't really be possible unless, the art mods were all from the same modder and they created just one atlas. As soon as you have multiple different modders with their own atlases, it won't know which ones to use. But, that's definitely on my to-do list! :)



You'll notice their is a new faction (much like player, neutral, hostile) called 'captured'. This faction is applied to, you guessed it, captured entities from cages. It has all the same functionality as the player faction, however, captured entities will try to stay in their designated rooms AND will only eat/drink from those room. Make sure to keep those rooms stocked with food/water so your captured entities can eat/drink.

As well, factions can be used to limit room occupants. The prison cell is one such room that uses this setting to determine occupants. You can edit this faction setting from the Room Edit Window.

The Prison Cell is pretty much the equivalent of the Animal Enclosure, but for Sapient entities. Pretty soon I'm going to add some deeper mechanics to how captured entities react to their situation. And how they are housed in cells will play a big part into whether they choose to join you or try to escape or get sick, etc.



Matt Creamer, our wonderful composer, has created five new tracks for the game. Four of which are in this update. I will add the fifth track in patch 0.11.0.1. I didn't add it because it wasn't looping properly and needed Matt to address that. You'll also notice the new tracks are a bit quieter than the previous ones. Matt is currently normalizing all these volumes and those changes will be in the next patch as well.



Ok, I'm not going to lie, I did a terrible job tracking this update's notes. I was going through a lot of personal stuff and neglected to track things as I went. Lots of small tuning changes and UI improvements went untracked and I apologize for that. Going to track these better going forward. Here's what I managed to jot down:

• Content: New Ardyn playable race with three new unique starting loadouts.
  
• Content: Three new Ardyn rooms (Astralarium, Hortichron, and Somnic Pools).
  
• Content: New Technochron profession. Levels up Time Weave skill.
  
• Content: New Time Weave skill. Only Ardyn can use this one!
  
• Content: A bunch of new props and items to build that are unique to the Ardyn.
  
• Content: Chickens now have a child (chick) appearance, as well as a male appearance. Slowly going through all the animals to differentiate these different states. More on the way soon!
  
• Tuning: Tons of work was done cleaning up tooltips and adding missing info.
  
• Feature: Core jobs like eating, drinking, sleeping, warming up, etc, are now visible from the Region room in the production window. This is to let players have more control over how these are started.
  
• Feature: Modding capabilities using a separate Unity mod project. Plus the ability to select and load mods from in-game.
  
• Music: 5 new ambient music tracks have been added to the game. These play during settlement gameplay.
  
• Bug Fix: Where the correct tomes weren't spawning. i.e., The Tome Of Cooking never spawned for cooking jobs.
  
• Bug Fix: Where a visual fragment would appear on some blueprints with transparency.
  
• Bug Fix: Where Lfeth (an Ancient) would lose hunger and thirst.
  
• Feature: Prohibited items can now be added to stockpiles.
  
• Feature: Priorities can now be set on stockpiles.
  
• Feature: Min and Max item counts can now be specified for stockpiles.
  
• Feature: Added schedules to auto-jobs. Players can now limit the hour and season for auto jobs. i.e., No planting carrots in winter. Or, no sleeping from 12pm-8pm.
  
• Tuning: Added Wood Fishing Pole to the Human Hermit start.
  
• Bug Fix: Hitting ESC while the new settlement loadout popup is open will now close it instead of closing the overworld screen.
  
• Art: Cleaned up a bunch of inconsistent color palletes.
  
• QoL: Dropping an item on an entity item slot will now select the individual uniform by default (for the uniform selection popup) if there isn't an item in a higher priority uniform.
  
• Art: Updated profession icon art to unify visuals.
  
• Tuning: Planting and Harvesting skills have been replaced with Horticulture skill.
  
• Bug Fix: Where airborn entities could not spawn on the map because they wouldn't check air blocks.
  
• Bug Fix: Where extinguishing a fire that had just gone out would create a giant pool of water.
  
• Bug Fix: Where the raw foods tooltip showed it provided a worse buff than raw foods. Now shows it provides a worse buff than
• cooked foods.
  
• Tuning: Room owner size is no longer based on room size. Now, it's a flat starting value that players can edit.
  
