Here are some statistics from the analytics backend.
If you haven't checked the privacy page: The game does collect a few analytics data, such as which buildings you construct, which levels you play, etc. - this is necessary for some of the achievements, and it also helps me to understand how the game is played. The data collected not for achievements is anonymous, so all I get is numbers.
Here are some of these numbers:
Here are the levels played during the past few days. Clearly, Schramberg ist the favorite level to play, and in general easy levels are more popular than normal or hard. The large number of Tutorials being played (this number is large because they are 4 short levels and add up here) shows that a large number of new people are trying the game, which is probably why easy levels (where most people start a new game) are so popular.
Here are the most popular buildings:
I expected palisades to dominate, from the videos I've been watching. For some reason, plank walls are not as popular. I blame this in part on the bad icon I'm using, but I simply don't have a better one.
I'm surprised that lamp posts are so popular. Apparently some people like to light up their village. Nice. :-)
What surprised me was that not one of the support buildings (workshops, etc.) even made it on the list. They are somewhere in "others", I'm sure, which all together is still a seizable number. Sadly, the backend doesn't give me a breakdown of that. I'd much like to see that.
I'm also surprised that rabbits are the most popular animal pens. My money would have been on chickens.
All in all, I find these things interesting. Anything that lets me understand a bit how you all are playing the game helps me to make it better. The very best feedback are gameplay videos. I make a point of watching each and every one that I can find. If you want to make sure I find it, post it on YouTube or Twitch and make sure to put "Black Forest" into the title, maybe also "Steam" or "Indie Game" or something.
Beta Update
Change: Well and watchtower now also use the "assign/remove" game mechanics, instead of the man-for-one-day mechanic
Fixed: Monsters spawning on top of each other bug
Fixed: A bug that caused peasants to abandon tasks seemingly at random
Fixed: Visual bug of insane speed of the active button indicators in the context menu
Balance: Workshops (carpenter, mason) now add much more to gathering (+20% per worker plus a flat 10%)
Balance: Villagers will occasionally return with twice the usual amount from the forest (lucky find)
Balance: Damage caused by freezing now depends on the actual temperature
force-despawning monsters on daybreak
fixed several exceptions and small bugs
preparing sandbox and doomed mode
reworked cabbage field for more realistic harvest and damage displays
Testing Sandbox Mode
The latest update on the beta/testing branch includes an experimental sandbox mode, which has been requested many times.
Features:
no monster attacks at night
can play an entire year (365 days) - visual season changes may or may not work
achievements, stats and leaderboards are disabled
new peasants will settle in empty houses (though it may take a few days - basically, 50% chance per empty home every morning that a new family settles in)
Known Bugs:
loading a sandbox map is broken (no buildings are loaded)
Bringing Back the New Year Update
After lots of bugfixing and testing, here is the 2nd attempt to bring this huge update to everyone.
This update was tested on the beta branch, though as always some bugs may have slipped through. Please do report any issues you find.
Most Important Changes
New building: Smelter - a cheaper alternative to the smithy to get metal (but produces no tools and is more dangerous to operate)
New monster: Hydra - a terrifying late-game enemy that can tear right through a village if not stopped by massive defenses
Added monster flags to the maps that were still missing them
Watchtowers and well now have "unmanned" icons
Threat level and reachable scores increased on all maps
Balance: The well does not require metal anymore to be built
added a small compass (optional, default disabled, enabled it in the options menu)
Smithy now also grants a small bonus to metal gathering, depending on the number of smiths assigned
Added a "task is active" indicator to the context menu
Hide UI function added so you can take more beautiful screenshots
Houses are now vacated if all family members die
Other Changes
Fixed: Lunchtime was more of a full-out harvest festival using 5x the food it should. That's back to normal now.
Balance: Slightly increased the range at which fire spooks monsters
Refactoring the internal event system code to bring more stability (i.e. unrelated things shouldn't fail if something somewhere fails)
Refactored monster spawning elements, for more stability and fewer bugs
Refactored monster info display and monster controls, again for easier bugfixing and fewer bugs
Refactored internal handling of various small components (status icons status, etc.)
Fixed lights on a couple of the houses that didn't work properly
Fixed Burning Pile and construction interplay in the rare case that construction isn't finished at nightfall
Fixed a few peasant log entry texts
Fixed another save/load game issue that caused the village population to double
Added a few visual effects (construction of walls, etc.)
Spiced up the main menu UI
Spiced up the level start
Peasants now reset at midnight, just in case (hanging issues, etc.)
Wetness of fields is now properly averaged over the past 24 hours instead of my previous more naive calculation. The new one is also smarter and faster.
Reworked the way different types of fields react to wetness
Reworked wood use for heating in cold weather and properly calculate the temperature dependency of that
Fixed manual link for animal pens
Fixed unmanned display icon for market
Lots of small visual improvements
Fixed the construction sounds on various buildings
Improved notifications for gather (and other) tasks
You can now much more easily assign all (maximum) workers to a task
Repair work now correctly updates the storage display
Scroll view on game log finally fixed
Slightly improved texts for log and notifications
Big improvement to the night and dawn/dusk issue - should be a lot better now
Fixed: Prices on the market should no longer go into negative values.
