Version 0.03 is finally out and ready for playtesting!
We are currently preparing for the demo release, and getting honest feedback to improve the game before the demo is very important to us!
In the previous update I went through some of the changes that we added in the new version. But it's not all of them! So I wanted to cover a few more in this post. But if you want to discover them for yourself, sign-up for the playtest from the Steam page or by joining our discord:
One of the things we worked on since the last playtest is on improving the overall quality of the graphics and rendering. Here's a comparison before/after of two battle scenes to show the difference.
BEFORE
AFTER
There are many new items and objects that you can craft, here are some of them.
Winter hat is very useful to survive winter. The holy water can be obtained from the human priest, and boost your strength against undead. The Spirit Stone allows you to increase your stats. The Ethereal Saber is very good against ghosts. The water bomb can extinguish fire easily. And the tame potion can make it easier to tame animals.
You can now build flooring to decorate the terrain!
There are new decors that can be built. A new plant (Hosta) and now fern have growth levels and seeds like other plants.
Sleeping in a bed speeds up the time, it can be useful if you want to get over the night quickly. Just watch out for your hunger!
Villagers now have an anger meter! It goes up when they are hungry, cold, or are not getting the items that they want. Changing the role of a villager will also increase their anger. Anger will reduce the mood but will also increase the risk of strikes and revolts!
A single angry villager will go on strike and stop performing tasks. When more than half the town is angry, there is a risk of revolt against the leader! Beware.
Favor is a new mechanic that can be gained with each individual town. Favor is earned every day based on the town mood and the town relation level. It lets you take items for free from the community box!
Adding items to the box will also increase your favor.
As a popular request during the last playtest, it is now possible to pin multiple quests! Similarly, the map can also have multiple pins. The map pins can even be assigned a title and icon.
Randomized events, and some other important information such as a wounded villager, are now displayed on the side of the screen to help you understand what is happening.
In the previous version, it was quite challenging for new players to figure out how to learn a recipe and how to craft it. It was especially challenging for wanted items.
For this reason, when you right click on an item, you can now see how can you learn the recipe, and how you can craft it. This is actually very useful, I found that I use it myself when I forget what I've assigned an item to in the game.
So now, if a villager is requesting a Scope, all you have to do is find a scout in a friendly town, and then build a workshop. Which is much more straightforward than trying to ask every single villager that you meet in hope of getting the recipe.
Humans can now be encountered in the underground! They are also looking for ore! The most frequent enemies in the mining camps are human miners and human engineers. Miners use their pickaxe, which can't be blocked by shield (or your shield risk breaking), and engineers will throw bombs at you.
There are now puzzle rooms scattered in the underground. They will normally reward you with some kind of treasure!
We significantly improved controller support. It can now be used to move the character and for some of the most frequent UI such as inventory and crafting. BUT, controllers are still not fully supported, there are still some UI screen like the Town screen, rebel screen, or settings that cannot be controlled with a controller. For this reason it is still recommended to play with keyboard and mouse, or at least have access to a mouse nearby if you play with controller.
Check the other changes in this update.
If you're interested in the beta test, join the Discord and signup to the playtest!