July News Update

July 31, 2023

Hello all, it is, of course, time for an update on the progress of the game. I’m staring at my clock and realizing we are already like 2/3rds of the way through the year which is wild to me. I’m also realizing that I probably need to start writing down what I do as I do it so I have a better list to go from for these updates.

As for what happened this month, a lot I’d say. Scanning the previous update, it looks like I had just started trees the last time. You could chop them down and collect the wood. Apparently, I qualified that as “half the battle” which future me can now attest was incorrect. As with farming as it turns out trees are like one of the most complex things on the map. This is by virtue of them growing for the most part. Turns out things that are alive and change have a lot more to handle.

So, at this point trees are done, or at least I can’t think of anything I missed. I’ll be doing a comprehensive comparison between this and the old version before it goes live just to make sure I didn’t miss something. At this point you can plant trees, chop them down, they grow correctly, record themselves between rooms, change with the seasons, you can uproot the stumps, the ones in the wild grow back, fruit trees will bear fruit, you can shake trees to gather the fruit, and lastly you can tap trees to get sap and resin. As you can probably tell from that list being able to chop down trees was in fact, not half the battle.

One change before moving off trees, tree taps. In the current version they are one time use. In this version they have been altered so that you stick them in a tree and they give the resources accordingly after a set number of days. The only reason this wasn’t the case originally was because of how z ordering worked in the old engine. In short, it didn’t really allow for this, at least not without ripping out a ton of other stuff.

Other minor change, you now get resin and sap. You can also tap any non-fruit tree in any season besides winter, assuming its on your farm. This is basically less restrictive. While I won’t divulge a ton right now maple sap is still used to make syrup. Resin is the change, and is a refining product used in a few other systems that I’ll get to eventually.

Alright so, now that I’ve droned on about trees, what else? Tools can now be charged up. For those unaware tools like the watering can and hoe have upgraded versions that you can use to water/till multiple tiles at once. This is all working. Precision aim has been added again. That’s the system that lets you put your mouse close to your character and aim at the tile you want.

A room transition system that isn’t just me pressing an admin command to move rooms is done. Last, mining is in. Note that doesn’t mean that the mines exist. That’s going to be a doozy. But the player character can mine nodes of rock in the world and collect appropriate resources. These nodes in the overworld also spawn and respawn appropriately each day and all that good stuff. Aside from that there were a variety of bug fixes applied to previous systems. For instance you could water a hole and turn it into a tilled tile. So lots of little stuff like that was fixed.

As for what was done this month that about covers it, I think. Like I said I need to start writing down what I do. All the base tools in the game work at this point which was the goal from a while back. Next on my list is fishing just to knock that out. There are a few complications with that, but I don’t expect it to be too much as its basically just a drop table and a minigame. After that I’m currently looking at getting a shop system back in.

The only other thing I wanted to mention was something I’ve been rolling around in my mind for a bit. That thing is fermenting, or I guess basically brewing. I don’t expect there to be too many drastic changes to the games systems. There are some rough edges I’d like to smooth out but most things are planned to remain relatively the same. I’ve been giving some thought to fermenting however and I think it will be very different. For those unaware the current system allows you to make custom drinks. You do this by adding whatever you want into the brew and matching complimenting flavors. What you add determines the buffs the brew gives when you drink it as well as the selling price. These buffs are enhanced based on the strength of the flavor composition.

It’s a system that I like in some respects however I think its far too complex and it steps on the toes of other systems. The buffs tend to step on cooking and alchemy and the volatile selling price can honestly step on just about every other product. The concept of custom-made items in a game like this is also something of a nightmare.

I’ve been kicking around a few ideas because I’d like to retain some level of freedom that the system gives to allow you to make different brews. I think the current version gives a bit too much however and that complexity is self-defeating. I won’t go into tons of detail here but I’ve been debating things revolving around having a setup that’s more than just a fermentation barrel. Instead, you’d build more of a setup of multiple stations, or upgrades to one station that allow for more customization. What you can create would ultimately be based on what type of brewing setup you have and what ingredients you chose to add which would be a bit more restricted or specific to certain recipes or brewing station parts.

