Hey everyone, I just wanted to pop in with a little status report before I’m off on a family vacation for a bit over a week.
As I’ve mentioned before, the first main update to Iron Village is to give it a “soft ending”, tying up the (light) story of why you are building this village and signaling to players that there’s no more “content” beyond this point. For Iron Village, this takes the form of a City Establishment Ceremony. Monarch Faearn shows up in their Royal Train, conducts a ceremony, attends a feast, and then officially designates your town as a City. All of the preparation, as well as the train and the monarch themselves, have been implemented, the remaining work consists of having the ceremony actually occur, and figuring out what to do with the Monarch afterwards.
The Royal Ceremony isn’t the only thing in the 1.1 update though, there’s a few feature requests that made it in, as well as some features that didn’t quite make it into 1.0:
- Buildings can now be freely moved: no more demolishing and rebuilding.
- Production can now be paused: open a building’s info panel, and click pause (or resume) production.
- Autopurchase: automatically buy resources from trains as they come by. This can be really helpful to combat food and water shortages.
- Screenshot Mode: Hide all of the UI (apart from the little screenshot mode button) in order to take screenshots with just the pixel art.
- Added rotated versions of farms & big houses. They are different buildings, you can’t actually rotate one into another, but that should give you more flexibility in building your towns.
- When a building tries to store the resources at the end of a production cycle, it will wait until it can store something, but then discard the rest and move on. This should help with the Deep Mine, where before it would stop producing anything if even one storage was full – usually this made it really difficult to actually get gems.
No promises on what else will make it into 1.1, but the bigger features that are planned include:
- Allow demolition even when there is insufficient storage for the resulting resources – as long as the game warns you first.
- Make necessary changes to the UI to ensure the Android version works well before release (which may be pushed to May).
- Zoom In and Out: Actually zoom in or out in the game, without also changing the UI scale.
- Villager working animations: the way clothes are implemented might make this annoying to implement, but I have some animations for the villagers to actually mine, and I can probably pull something together for farming.
Also coming up in the beginning of May is the Boston GodotCon and PAX East – I’ll be at both! Just as an attendee though, I’m not shelling out for a PAX table, haha.