Hi all,
with 2 weeks left this year it's time to make another one of these posts. It's already over 2.5 years since I started this project and some of you are with me from the beginning. I'm thankful for that trust and even more for the support via Patreon for that. As someone recently wrote on Steam, it must have looked like another of these "ima maek gaem" posts back then but here we are.
So with the end of the year it's time to recap where we are and what the immediate plans for the next months are.
This started out as a rewrite of Gnomoria but not to the letter but with changes or improvements where it makes sense. Also take stuff from other mainstays of the genre where it makes sense. So I guess it's fair to take Gnomoria as a benchmark for the base feature set. Considering Gnomoria was in development at least twice the time of what I spent so far I'm pretty happy with what we got now.
**On the technical side:**
I guess I can say that Ingnomia is able to run larger maps with higher amounts of gnomes. I've seen colonies with 130 gnomes and tens of thousands of animals after a chickensplosion. That would slowed Gnomoria to a crawl. I noticed some slow downs with 50k and more items and lots of stockpiles, that's something i definitely need to keep an eye on. But overall I'm happy with performance.
On the UI side things look mixed. I got some improvements in, especially the dwarf therapist like profession window, previews in most building dialogs and some other stuff. However I must say I'm not too happy anymore with Qt as the window framework anymore. It's sub optimal for scaling and the full screen mode doesn't work properly. The problem is that replacing it will be a task of many months.
The addition of behavior trees added the ability to give animals, gnomes and monster different AI without having to hardcode it. That's something I definitely look forward to once modding picks up.
Modability is in and it should be easy to change styles, add stuff or change behaviors.
**On the content side:**
Here things look pretty good. Thanks to the work of u/lordhugh and u/pigtailsocks we already surpass Gnomoria a bit. Personally I really like the multi tile trees, they look so much better than the original one tile trees. We have a large number of plants where Gnomoria had just wheat, grapes, strawberries and cotton. We just need to find a use for them now. We have flowers for those who want to decorate more, more types of fences. There are many more animal types both for farming and in the wild. A few more workshops like fishery, windmill or even a waste cremation place.
In addition to the usual engineering stuff we have things to manage fluids like pumps and pipes. So constructing moats or watering soil is much easier than in Gnomoria.
There is now a mission system that allows you to send Gnomes outside of the map to interact with your friendly and not so friendly neighbors.
So I can say most of the base systems are in but many of them still need some finishing touches and balancing. Combat is the red headed step child and still needs the most work of it all.
**What's next**
For the next few week I don't plan anything big. Just bug fixes, balancing and adding small things here and there. I still have a big backlog of sprites from u/lordhugh Somehow he cranks them out faster than me adding stuff.
For next year the big things are sound and combat. Getting combat to a state where it's fun in a way that the enemies are clever and the player has the feeling that their actions and preparations matter.
Sound is an often asked for feature I probably can't ignore much longer.
So for Christmas presents I want you to send me bug reports with meaningful descriptions so I can remove all remaining quirks. If you are able create a reproduceable crash with good instructions how to trigger it you may get a gnome, goblin or slime named after you and a free ticket to Ingnomicon 2025.
Happy Holidays