The hope is that all this would still allow for some expression on the player end, but with a bit more guidance to help people actually use the system without getting lost. It’s still pretty early days for it all in general but like I said this was just something I was kicking around this month. I like to mention these things incase there is some large unknown consensus of people who secretly love brewing the way it is.

That should be it for now. There will be more to come next month of course. Thank you all for taking the time to read, and give feedback and all that. As always it is very appreciated.

June News Update

June 30, 2023

Hello all, time for another update on Verdant Village’s development, or rather re-development at this point. Things are moving along smoothly I think. Similar to last month there is definitely still something of a learning curve with the engine. All in all however I think I’m moving faster than I was. Which is pretty much all I can ask for.

So, what actually happened this month? Well, let me tell you something. I just looked at the last dev log to see what I’d accomplished last month as it all runs together for me. The last thing I mentioned was and I quote “At the moment, you can really only till ground but everything else should follow quickly.”.

As is sometimes the case, I had no idea what I was talking about. Farming is complicated to say the least. I am happy to report that it is working in basically the same capacity as it is in the live version now. I think the only thing that’s missing is a function for using growth powder to make crops grow, but that would truly be a single simple function.

I say all this, quote and all, because I clearly forgot how complicated farming is. For a brief rundown, first you have to be able to till a tile of land, check. When I started this month, this was quite literally the only check. A tile then needs to be recorded so that it can be recreated when you leave and re-enter the area. For the object itself this involves creating the tile but then also setting up functions to display the tile correctly depending on how many tiles are surrounding it. Tiles also need to be able to adjust their appearance after they are created for when tiles around them appear or disappear. And need to be able to do this quickly to avoid stutter each time you till a tile.

After that you need to be able to water a tile, which involves the watering, as well as the use of the watering can. Adding the watering can involves implementing an item that has limited uses and displaying the data properly. As well as adding water that you can actually fill the can up from.
And after all that you need to be able to plant seeds, which need to be recorded similar to tiles so they can be recreated and manipulated properly. Then they need to have code to be able to grow, wither, become harvestable, regrow in the case the perennials, and abide by seasons.

I didn’t consider it when I started remaking farming, but its probably one of the most complicated systems in the game. Its not particularly hard to code, but there’s just a ton of factors. Compare this to something like mining which is basically, hit rock, get item. So long story short, past me thought farming was simple but got to remember that its very complicated.

Despite this, I did manage to tackle a few other things this month. First, the automatic pickup system works now. For those who have played the game that’s when there are items on the ground and you walk over to them they will gravitate towards you and be collected automatically. This also displays a bit of UI on the left. This UI has also been coded to work with manually picking things up like when you harvest a crop. It’s a smaller system but still something else out of the way. I also did a bit of refactoring on the inventory system to make it more efficient and scalable.

And last I started on what I am still working on, trees. As with crops they are a complicated system mostly because they grow. Progress is going well however, you can chop them down and gather materials so that’s about half the battle. The tough part was in animation, which I’m happy to say there’s been an improvement. If you played the current game you’ll likely notice that trees just sort of shift their angle and wobble when you hit them, even the roots move. It took a bit of doing but trees now animate in a different way that looks better in my opinion.

Next on the list is to get trees finished which mostly involves having them grow and record their data properly. This is thankfully more simple than crops which abide by more factors. Trees sort of just grow and they don’t have to correlate to a tilled tile. Since I’ve already done this sort of thing once I think it actually won’t take long this time around. But future me will be sure to quote current me if I’m putting my foot in my mouth right now.

So that is basically it for this month. Things are progressing nicely but there’s still plenty to do. My general plan was to get all the basic tools working first. That sort of spun into all of farming. Similar to how the axe is spinning into setting up trees. The next and last tool is the pickaxe. As mentioned before though that’s basically, hit rock, get item, so it should be easy. After that I’m not sure what I’ll move to next. A likely choice seems to be setting up some basic zones and getting shops working. Currently I’m walking around in a giant green field with a puddle to fill up the watering can, a single tree, and the player house. So you know, that probably needs to change a bit.