• Feature: Added an 'auto' option to auto-jobs. This setting will create jobs as long as the requirements for the job are met. i.e., If all the items and block requirements are available, a build brick job will be created.
  
• Tuning: Most props now act as obstacles and will block pathways.
  
• Tuning: The 'Create New Room' hotkey now uses Left Control instead of Left Alt.
  
• Feature: Added a notification to indicate when entities cannot reach items used by jobs.
  
• Feature: Added new Prison Cell room.
  
• Feature: Add a new 'Captured' faction. Animals captured in cages will be given this faction when the capture job is successful. The faction is player controlled and provides an extra layer of control. Captured entities may also try and escape.
  
• Bug Fix: Where the Spellbook of Death wasn't issuing attacks.
  
• Bug Fix: Where entity appearances were not matching up when entities grew older.
  
• Bug Fix: Where rooms couldn't be designated on snow.
  
• Tuning: Overlay states now save to individual selection groups. i.e., disabling the priority overlay when placing jobs will not disable the priority overlay for the priorities selection.
  
• Tuning: Summoning is now an Ancient only ability. In the future, other races will be able to summon certain things, but the Ancients are now the masters of this.
  
• Feature: Separated the deconstruct jobs into platform, prop, block, and all.
  
• Bug Fix: Where you could select an overworld tile when the confirmation popup was open.
  
• Bug Fix: Where the 'no profession assigned' notification would trigger for entities that could not change their profession.
  
• Bug Fix: Where freeing an Ancient from a Stasis Crystal would spawn them as neutral.
  
• Bug Fix: Where entities were climbing up/down through floors/roofs.
  
• Feature: Skill defaults sub-window in the Settlers window.
  

This next week I want to focus on bugs (as well as make a tutorial video for mods!). I know there are lots of new issues with how entities are prioritizing stockpiles and some auto-jobs not being created. I want to spend the entire week hyper focused on cleaning all those issues up.

After that, I want to add the remaining props and items I have on my Ardyn to-do list. I wasn't able to add them all in and there are a few to help round out the Ardyn tech tree.

I'd also like to work on polishing up and tuning this update for about three weeks. I think that will be enough time to make it feel really nice and then I'll push it to the main production branch once it is in a good place.

Once this update is done, I'm going to jump onto a little content update that focuses on adding more events, props, items, and summons. I think it's time to start adding to the depth of the game now that we have a third race. I want to flesh out (HA) the Ancient race a bit more as I think they are the most lacking in terms of things to do. Void magic is a powerful tool, but it's also extremely risky to use because it attracts the attention of other entities in Odd. Summoning creatures from the void is a huge advantage but it will mean the Ancients have to also be prepared to fight off the slumbering void creatures that are awakened by the large magic use.

Well, that's all for now. If you've read this far, bravo! I appreciate you taking the time to read through this. I know it's a lot. As well, thanks to all of you for your support and feedback and kindness. Many of you messaged me about my grandfather passing with kind words and I read all those. I hope you know that these messages keep me going.

Thanks and have a wonderful day!

Hello!

I've been meaning to make an Odd Realm demo for a while now. I don't like seeing people buy the game only to realize the visual style isn't for them, or it doesn't run so well, or any number of reasons. No one wants buyer's remorse! That being said, you can now play the Odd Realm demo on Windows, Mac, and Linux. :)

The demo is the full version of the game with two limitations. First, players can only play as the Humans, and, second, saved games cannot be loaded. If players decide to buy the full version of the game, their saved files from the demo will be there to load.

That's it for now. I'm wrapping up the rest of the new race update, so look forward to news about that soon!

Thanks,
Waylon

Greetings everyone!

I apologize for posting this so late in the month. My grandfather passed away just over a week ago and I had to attend to his funeral. I'm back to work now and I have lots of fun things to show today.


One thing I've been meaning to add for ages is a window which lets you toggle the default enabled skills per profession and race.



It's pretty straight forward. Within the settlers window, there is a skill defaults sub window (seen above). This window shows all the default skills that are enabled/disabled for when an entity spawns. Players can also select which race to edit the skills for. So, let's say you wanted to disable mining for new Void Woken summons. You could select the Void Woken tab, navigate to their default profession, and turn off mining.

