We are still hard at work on our next game and have a new devlog highlighting some of the biggest additions and changes we have included!
Added A Seasons System
A fairly large visual change we have made is the introduction of seasons to Somerholm. With the turn of different seasons, vegetation, weather, animals, and overall color-tone will change. The "default" look the game had before this addition is marked as Summer. Spring will feature a more blue overall tone, flowers, guaranteed berries in bushes, and less overall wind. Autumn will have slightly less of a grass-line near the water, more of a grey overall tone, orange-brown grass and trees, less smaller vegetation and some dead trees. Winter has the largest amount of changes, with even less of a grass-line neat water, a more grey overall tone, brown grass, more dead trees, the least amount of vegetation, and the least amount of animals. Hopefully all of these changes will help to add even more visual variety to islands.
Added A Fishing Mini-Game
A pretty notable addition we added with this update is the ability to fish where-ever water is deep enough. Fishing at the moment is fairly simple and akin to something like Minecraft's fishing system. There is a limited amount of bait per island and the odds of fish catching the hook will change with the weather and seasons. Fishing has never been a large planned component of the game, but we do like having support for it, so we may add more complexity to the system in the future, but no promises.
Added Full Controller Support
Getting ready for release, there are a few features we needed to start adding, controller support was one of them and now it's fully implemented! Menu controls will work in a similar fashion to our last game, "accelerating hotkeys" in that a virtual mouse is moved around by the controller joysticks. In addition to support for controllers we also added some controller specific options: light-bar enabled (for controllers that support it), rumble enabled, and virtual mouse speed.
The Start Of The Story
With the last update we started adding story support, while not finished we have added the start of the story and have implemented support for the rest of it. We can't share a whole lot in this section right now, but we still wanted to make a note of it while we continue to add everything in the game.
Miscellaneous
A few additional things to note for this update, not including any misc. changes we have made along the way. In the last update we added the ability to kick physics based objects to make the world a little more interactive, and with this update we added the ability to shake trees and cause pine-cones and twigs to fall from them. To also help with performance logging we added a more in-depth frame-rate UI option to track frame-rate lows, frame-rate highs, and rendering milliseconds.
We appreciate the support, hope everyone is having a good holiday season, and are looking forward to sharing more in the future!