Anyway, as usual, thank you all for your patience and support. Seeing people thumbs these up and comment and stuff is always nice. You’ll hear from me in a month with hopefully far more to report on.

May News Update

June 1, 2023

Hello all, more than a few things to talk about this time around, so strap in for the excitement of game development. This was basically the first month where I spent the majority of my time actually working on code. Some random things came up that needed to be done, but generally I was coding.

Personally, I think the results are about what could have been expected given recent changes.
While progress wasn’t slow, I’m certain still in the throes of learning a new engine. Generally, that means looking lots of things up and reading. Not a big deal but it does slow things down. As for what was actually done this month I can briefly list things. The player can move, the camera now functions correctly, time has been implemented (as in days pass in game), the inventory system is implemented and functioning, including the ability to manipulate items and stacks as well the description system when hovering items. The hotbar is working, and the shell of the system to allow the player to use tools is in place. This system is sort of built piecemeal, as I add tools in their functionality is added. The item database has also had its framework set and is being filled out. Lastly, the start of farming has been put into the game. At the moment, you can really only till ground but everything else should follow quickly.

As I said before this month was sort of slow. There were two big issues that I came across, well, one issue, and one learning experience really. If you don’t care for tech jargon maybe skip this and the next paragraph. In short, the issue was with the camera. Because of the nature of graphics and pixels there was basically an issue with sprites moving at subpixel positions, which is impossible. If you try to do this it results in some really bad looking jitter when you move around in game. This took a bit to figure out but the solution was ultimately pretty simple. In short, just, you know, don’t do subpixel movements.

The learning experience was just GUIs. Things like the inventory and hotbar and any GUI are created in a specific way in this engine. That method is basically different from how everything else works and very weird to tackle when you are unfamiliar with it. Sort of a different way of thinking I guess. Ultimately, the way this engine works these things is great, it’s just that learning it is sort of a jarring moment that took a while to get used to.

All things considered I think, as I’ve said before, the pace should only increase. There is obviously tons to do but I can tell I’m getting more comfortable with the engine which will speed the process. Also, while a lot of this month was figuring out GUIs which involved new ways of doing lots of stuff many systems won’t have that issue. A lot of basic logic from the old version will still hold up in the new one. So its not so much reinventing the wheel as it is making tweaks.

Other stuff to discuss, just two things really. First is farming. I’m obviously creating the system right now and I thought it might be good to touch base on some changes to see what people think. So, much of farming is the same really. The bigger changes are mostly how you get crops and how they function.

At this point the plan is that only a few crops will be available to the player at the start during each season. There will be a new machine? Object? Thing? I guess machine, that you can get early on that lets you create hybrids of crops. So basically, you drop two seeds in, they make a new crop. Once made these seeds will become available for purchase in some way so you don’t have to do this every time you want seeds. I hope this will add a little bit of progression to crops instead of just dumping like 12 crop types on the player at the start.

Another thing that I’m being more cognizant of is crops that grow in all seasons. I think most of these changes were already made in the old version but I’ve added a few. Things like sugarcane, wheat, tea leaves, etc. Stuff that you primarily use in cooking will last all year. This means you can plant it in spring and it will stick around and regrow until winter. That said I’ve also added winter wheat. It’s the only crop you can grow in winter but if you really want to farm during that season you can. Oh and winter wheat just turns into normal wheat when you harvest it so it isn’t like a separate crop.

Compost is also being added as something of an alternative to growth powder. Effectively it will do the same thing making crops grow faster, but it opens your choices up a bit so you don’t have to pursue alchemy if you want that.

Aside from composting, milling seeds is more relevant. You’ll have the option to turn most crops into multiple seeds of that crop so given some time you can duplicate your plants if you chose to instead of buying them.