I would like to get your opinions on how these selections get saved. Currently, I have them saving to the player settings which means it applies to every game. However, you might want to save only to the current game. I'm not too sure which is better yet. Please let me know your thoughts if you have a preference.


The main focus of this update is the new Ardyn race. I have made a lot of progress on their gameplay mechanics over this last month. I'm very close to being finished. All I have left to do is some tuning, and add a few additional items, props, and events. Oh, and I also have to add some tutorial steps for them too. Not a lot of big things, but still a few weeks of work.



When the beta goes live in a couple weeks, I'm going to write up a big post explaining their mechanics. They have a bunch of new items and props, as well as three new rooms which allow for them to procreate and construct things. The unique element of the Ardyn race is that they use time to create items, stay alive, and procreate. I'll explain all that in the beta post, though. ;)


The production window is one of those screens which has a lot of functionality, and, as a result, is quite complicated. So, I went through it and cleaned it up, focusing on making the job requirements easier to read and understand.



There are four main requirement areas that include skill, block, items, and/or entity status. A job doesn't necessarily need all these things, but it will clearly show what is needed, highlighting missing requirements in red. For example, the above job, "Sleep In Bed," needs a bed block, and an entity that's tired.



Additionally, I've added auto job schedules which allow players to select time of day and season to limit when auto jobs can start. For example, you only wanted to plant carrots in summer between 10am-2pm. You can enable the schedule for that job, then disable the times and seasons outside those requirements. You can also make schedules global, meaning every job of that same blueprint will have the same schedule. Handy if you wanted everyone to only sleep in beds between 10pm-630am (my bedtime!).



I've added an 'Auto' option for creating auto-jobs. This will create a job as long as all the requirements are met for a blueprint. So, if you have a build wood plank job that needs wood logs and a workbench, and you have two workbenches available, it will auto-create these as long as those workbenches are open.

Another small change I've made is that jobs are created immediately and there's no more queueing. In the live build, you'll see two numbers representing 'active jobs' and 'queued jobs'. Queued jobs are waiting for a place to be created in the room, while active jobs are active in the room. There was a lot of confusion around this. To fix, I've done away with that queue number. Instead, the jobs are immediately created in the room if you manually add them, or when the auto-job requirements are met.



Lastly, I've surfaced a lot of hidden jobs players didn't have much control over. Examples of these are: eating, drinking, sleeping, warming up, equipping items, and extinguishing fires. I want players to be able to control all aspects of the game, and for things to be visible, so I've added a 'Region' entry to the production window. The Region represents the entire map, whereas other entries represent rooms players have placed. It's essentially a giant room that contains the whole map. In there you'll be able to see how these jobs start, and edit their settings. I don't think this will be used all that much, but it's there if needed.


Well, my timeline was pushed back about ten days because of my family emergency, but I am feeling very good about things. I'm hoping to get a beta build out in two weeks! As I said, there are only a few more Ardyn tasks on my list which aren't too overwhelming. Stay tuned for that in the coming weeks.

Hope you are all well. As always, thank you for all the support and patience waiting for these updates. And thank you for reading!

Waylon

Hello!

Today I'll be talking about all the exciting things coming for the next expansion, Timeless Tyrants. I have been extremely busy working on this one and I still have quite a bit of work to do to get it into your hands. I don't want to promise anything but I should be able to put out a beta build in a couple weeks.

Alright, let's take a look at what's coming down the pipe!


Every expansion going forward will introduce a new race to play. This expansion will unlock the Ardyn, a race of fierce warriors with a vibrant culture and history.



The unique aspect of the Ardyn race is that they age extremely fast. Every one hour of in-game time is one year to them. To combat this, they have evolved the ability to syphon life from other entities, keeping themselves from ever growing old. Their victims, sadly, must pay the price and often die of old age as their youth is drawn from them. This survival trait has given the Ardyn many enemies. Some small factions within Ardyn society have forsworn the use of their powers on sentient entities, preferring to roam the lands as peaceful shepherds.

Their development is coming along very nicely, and I'm in the middle of populating all their new appearances, special items, and various game data requirements. Stay tuned for more on them in the next post!


Just as it sounds, you will now see items that are equipped on your character sprites.