Fixed peasant info display for dead peasants (not that they care anymore...)
A lot of beautification was also added, and streamlining of gameplay.
Fixed: Werewolves should no longer glitch through walls when attacking
Balance: Food production of cabbage fields slightly reduced
Fixed: No longer possible to assign more than the maximum number of workers to certain workshop buildings
Some more code cleanup work
Fixed: Gamelog was broken on some maps, should be fixed now
Well now notifies explicitly if all fields are watered
Tooltips added to options buttons
score display on saved games is now correct again
Fixed a crashbug related to pausing
Fixed several save/load issues - ATTENTION, this will break your previous savegames and silently delete the incompatible ones
Made keyboard shortcuts and controls configurable
Changed the "ghost" (building placement) shaders to avoid issues with them going black sometimes (the new shader is also more performant, but performance isn't an issue here)
Increased range of lamps
Changed the way the camera works to rotate-in-place instead of rotate-around. This should make the camera work much better, especially around the map edges
Made mouse zoom, move and rotate speeds independently configurable
Cleaning out a number of unused assets
Buildings no longer open the context menu as soon as you start constructing them
Fixed an exception in the tutorial
Fixed a possible issue with the main menu
Should no longer build a building when you're actually trying to click on the X to exit build mode (or any other UI element)
Replaced the level loading system, uncluttering the level and object hierarchy, which might also resolve some input bugs.
Fixed a small typo in well construction
added visible version display to main menu
fixed an error in setting the camera speeds
added code to reset camera speeds to default values if they are out of bounds (e.g. due to old settings which were on a different scale)
fixed a small bug in the tutorial
fixed a few small text and code bugs of minor consequence
small improvement/fixes to saving and loading
several small code fixes
added user reporting feature
fixed starting camera location on several maps
cleaned up some terrain textures
continue clean-up of terrain textures
improved carrot and cabbage shader
improved fields ground shafer
fixed a small startup bug
fixed a small layout bug
some UI performance improvements
moving over to Rewired to handle input, dropping Unity's "new input system" trainwreck
added key controls to rotate/move the view with the mouse (left ctrl and left alt respectively)
you can now hover over peasants to see their name, and click on them to get their personal diary
several small bugfixes
monsters now leave more tracks on more maps
fixed a few animation and texture problems
Testing Update
With the latest updated I've uploaded to the testing/beta branch, I believe we are close to having a working game again. Remapping of keys is still incomplete, but aside from that everything should be working again.
Please test and report so that I can bring it to the default branch.
Beta Update
This is the first update with the new Rewired input system and a bunch of things I improved on the way.
Input remapping is still incomplete in many ways. The whole build is for testing purposes. Please let me know if it works or doesn't (both is valuable information for me).
continue clean-up of terrain textures
improved carrot and cabbage shader
improved fields ground shafer
fixed a small startup bug
fixed a small layout bug
changed scale of speed sliders a bit
made the testing build a development build so I get better bug reports
some UI performance improvements
moving over to Rewired to handle input, dropping Unity's "new input system" trainwreck
added key controls to rotate/move the view with the mouse (left ctrl and left alt respectively)
Small Bugfixes and Updates
continue clean-up of terrain textures
improved carrot and cabbage shader
improved fields ground shafer
fixed a small startup bug
fixed a small layout bug
changed scale of speed sliders a bit
made the testing build a development build so I get better bug reports
fucking around with the input system once more...
Testing Branch Opened
I've opened a testing branch that will get future updates first.
If you want to always have the latest update, and don't mind if there's a few bugs or it breaks a bit, then right click on "Black Forest" in your Steam library list, go to "Options" and "Betas" and switch to the "testing" branch.
I will post new features and bigger updates there first, hoping that any issues that slipped through my testing will be caught by you, while the default/stable branch stays a bit behind but won't break.
As a small goodie, the version uploaded there now is the latest version with all the recent updates and a new one, an in-game compass (off by default, switch it on in the options menu).
I have applied the last input issue fixes to this, hoping that this eliminates the input issues. So if you were having problems with that (main menu not working, etc.) please go and try out testing.
Thank you all for your support and kind words. It's been a rough two weeks with these game-breaking updates and bugs. I hope it'll be more smooth from here on, because I still have a lot of plans...
REVERTING BACK
Due to all the issues the game currently has, I have reverted everything back to the December 18 build.
That was the last build before the large code refactoring I added. Yes, old bugs are back. Yes, new features are gone. But so should the recent large input issues that prevent some from playing at all.
Please bear with me. Come to the forum to find out how you can help, ESPECIALLY if you experienced game breaking bugs.
another hotfix
fixed a small bug in the tutorial
fixed a few small text and code bugs of minor consequence
another attempt to solve the main menu input issue - now enabling TWO input modules, maybe one of them will work. :-(