Another slight change is harvesting. At the moment crops basically give you one of that crop when you harvest. I’ve been tinkering with the gold systems in an attempt to normalize item prices and such. One big issue is food. Because you can buy food that you can cook the price of the food you buy has to be more than you can sell it for, otherwise, infinite gold. However, many dishes use crops to make them. Crops sell for a lot by design because they have to make up for the seed cost. So basically, something has to give. There are a couple ways to go, but I figure when you harvest something in real life you almost always get more than 1 of the crop. So the solution at the moment, unless I have a sudden change of heart, will be to lower the value of crops but you’ll harvest multiples of them.
One more tiny change is to irrigation. Currently an irrigation pipe takes up a whole tile. I’m planning to change that so it goes between two tiles. I think this will look better and consume less space.

Lastly, and probably most importantly, is the change to I guess, growth? As it stands right now, most crops in the game grow once, are harvested, and they are gone. While these crops will still exist I’m changing some to another type of crop, aptly named perennials. These will be slightly more expensive, but will function in a similar manner to trees. You plant them once, they grow to maturity and then give a repeating yield. They go dormant in their off seasons, but effectively you can set out fields of these crops and have less maintenance at the start of seasons. The trade off is that land is in permanent use. I figure this will be a little something to mix up crops.

Most of the point here is to just add some variety. Farming in real life is complicated. While I hardly want to make things realistic I figure this stuff adds a little more player choice to the system rather than just mindlessly planting swathes of the most profitable crop.

The other thing to discuss is much shorter, and more a reflection of how I want to proceed. In the current game many things are half done. If you’ve been playing this game for any amount of time you’ve probably run into something where the plan is to finish it at some point in the future or a system is just missing entirely. Admittedly, in some cases like map areas not being available, this is somewhat unavoidable. In many others though I don’t like the idea.

Two examples of this are zones missing content, and NPCs. Every zone in the current game exists but is missing some key form of content, whether it be battles, secrets, characters, resources, whatever. NPCs have the same issue. They exist in a basic form. They have quests, although sometimes not all of them, and their basic dialogue. They are missing unique topics, storylines, cutscenes and romances.
I want to change this. While there are certainly going to be minor things that I can’t fully do without going down a rabbit hole, I’d like to implement systems more fully this time around. The most apparent example is likely NPCs. When I add an NPC I plan to have everything regarding them written and implemented. There are a few caveats to that, mostly with some topics that you won’t have a way to unlock yet. Regardless, I want to try and stick true to it as best I can. I think it will give a better impression to anyone playing the game instead of having half-finished systems everywhere.

One thing to mention plainly here regarding NPCs specifically. Romance. Currently I’d like to write it in and add it along with the NPC. I’m going to see what happens with this particular system. I want to do it at the same time as a character is added but I won’t deny that it’s a huge system. Simply writing everything and putting in scenes is a lot. Then you have to think about everything regarding how they act post marriage, children, etc. So I just wanted to be transparent on that particular part because if there’s one thing I’ve seen people request its romance.

In any case I think that’s all for now. Plenty to do, but hopefully there will be more progress in June than in May as that’s the trend that should be happening. As usual, thanks for your patience and sticking with the game through this process.

April News Update

April 29, 2023

As usual, another month has passed me by and I’m wondering where the time went. Regardless, I’m due for a little dev post here to let you all know what’s going on.

I’m afraid it’s not that exciting, but I guess that’s to be expected for what’s going on currently. I spent a large chunk of the month drawing up more plans. For the most part all of this is now in place. I still have details to figure out like pricing schemes of items and which secret goes where etc etc. While that stuff is important the broad strokes are all there at this point so that’s good. Currently, I’m splitting my time a bit. I’ve started coding, but I still work on the little planning details in some capacity every day. Reason being, I can only look at excel spreadsheets so much each day before I start to lose my mind.

As for development well its about what you would expect given that I’m starting over. Currently the normal title menus are in place, you can start a new game and you can walk around, in an empty field, truly epic.

In all seriousness however, that may sound basic but I’m very happy with the progress. For reference what currently exists was created in about a week where I’m only coding a few hours a day due to time constraints. So don’t worry, it didn’t take me a month to code walking. That would not bode well.
I won’t delve into the details but things are going well. I feel like I’m picking up the new engine at a good rate, already its starting to feel familiar. As probably anyone will attest the toughest part of processes like this are learning the new software. While its certainly different I’m finding it fairly easy to grasp which means progress should only speed up the more I use it.