Every entity sprite has a set of default colors, and accessories which get swapped out based on two things: the entity default appearance, and the entity equipment. The default appearance will establish things like skin color and hair. The equipment will then take a higher priority and override colors or add accessories. For example, hair (say, a ponytail) is a default appearance accessory which can be hidden by a helmet accessory coming from the item equipped in the head slot (as seen in the above gif.)

I will be adding some new settings options so that players can disable any accessory visibility. For example, if players don't want helmets visible, I'll have a toggle to hide them.

This is a big change and I didn't think I was going to be able to pull this off. This is something that I've seen suggested quite a bit, but I had always shied away from implementing it because of the workload. It required going through every animation frame to set the anchor point positions and orientation (so things like hair and helmets move properly.) It was extremely tedious. But, that's all done now, and it works great. The only real downside is that things can't be very accurate in scale. For example, a helmet lying on the grass will look slightly larger than the one on the character sprite. There's nothing to do about that really. The scale of the game can often be an annoying restriction in cases like this.

This change added a lot of new properties to edit for entities. It's very easy to make appearances and swap out skin color, fur color, type of hair, etc. This leads into the next big change...


This is another HUUUUGE change that I'm super excited about. I think it's going to open up a lot for the game.

Essentially, I've done away with the old method of game data management that I was using. I no longer derive the game's data from that one .json file. A file that was generated from a 100+ page spreadsheet on google. It was just an absolute nightmare to edit after the game was built. Instead, I've migrated all that data to use Unity's scriptable objects.



There are a couple benefits to doing this. Firstly, it makes editing and creating data objects super fast. I no longer have to import my spreadsheet every time I want to tune values, or create new content. Secondly, this has the added benefit of working nicely with Unity and the bundling framework.

Not only have I migrated to this new framework, I've also done a lot of work on making modding easier for players. At a high level, let's take a look at how mods will be made, as well as how they can be used to give you an idea of where it's going.

[h3]Making A Mod[/h3]

Note: I will be making a detailed walkthrough later, so don't get hung up on how things find folders and such. I'll cover the details thoroughly later. This is a very, very high level overview.

Modders will be able to download a unity project from a git server that I will keep updated with the latest builds. This project will provide two important things: the core game data (i.e., blueprints, dialogue, items, etc), as well as the c# game data scripts. The scripts will be necessary for modders to make their own game data that can be read by the game client.

The unity project will provide a nice way to edit game data, but, more importantly, the tools to create a mod bundle.

Here's an example where I've created a very small mod which edits the tag for Cauldrons. Tags are a data object which represent a group of other data objects, in this case, cauldrons. Here, the cauldron tag gets used for room requirements, specifically, the kitchen room.



In the modding project, I've simply changed the display name for the tag from Cauldron to BETTER CAULDRON. Then, I built the bundle which creates a special folder named BetterTags.





The Mod folder resides in the same directory as the game's save files. This is to avoid any mods getting stomped when a new game version comes out. Inside the Mod directory, you'll see my new mod, BetterTags.

[h3]Using A Mod[/h3]

The game client will automatically look for the Mods folder, and will display any mods inside when the game boots up. All you have to do is put the mod folders here for them to be used by the game.



Players can then select which mods are active and the mod will display the version it was last used on. I am going to add lots of helpful stuff here as I go. I want to add warnings for out-of-date versions, conflicts on assets, and maybe even a mod importer. So, please let me know if there's anything you'd like to see at this screen!



With the BetterTags mod active, you'll see (in the above gif) that the new tag shows up. Pretty cool! Because everything in the game derives from data, modders have a lot they can change, not just lame tags. Want to make a new item? Go for it! I've also made it so character sprites and animations can be modded, not just the texture atlas. At some point, I'll still need to make it so modders can change the game's scale, but that's on my to-do list for now.

This is hopefully going to work out pretty well, but I'd love to get your feedback on things. So, feel free to leave a message. I'm sure there will be lots of fun problems around how mods merge, modify textures, and so on. We'll figure them out as we go. :)





Stockpiles now have item prohibiting, and priorities. Entities will move items from lower priority stockpiles to higher priority stockpiles. This should help when trying to keep things like animal enclosures stocked with food.



That's it for now! I will work as fast as I can to get the next beta going. I need to do quite a lot still to get it ready. I'll keep you folks updated! Thanks for your patience and great feedback. I hope you have a great day!