Winkeltje: The Little Shop News

Greetings Shopkeepers! Today we are looking at a couple of changes and improvements. There is more on the way but these needed to roll out sooner rather than later. Keep an eye out for more content in the next update.

• Community - UI - The crafting and farming menus now have permanent side menus.
  
• Community - Balance - Decorations that can be placed outside & inside now have different appeal values depending on where they are placed.
  

[h2]Changes[/h2]

• Balance - The first crafting station unlock is now at level 5 instead of level 3 (3 -> 5).
  
• Balance - Players can now unlock a new crafting station every 5 levels.
  
• Balance - Anywhere shop objects now have variable appeal depending on if they are placed outside or inside.
  
• Balance - The following objects are now "Anywhere" objects: "Barrel", "Basket", "Autumn Wreath", "Large Blue Banner", "Small Blue Banner", "Large Red Banner", "Small Red Banner", "Decorative Pumpkins", "Wall-mounted Lantern", "Table Lantern", "Winter Wreath", "Winter Garland" and "Solstice Tree".
  
• Objective - Moved crafting objective to level 5 so the objective launches at the same time a crafting specialization can be chosen.
  
• Community - UI - The crafting and farming menus now have permanent side menus.
  
• UI - When moving anywhere shop objects the expected appeal based on where it will be placed is shown.
  
• Community - UI - The crafting repeater should now search upwards in item quality from the preferred choice before searching down and stay limited to the vegetable type that was chosen.
  
• Community - UI - Closing the catalog menu before the animation was done playing could make the menu appear half visible.
  
• Community - UI - The item info tooltip can sometimes go off-screen. When that happens, it should now be repositioned so that the tooltip remains within screen bounds.
  
• Layout - Anywhere shop objects now get sold when shop structure is removed or added around them
  
• Community - Audio - Buy swoosh sound should no longer play when a customer pays at the counter.
  
• Community - UI - Added quality sort options to the commerce menu.
  

[h2]Performance[/h2]

• Performance - Hovering the mouse over furniture would slow down the game significantly.
  

[h2]Fixes[/h2]

• UI - Added a delay before the main menu becomes interactable to prevent interactions while the main menu scene is fading in.
  
• UI - The game saving notification animation was not using unscaled time.
  
• UI - All items in the commission menu should now have a quality indication.
  
• UI - Changing the UI scale could cause the furniture menu tiles to not show on initial presentation.
  
• UI - The inventory capacity HUD will now remain visible if the inventory is empty.
  
• Art - Some winter decoration outlines were incorrect.
  
• Art - Lifted up the farming slots by a minor amount on planters because some seeds were not visible under the soil.
  
• Objectives - Milestone Objectives couldn't start because their objective group list it was checking against never got populated.
  
• Objectives - Autumn and Winter objectives had too many days to complete the objective, they should now properly stop after the last opening of the season.
  
• Scenarios - Item values were set up wrong in the Relaxed Scenario leading to incorrect prices being displayed at the trader.
  
• Scenarios - Displays did not receive the appeal upgrade when upgraded in the Creative Scenario.
  
• Other - Furniture with multiple colliders would incorrectly select/deselect when entering/exiting the player's awareness range.
  
• Other - Some decoration materials could cause big areas of shop objects to be highlighted when in range.
  
• Other - Cached colors and updated outlines on all furniture.
  
• Other - Cached colors and updated outlines of all entrances.
  
• Other - Old graphics preferences could cause the game camera brightness to appear black. This value is now clamped to so the resulting brightness is no longer black.
  

[h2]Hotfixes[/h2]

• v5834 - Outlines on alpha clip materials should look normal again.
  
• v5835 - Removed an obsolete delay method call that could potentially cause an error.
  
  
• v5836 - Fixed issue where old shop files would have an out of bounds shop level.
  
• v5836 - Fixed issue where old shop files would throw errors when they would not have obtained certain items.
  
• v5837 - Specialization weights would not be cleared correctly if the player opened the shop without placing anything on a display.
  
• v5838 - Fixed edge case when no specialization exists, no items are in inventory and no items are on displays.
  
• Community - v5840 - Canceling the placement of outside furniture while this furniture was outside of the shop bounds would break the game.
  

Update: v5830
Hotfix: v5840

Greetings Shopkeepers! Today we bring you a somewhat smaller patch than last time, but one that's very much needed on our side. We finally updated our engine, which doesn't only give us shiny new toys to play with, it also allowed us to do some performance optimizations.