Only other thing I wanted to mention is another feature I was curious about. Currently its planned out so unless people tell me it’s a horrible idea it will end up in the game. The idea is relatively simple but I don’t think its been done in games like this. Full disclosure, I haven’t played many games in this genre, so maybe I’m wrong.

Anyway, the idea is horse breeding/renting out? I don’t know how to phrase that. You can breed horses and then basically rent them out to others who might need them. So for a basic example, there would be something like a posting for a horse that would pull a caravan and you could assign a horse you have to that task and then get paid when it completes that task after a few days.

That’s sort of just the money making end of things. The other parts probably need another pass just to make sure they are what I want. The general idea is horses are treated similar to other livestock that you can own. Their maintenance might be a bit more intensive than just feeding them however. They will also have stats that are basically used to dictate their success at particular jobs. You can breed them for appearance as well as stats. Stats are also planned to play a minor role in gameplay. For instance, a horse that you ride that has a higher speed stat would move faster in the world. Stuff like that.

Anyway, I happened upon the idea when looking at what else could be done and which systems were lacking in my mind. Horses always seemed like something that there should be more to. I’m not a history expert and I’m a bit too lazy to google but I’m like 99% sure that there are ranches in the real world that exist (or used to exist) just to do this sort of stuff so I think it’s a good fit. It also lends itself as just another gameplay option to make money which is the general goal with systems in this game. You likely won’t do them all in one playthrough, but it gives you options to focus on something different if you do multiple playthroughs.

So that’s about it for now. Progress is moving along at a steady pace. Hopefully May will be more fully about coding rather than splitting time. I still don’t really know how long this will take. I’ve mentioned before that I want to basically have a beta branch for this version of the game. That way people don’t have to wait until everything is done to play it. I’m not good with timeframes for this sort of thing but currently I’m looking at maybe the end of summer. That may end up being horrible inaccurate but if the pace keeps up and I don’t run into any huge issues I think it might be possible. Thanks again for your patience and I hope you all have fun playing the current version of the game, such as it is.

March News Update

March 31, 2023

As usual time for an update on what’s been going on with Verdant Village. The answer to that question is a bit complicated. Sort of something between a lot and not a lot depending on what you interpret as progress.

Personally, I’m very happy with everything. I’m not much for extensive planning, but I’m forcing the matter in this case as I should have done from the start. Real quickly though, for those out of the loop, it should be said that per the last update the game is going on a sort of hiatus while I remake it in a new engine. As mentioned before, if you already own the game you can play it for now and eventually you’ll get the new version for free. There’s a variety of reasons for remaking it but if you want the details you can check the previous post linked below.

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1236900/view/3647390066644268292

So, this month has been a planning extravaganza. While the game isn’t changing in massive ways I basically had nothing that really resembled a design doc for Verdant Village. At the beginning I had a word doc that was several pages that basically said (very useful) things like “Alchemy will be a system that exists”, with little to no details describing the system. This left me to work out the details when I made the system which resulted in many an issue.

I now have not one, but several documents for the game. The main design doc is currently 46 pages long and I think its done, bar any minor changes to finalize things. Aside from this I have several other documents that are still works in progress detailing items, zones, secrets, rewards, quests, holidays, lore, events, etc.

The design document is the most important one however. It basically lays out every system in the game as well as more generalized notes to adhere to during design. There’s lots of little things like focusing on a more consistent UI, adding flare to various elements of the game to make it generally feel better, and various modifications to systems that will hopefully relieve pain points as there are several things that I think are rough for new players and even experienced ones.

Aside from that, like I said, every system is laid out in detail. Most things are remaining the same, however there are some changes that I’m considering. As this is all still in the design phase its subject to change, but I’d like to have it locked in by the time I begin coding in earnest. While I don’t want to spoil everything, I am curious for external opinions. I think I’m prone to complicating things in a game in the name of player progress, but I don’t want to go overboard. Below are a few things I wanted to mention and see if anyone had an opinion on. These aren’t all the changes but they are a few of the larger ones.

