August 2020 - Week 48 - Release 0.14

Summary

• Building workshops
• Too much excitement
• Workshop UI
• Release 0.14

Detail

I woke on Thursday morning with a fairly clear idea of how workshops will be built in the game and how the placement tool will work. Finding good, clear mechanics in what at first appears to be a difficult task is a hugely rewarding part of development. By 4pm I had figured out how placement and rotation will work.

Then I got working on having the Dwergs build the workshop. Workshops are made up of a number of buildings so I was able to re-use existing building-construction behaviour and then link each building to the workshop as it was completed. I was excited to be making good progress and pressed on with having Dwergs craft some items in the workshop. Unfortunately, as is so often the case when I get excited, I was working into the night, getting tired, losing discipline and not writing tests.

On Friday morning I took a step back and decided to put crafting items on hold while I wrote tests around placement and construction. This was a smart thing to do as it uncovered a number of bugs.

On Sunday, instead of continuing with crafting items, I started on the workshop UI because I felt that this would influence how crafting jobs are created. The workshop UI works much like the stockpile UI so I made good progress with this and by the end of Monday I had all the parts working; a list of items that can be added to the work-queue and the option to choose the material the items are made from.

On Tuesday I took a break to help out a friend harvesting some real-world hay. Good thing too as there was a big storm on Tuesday night.

For the next week I'll be finishing the crafting of items in workshops and looking at the first level of monsters encountered underground.

Release Notes for version 0.14.0

Release 0.14 is now available for $3 patrons on itch.io. 

Known Issues:

• Building a workshop will cause a crash in networked games

Features:

• Music: Winter night-time
• Music: Updated spring-day track
• Ambience: Autumn dawn-chorus and rain
• The merchant's broken cart
• Choose building materials for walls, doors, floors and stairs
• Short tutorial on hunger and farming
• Ploughing fields, sowing seeds and harvesting crops
• Death from starvation, dehydration, sleep-deprivation and lack of social contact
• Tool and crop information in UI
• Dwergs sleep more at night than during the day
• Preview worlds in the New World screen
• Log the seeds of the 100 most recently generated worlds
• Menu button
• Added Flint nodules near river
• First workshop (work-in-progress)

Bug-fixes:

• Prevent first-time users from skipping the tutorial
• Re-organise deployment into a launcher and a folder for the game
• Stockpile fixes: Un-stockpiling items when stockpile parameters change
• Clamped the minimum light for depth - the world doesn't look so dark now
• Occasional tutorial failure due to the merchant being inaccessible
• Blueberry bushes take longer to grow and ripen
• Stair tool connects existing stairs and stairs jobs above and below
• Prevent moving hostile units on top of each other
• Reduced audible repetitiveness in conversations
• Prevent moving to a new world while a story is in progress
• Occasionally repeatedly falling in and out of sleep
• Smoother follow-camera
• Improved visual difference for ramps