Okay so lets start off with something I've said before: delays. A while ago I said I'd be taking a short hiatus. Unfortunately that's not possible for me since this game wouldn't even get worked on if I left it. So, I'm trying my best to work on it from time to time, getting a few things added here and there, making little tweaks. Therefore, 0.3.0 will be delayed. 0.3.0 will also be a bit different the next time you see it but we'll save that for later.
Alright so a few of the things I've done are balance related. Animals' damage is now based off their type (e.g. a bear hits harder than a chicken) and like before their health.
Earthquakes have been reduced to a 1 in 1000 chance (down from 1 in a million) because frankly, content restrictions are plain silly. Also, the Merchant spawn rate has been bumped down (a lot) and diseases have been bumped up again.
I've added another "dimension" as it were, houses (which I've mentioned before). There houses are mainly to shelter you from the night but we do have zombie invasion plans (so that they break in and murder you while you hide ;]).
The game is a lot more optimised now: worlds render and generate faster and use up a lot less memory as does the game in general. Currently I'm working on fixing a leak coming from the text rendering system that takes your FPS down by about 10.
A big thing for me to finish for 0.3.0 is world generation. Currently, I'm working on my biome system and now I've finally got round to reducing the chance of things spawning in awkward places (not quite there yet, but I have yet another idea) and having empty land. In the screenshot below you'll see that most of the world is covered up by things:
And finally here's a changelog of all the changes from this week:
# FIXES
- Fixed tree collision.
- World loading should now be much faster.
# CHANGES
- Faster intro sequence.
- Balanced out the animal's damage (and based it off what type of animal they are).
- NPC AI tweaks.
# ADDITIONS
- GUI scaling for the world info.
- Language support for the new strings.
- Added hit and impact sounds.
P.S. I think I did mention that we're on Twitter (https://twitter.com/SleepyStudios) now, I'll be posting links to news there so it's a pretty damn good way to keep up to date. Also people who would like to 'beta test' new releases (not public ones) can still PM me.
Is it just me or does this community seriously lack posting comments for game updates? Updates like this are seriously worth commenting on. I can honestly say that I really enjoy when people complement AND critique my games. What are your thoughts when you make huge updates and no one comments on them?
Well of course it kinda feels disappointing but its alright because those silent people are probably still trying out the game (hopefully) and are just reading these updates so thats good enough for me.
And really, it is a community for game developers, most of the people here are game developers so don't really want to play other people's games, which is a shame of course but I can understand that.
That makes a lot of sense. As a developer, I'm also guilty of not trying out very many games (or free demos) and all that jazz. That being said, I hope to increase my feed back in general. Hope things are going well with your game, have a good one.
I play waaaay too many games xD. I haven't worked on Crawle since the day this was posted. And I used to think I was the lazy one on the team.