Decoration Buff (for lack of a better term): If anyone has played My Time In Portia I believe they have something similar. The idea being that by decorating your house and farm you get a buff. I haven’t determined what, but was considering something along the lines of additional stamina. Unlike Portia where certain objects give certain buffs this would be more of a score you get by adding objects in general so you can place what you want and still get the benefit.

Automation: While I won’t be specific on this, it’s a system I’ve had on my mind for a long time. In terms of theming this would keep to the games current theme, so you won’t be making industrial machinery. It would instead be something probably more based in magic. The idea would be to automate some, but not all, tasks. Things like auto gathering plants, automatically being given certain basic resources each day like stone, clay, or wood, and other such things. All of this would run on a power source that you would still have to supply so it isn’t completely free.

Hybrid Seeds: This is something fairly simple that I was considering. Looking at farming it sort of dead ends before it begins. There isn’t really anything different about it at the end from when you start. Generally, you just have more crops and they are probably watered automatically for you. This idea is meant to change that a bit. Basically, the general store will sell a smaller variety of seeds. The player can then build a small structure on their farm that allows you to cross breed seeds to get new crops. These cross breeds are remembered and there would be ways to obtain seeds you’ve made after you have made them once so you don’t need to cross breed them every time. In addition to this I wanted to add a few end game crops so you have something to strive for.

Grand Market: This one is sort of big. As the name implies, it’s a big market. The general idea being that this something of a task generator, a system for making money, and one of the end game challenges if you want it. The general premise would be that you would gain access to this market at some point in the game. Every couple of days or so the market generates requests. These requests can be for any item in the game and are randomized. As well as it being any item the requests are timed. So basically you can take on jobs to create specific items and you get more money for doing this task than you would be just selling the item at a store. Also requests would be themed so some might be all about alchemy objects while others are all livestock products. As far as end game goes I would like make a set of very difficult perhaps even a year long requests for players to complete.

That’s some of the new stuff that I wouldn’t mind getting an opinion on. There are a few other things as well, along with tons of changes as mentioned but I don’t think its stuff that needs to be brought up here.

Another thing to mention is characters. I don’t know that this really matters because I don’t think there was a ton to go off of in the current game, but still I thought I should mention it. I’m currently creating a database on characters. No characters are being dropped but some are changing a bit. Appearances may be altered and backstories might change for them. Like I said I don’t think it really matters but I wanted to mention it as its currently what I’m working on. There wasn’t a ton to go on with the current iterations but I can say that the updated versions have many more details to work with which should result in more fleshed out personalities and stories.

This sort of thing ties into writing. While the current version of the game has a setting that is sometimes eluded to it is pretty scattered and not terribly well made. I went back and drew up a legit lore document for the game world that solidifies what was already there. It also has plenty of extraneous details. I somehow doubt this world’s creation myth is really going to come up much in a farming game, but it exists now and will probably be hidden away somewhere in the game.
All this is generally being done to hopefully enhance the world. The way I see it these are the types of games that players can spend tens if not hundreds of hours in. The world should be a character like anything else that brings you into the world. So while not all of it will be super relevant to your quaint little farming life it will hopefully serve to flesh out the world a bit.

Alright, I think that’s it. I apologize for the long post. It’s a lot easier to write a lot when you are just talking about stuff you are going to do and not what code you actually wrote in a month. As much as I’d like to have an ETA on the new version of the game I don’t have one. The only thing I can say is that Steam allows for beta branches. What I will probably do at some point is have an opt in beta so if you want to play the new version you can while retaining access to the old version.

Anyway, I’m off to write more characters. Thanks for your patience and support. With any luck actual coding will begin in April and I’ll have something of substance to report next month.

Verdant Village State Of The Game

February 28, 2023

I'm not sure I have a good way to segway into this but big changes are coming. So big that I broke convention and didn't just name this "Insert name of month News Update". In fact, I don’t know that they could get much bigger.