• Upgraded Unity to 2020.2.1f1.
  
• Traders now bring goods based on your specialization.
  

[h2]Changes[/h2]

• Community Request - Furniture - Counter appeal is now variable and based on the unlocked sets and max appeal upgrades.
  
• Community Request - UI - Crafting material quality preference should now be stored and used when possible when playing in the same session.
  
• Furniture - All counters are the same price.
  
• Trader - Changed the trader to have items based on your specializations, instead of what items you have unlocked.
  
• Trader - Specialized Traders can now make an appearance offering primarily goods and crafting resources fitting their specialization.
  
• Trader - Improved the amount per quality item offered by traders a little.
  
• Commission - Crop commissions now have qualities attached to them.
  
• Assets - Refactored the outline system due to shader changes.
  

[h2]Performance[/h2]

• Performance - Merged several (custom multipass) shaders into a single shader.
  
• Performance - Added shader keywords to generate lightweight variants.
  
• Customers - Added a pooling system for all agents, this should reduce some of the performance spikes we're seeing.
  
• Performance - Increased the memory usage of resource loading, should speed up the loading of assets slightly.
  
• Analytics - Disabled analytics until we figure out a way to optimize the serialization.
  
• Performance - Caching some calculations so that they don't have to be ran twice when opening the shop.
  
• Performance - Converted a Linq statement to normal C# a few times.
  
• Performance - Disabled prompts refreshing on every disabled interactable when the shop opens, and instead do it only once at the end.
  
• Performance - Moved the caching of the MilestoneObjective list to the loading of the game, instead of the first time opening of the store.
  
• Performance - Cached the IsDisplay method since that isn't dynamic anyway.
  
• Performance - Minor GC alloc fix.
  
• Performance - Added a check so that the awareness isn't updated for every decoration on shop open/close.
  
• Performance - Spread out some of the calculations on shop close over a few frames to reduce the stuttering.
  

[h2]Fixes[/h2]

• Commissions - Removed crafting resource commissions from appearing.
  
• UI - Traders should no longer appear to have an empty inventory.
  
• UI - Pressing tab while hovering an item in the commerce menu would favorite the item and show a spriteless graphic.
  
• UI - Hovering over a locked crafting target would show a tooltip.
  
• UI - The seed/material crafting menu did not always show the correct number of items compared to the inventory.
  
• UI - Closing the farming menu while hovering to destroy a crop should no longer show the destroy graphic when reopening the menu.
  
• Creative - Fixed issue where the maximum shop tier would go higher than 5.
  
• Other - Removed instances where an item was added by ID or reference because it could lead to some items no longer being unique.
  

[h2]Hotfixes[/h2]

• v5753 - UI - Hovering over a planted seed in the farmnig menu would not show accurate chances.
  
• v5753 - Fix - Turned VSync back on
  

Update: v5748
Hotfix: v5753

Greetings Shopkeepers! Today is the day we have been working towards for quite some time now (the original task was made in January 2020!), but we are finally here.




This week we are releasing the updated Crafting Menu, which includes some changes to the materials system. You can now buy, sell and farm quality materials!

[h3]Crafting Menu[/h3]

The crafting menu has been reworked to allow for quality crafting resources to be used. Using higher quality resources will increase the chance for a better outcome. Crafting progression has also been updated and you can now gain skill in a crafting category as well as skill in crafting a specific item.

[h3]Quality Trader Items[/h3]

Quality items, resources, and seeds can now be obtained from the trader.

[h3]Farming Menu[/h3]

Farming now has a menu where It is also possible to use quality seeds to improve the chance for a better harvest. As with crafting, you can now gain skill as a farmer and gain skill cultivating specific crops.


A harvesting animation has been added to better reflect what has been harvested.

• The crafting outcome is influenced by the quality of materials you use.
  
• Crafting now has an item skill and a category skill.
  
• Quality seeds (bought from traders) can now give quality crops.
  
• You can now craft multiple items in a row.
  

[h2]New[/h2]

• Crafting - New crafting menu.
  
• Farming - New farming menu.
  
• Farming - Seeds & crops can now have qualities associated with them.
  
• Items - Crafting resources can now have qualities associated with them.
  
• Items - Trader will now offer quality items.
  
• Progression - Category skill level has been added.
  
• Progression - Item skill level has been modified.
  
• Audio - Updated and added audio for crafting.
  

[h2]Changes[/h2]

• Crafting - Time is slowed while in the crafting or farming menu.
  
