Odd Realm News

Happy Friday folks!

I just uploaded 0.8.8.0 to the beta branch. I'm going to fix a few more things before pushing them to the production build tomorrow.

Also, you may be experiencing some bugs with old saves from 0.8.4.2 and before. That's because I didn't properly handle the change to age. So, you'd end up having all your settlers become children. That's one of the last few things I'm fixing up today to get into the prod build.

One big thing I've changed is the tutorial. It now has way more steps and is hopefully better at giving the player a sense for the game. There are several steps missing for it but most of the things are there. However, the Ancients tutorial still needs an upgrade but I'll have to get to that another time.

Here are the patch notes:
-Fixed a bug where control group button graphic wasn't updating to show when it's interactable.
-Re-made the tutorial.
-Fixed a bug where Emily Townsend would appear and kidnap non-children.
-Fixed a bug where settlers could have the elder profession.
-Shepherds/cooks should for real stock up animal enclosures and taverns now.
-By default water and first available food item are designated items for rooms now.
-Changed container tooltip to show 'size' as 'capacity' and to also show current content count.
-Changed min age to become elder to 55.
-Changed elder chance to die per day from 10% to 0.5%.
-Changed hunger/thirst/unhappy notifications to have a few hours delay. This should help with issues where notifications would appear for people starving/being thirsty even though they were on their way to food.
-Jobs placed on undiscovered blocks that become discovered will now be cleared. Should stop issues like miners digging into stone walls from happening.
-Fixed an issue where mining yield items would all show on one line.
-Changed most containers to be able to hold ALL item categories unless the container thematically doesn't allow that. i.e., food and water troughs.
-Fixed a bug where settlers would try to train when they are thirsty/starving and there's food for them to eat.
-Fixed a bug where settlers would work even if very thirsty.

Next steps:
I'm going to finish up the production build, but after that I want to fix up combat and add more encounters to the game.

Hope you all have an enjoyable day/night.

Thanks,
Waylon

Hello!

This is a small patch to fix some problems people were having with settlers getting stuck. Should be fixed the next time you load your save. Sorry for the issue.

As well, I've moved around and cleaned up some of the hud in this build. There's also some little additions to overlays to show previous zones and rooms when placing different things in the world. Oh, and I've also fixed an issue where settlers were spawning all as one gender or one appearance type. Should be varied now.

Thanks and have a great day!

Waylon

Hey there!

Wow. This build has been super intense for me to put out. Lots and lots of tiny design details behind this one. There are also a few things that I'm not even done and that's why this build is going to beta rather than production. HUGE disclaimer: this build might be buggy or questionable. There's just so many changes and additions that I didn't have time to triple check every detail. Apologies in advance if I break your game. : /

Mainly, this build is all about overhauling UI for rooms and various info displays. But it also changes up how Happiness works. Before, happiness was this very obscure stat that had a bunch of hidden values working in the background. Now, Happiness is a modifier on a brand new attribute called Will. Much like Hunger and Thirst, Will is a stat that starts at 1000. Happiness affects this stat over time, just like Metabolism affects Hunger. As the game progresses, Settlers will start to collect behaviors which affect their Happiness. For example, wanting their own Bedroom. This will give the settler a negative buff on their Happiness. Happiness starts at 5. As long as it's positive, a Settler's Will improves. Gain enough negative mods from things like wanting a Bedroom, wanting a Bed, wanting a Roof and Happiness will dip below 0 and the Settler's Will starts to decline. If a Settler's Will drops to 0, they will do something like leave the Settlement or go mad.

Ok, so, why make this change to Happiness? I'm trying to move the game towards my vision of it having more and more depth. I want Happiness to be something which isn't terribly important early on but will later introduce fun challenges. I'm going to add different ways for Settlers to lose and gain Happiness which will hopefully give them more personality, rather than just being drones. All that being said, I don't want it to get to the point where you're constantly worried about happiness. It will just be a long term thing to work on.

I've also changed up the 'Relaxing' state for Settlers. Settlers will try to relax every few days for an hour or two. The frequency of going to relax is affected by how unhappy they are. When a settler relaxes, they get a temporary bonus to happiness. If they relax at a Tavern, that bonus lasts for a longer amount of time. This is really going to be cool when I start introducing arenas and permance-based rooms.

Now to the part that's taken the most amount of my time the last few weeks, the changes to rooms. Essentially, I've re-worked the room placement panel. This panel should provide a much easier way of navigating the various rooms but also provide way more information and control for setting up a room. There are a lot of designs still in flux for it and that's really what eats up my time, trying different solutions for gray problems. Again, why I'm putting this in Beta.

As well, I've added the Shepherd profession. This profession will mainly be used for taming animals and taking care of them at Animal Pens. Animals will no longer just eat whatever when they are tamed. They will ONLY eat what is in their pen. I will automate this soon, but you need to manually designate items for Shepherds to bring to their pen OR manually place food zones in there. Otherwise, they will starve or die of dehydration. Currently, the room will autofill with some custom zones that have your designated items. This is sort of clunky and I'm going to be focusing on this for the next build to improve upon it.