• Farming - It is now possible to remove a growing crop.
  
• Balance - Community request: War event now also increases demand and price for Healing Potions.
  

[h2]Fixes[/h2]

• Other - Alchemy Station was missing description.
  
• Other - Planters other than the starting planter were missing descriptions.
  
• Translations - Fixed some typos and weird wording in the Dutch translation.
  

[h2]Hotfixes[/h2]

• Fix - v5663 - Crafting Station experience was not converted correctly.
  
• Fix - v5667 - Temporary workaround for rare issue where the trader has no items.
  
• Fix - v5668 - The item options dropdown in the furniture catalog menu was not using the correct sprite.
  
• Fix - v5669 - Closing the restock menu, crafting menu, or crafting side menu would leave items pulsing in the inventory overlay.
  
• Fix - v5670 - Hovering over crafting and farming items in the menu will now pulse the corresponding items in the inventory overlay.
  
  
• Fix - v5672 - Picking any item using a controller would deselect the farming or crafting menu.
  
• Fix - v5672 - Removing a seed using a controller would close the farming menu.
  
• Fix - v5672 - Removing a planted crop would not remove the plant model.
  
• Fix - v5672 - Selecting seed or crop would not always correctly update the chances.
  
• Fix - v5672 - Selelecting seed or crop would not always correctly update the item skill.
  
• Fix - v5672 - Selecting crafting materials, seed or crop would not always pulsate the correct inventory item.
  
• Fix - v5672 - Closing the farming or crafting menu would not correctly clear events on the farm or craft action buttons.
  
• Fix - v5672 - Picking a seed could cause an error if the first planting slot is empty.
  
• Fix - v5673 - Opening the seed side menu in the farming menu would sometimes incorrectly show that there are no more seeds available.
  
• Fix - v5674 - Opening the seed select menu would subtract seeds of any quality resulting in an incorrect count of remaining seeds.
  

Update: v5656
Hotfix: v5674

Greetings Shopkeepers! We're still working hard on the next major update, but in the meantime we wanted to get a couple of bug fixes out there.

We'd also like to use this opportunity to wish you all the happy holidays in these trying times. We'll be taking 2 weeks off as well, so expect a slower response time (getting in touch with us through our Discord is the best way to get a response). Stay safe and happy gaming!



[h2]Fixes[/h2]

• UI - Hovering the mouse below the close button of the catalog menu while placing furniture would repeatedly hide and show the menu.
  
• UI - Furniture catalogue UI hover would incorrectly show the storage tooltip for some decorations
  
• UI - Furniture description would be deactivated under certain conditions, and not show up again until the UI was re-opened.
  
• Art - Fixed the botanical illustration poster Z-fighting issue.
  
• Objectives - Netvalue objective visuals now update correctly.
  
• Translations - The English file would not be correctly used as a backup for missing translations.
  
• Other - You can exit the game again. For real-real this time.
  
  

[h2]Changes[/h2]

• Other - While the shop is open, the Mirror cannot be used any more.
  

Update: v5599

Greetings Shopkeepers! Over the past few weeks you have given feedback on a couple of pesky issues or small improvements. Because the next update needs a lot more time it seemed like a good idea to release a smaller update to alleviate some of these issues.



[h2]Fixes[/h2]

• Audio - Lowered the 'hmm' sound volume to be a little less annoying.
  
• UI - Deleting a shop in the main menu would try to update the game prompts and cause an error.
  
• UI - The restock UI should now select the first empty display slot when opening the menu if this is possible.
  
• UI - Added sort by quality to the restock UI.
  
• UI - Added sort by value to the restock UI.
  
• UI - The main menu scenario selector is now using the correct updated menu item selector.
  
• UI - Applied the item selector used in the restock menu to the catalog menu for visual consistency.
  
• UI - Opening the restock menu should now correctly select the first empty item slot.
  
• UI - The restock menu should no longer show the scroll bar when there are three rows of items.
  
• Other - The red invalid pulse on displays would not work when the white restockable glow was playing.
  
• Other - Spamming the mirror would create multiple instances of the character creator.
  
• Other - The first frame a new character type became visible in the character creator would show a t-pose.
  
• Other - Increased the size of the NPC bounding boxes to trigger animations before an NPC's shadow becomes visible.
  
• Objectives - Silk now unlocks when the dress does so that it can be crafted properly.
  
• Objectives - Craft Amulet objective should now update properly.
  

Update: v5568
Hotfix: v5570