Rather than write several more paragraphs, I'll list out the patch notes to give you a good sense of what's new/changed:
-Added more info to settlers overview screen. Shows level, age, happiness, and other important attributes.
-Added Will attribute and changed Happiness to a hourly increase/decrease of Will.
-Changed how settlers treat happiness. Settlers will now leave/go insane if their Will reaches 0. Happiness affects Will and can be + or - depending on how well the settler is living. i.e., has their own room, roof, furniture, etc.
-Re-made the Room placement overlay to be clearer and have way more info on room requirements.
-Can now limit room owners by race.
-Rooms (some of them) can have two owners. i.e., Animal Pen having a Shepherd and Animals.
-Re-worked the relax state to affect happiness and get bonuses from the Tavern.
-Animals will now only eat the food and drink water that's in their enclosure.
-Added two new containers: the food trough and water trough.
-Changed the barrel container to hold liquids and beverages.
-Added info to show room skill requirements.
-Added info to show room permitted races.
-Added Well House room. This room auto collects water from the ground and requires the survival skill.
-Added missing notifications for deaths by thirst and old age.
-Added new shepherd profession.
-Animal Enclosure will auto add custom item zones for food/water designated to be in enclosure.
-Added buff detail to entity state items.
-Settlers will now try to relax when they are very unhappy and every few days. Relaxing boosts happiness for a period of time. Some rooms, such as the tavern provide bonuses to relaxing.
-Re-made some of the settler state indicators to be clearer. i.e., being unhappy and gaining energy from sleep.
-Added positive/negative buff info to settler state list if state item has buffs.
-Added thirsty state icon.
-Added thirsty notification.
-Added unhappy notification.

I think there's a lot missing from these notes as I didn't track things so will this time around.

What's next? Well, I still have a lot of art to add to the rooms. You'll notice that some of the big icons that represent a room are small or not represented properly. I will be adding the new ones. As well, I'm going to tutorialize this new UI. Additionally, I'll be tuning/tweeking the behaviors for how settlers join rooms and how they do their room based tasks. i.e., How shepherds properly stock Animal Pens.

Phew. Ok. Still a ton left to do, but am hoping to get this hot new goodness to the production branch ASAP.

Thanks all for the support and feedback!

Waylon

Hey folks!

I won't be putting a patch out today as I'm still finishing up some things. Apologies for the delay. Hope to be done early next week.

Here's what I'm working on:

I've added some functionality to rooms so they can have two types of occupants depending on the room. For example, the Animal Enclosure can have a Shepherd and Animals. The difference between the two, outside of organization, is that the Shepherd will feed the Animals and stock the enclosure with food and water. Each functionality is different for the various rooms and not all rooms have two occupant types. Another example would be the Tavern where a Host feeds Patrons.

I've also been working on two new rooms, the Well House and the Prison Cell. The Well House provides the ability to automatically collect water from wells. The Cell, which will be used a lot by the Ardyn race, will be used to store prisoners, as you would think. It will require a Warden (anyone with combat skills) to guard the prisoners.

Lastly, I've been re-working the room UI to be easier to use and to communicate things a bit clearer.

Well, that's it for now. Hope you all have lovely weekends. :)

Thanks,

Waylon

Hello!

Hope you're all having a great day.

Just uploaded v0.8.5.0 to the beta branch.

This version is, I think, pretty cool as it adds a lot to the survival aspects of the game. That being said, it also might be the least stable in terms of loading saves. I've added a few things but also changed up some previous functionality so I'm not 100% certain everything will load perfectly. I didn't have any issues with the several old saves I loaded but you never know.

So what's new in this patch?

First up is age. I've completely changed how settlers treat age. Before it was based on seasons and children were treated as a profession. Them being a profession doesn't really makes sense especially when looking at elders. Elders shouldn't be stripped of their profession just because they get old. As well, who knows, I may want a child who's a super warrior to show up and I don't want to limit that because child is a profession.

Wow, wow, wow. What's this elder you speak of?

Ok, that's the other thing I've added. Much like Children turning into adults after a time, they will also turn into elders. I've changed age to correlate to days rather than seasons (seasons take too long). So, your settlers will start to become elders at around the age of 50-60 days. There are two things to be aware about elders. First, they can randomly die of old age. Second, they get a bonus to their favored skills. Think of this as them becoming masters in their profession.

The main reason I've been working on age is because Ardyn rely on it heavily for their main mechanic of syphoning life from other beings to stay young.

The other big thing that I've added to this build is water, thirst and the survival skill. Settlers now have a thirst attribute which depletes slightly faster than hunger. You can get water from two sources: a well, and water blocks. I've added a new collect water job which the survival skill is used for. Collecting water produces unpurified water. You then need to purify this water at the campfire room. Water is also used for booze now.

Ok, that's a lot to take in. Here are the notes:
-Fixed a bug where camera 'go to position' would not go to the exact z level of the target. i.e., Go to settler would not go to their z.
-Added sfx for: cats, dogs, chickens, tamtallen, mirmits, lopens, vytrax, cows.
-Added new Thirst and Hydration attributes.
-Added water and purified water items.
-Added Survival skill.
-Added Collect Water job.
-Added well prop.
-Can now purify water at the campfire.
-Added Age attribute.
-Changed age to correlate to days rather than seasons.
-Added Elder status.
-Removed child profession.
-Distillery will now use water as an ingredient for booze.
-Added beverages and liquids zones.

What's next?

This next week I'm going to fix up the bugs which arise from these big changes to put out a stable PROD build. As well, I'm going to implement some fun new things related to water. Mainly, building water blocks. Yay! As well, I'm going to add a new room to automate water production. This will use the stone well. Additionally, I'm going to add water and feed troughs to the animal enclosures so we can stop having animals steal your items and the farmer (in the future this would be animal handler or something similar) will automatically fill those with the proper food items.

This is all leading into the Ardyn race implementation I assure you. Ok, maybe water and thirst was a slight tangent. Happens.

Any help testing out this beta build would be solid.

Thanks and have a stellar weekend.

Cheers,
Waylon