To start with what has already been talked about prior. Thanks for the feedback recently on the map stuff. For those not in the know, I feel that the map is a bit too large for its own good. While I don’t (and don’t plan to) get rid of zones I do think some of them could use some trimming down and rearrangement. The currently plan is a widespread map recreation. Not everything will be touched and the general locations will likely remain the same but I think much of the map was created without much thought and before many ideas were implemented. Most of what I want to focus on is making it easier to navigate as well as adding more density to the world and the things you have in it. Less open space, more visual storytelling, and details to absorb as you move through the world. Also, more interactivity and integration of gameplay.

So that’s all the stuff that has already been talked about before so what’s all this goodbye to Verdant Village stuff? Well, it’s more of a see you later I suppose. Anyone who has played the game, browsed the discussions, discord, or reported a bug may have heard me mention this. Verdant Village is currently made via an engine called Construct 3, originally Construct 2 before it got ported up. Supposedly the port up didn’t cause issues, but sometimes I honestly wonder. Fair warning the next several paragraphs are reasoning for the changes. If you don’t want to read several paragraphs of that I decided to put in a TLDR though.

The point being, and Construct devs if you are somehow reading this, I’m sorry, I don’t think the engine works for PC. I’ll try to summarize because I don’t think most people care about the nitty gritty details of programming engines. Coding in the engine I think works fine, the issues stem almost fully from the export. Basically, Construct exports function through HTML, IE, a web browser. Since web code is generally understood by most machines this gives it a lot of versatility. That was their plan at least, I don’t think its going too well however. Mainly because all consoles (Switch, Xbox, Playstation) all dropped HTML support last generation, meaning no game made in Construct will work on them. This limits where you can release to PC and phone.

This is not terrible, or it wouldn’t be if it didn’t have its own issues. I can’t speak for phones as I’ve never tried them. I get the impression the engine has refocused onto the mobile market in recent years however. This leaves us with PC. To put things simply, in order to get a normal exe file that runs like a normal application on your desktop Construct takes that HTML export and wraps it with a shell program called NWjs. This gives the application the impression of being a normal application instead of something that opens in a browser window.

On the surface this likely doesn’t sound too terrible. It looks the same as a normal app so what’s the issue? Therein lies the rub. As an aside it is annoying to not be able to port to console and that feels like a waste, especially the case of the switch. I mean we are far from that reality, but having the option is appealing for obvious reasons. More relevant to the current situation are a variety of issues. During various releases on Steam I’ve had reports of the game not closing out entirely in Steam, hard crashes where the app closes itself, white screens (basically another hard crash), failure to integrate with Steam, black screen on launch, failure to start in any way whatsoever, and more. All this on top of the export process being a nightmare and having no way to really get these issues fixed culminates in a really bad user experience for some players.

I admittedly don’t know how widespread these issues are. Its easy for me as the dev to only see the issues that crop up as that is what gets reported. However, I find that, much like anyone programming something, I don’t want these things to happen ever. And I know if I bought a game and it just crashed on boot I would, understandably, be upset.

TLDR: Game is made in Construct 3. Construct 3 has many issues in my opinion that cause weird bugs and other issues.

So that’s the biggest part of the reasoning. The only other thing is that I’ve been developing this game for several years now. While I really don’t look forward to remaking it, I think it might be for the best. Something I believe I’ve mentioned before publicly is that I did not plan this game out as I should have. As I joked with my friend recently I remember writing up about a 13 page word document that was terribly vague and chalking the design up to “how hard can it be to make a farming game”.

I did plan out more as the game grew but it was always a bit more piecemeal with no firm document on what was supposed to happen or go into the game. For anyone who hasn’t programmed a game before, that’s a big no no. You don’t want to do this because a game is complicated. Even if it is properly planned out it is complicated. Not knowing everything you can before you start tends to cause your code to be a mess.

This is related because a few bugs that have been reported I’m finding nearly impossible to find. Likely the only way to truly get rid of them would be to rip out the system and start fresh, which would in turn cause more problems. So while I’m not super excited, I think this is honestly a fairly reasonable alternative for two reasons.

The first is that I can clean up code. I have several more years of experience and have learned quite a bit in my time making this game, usually the hard way. If I start fresh, I can likely make everything better in just about every sense of the word. The second thing, and likely the more important one, is that I can do what I failed to the first time, plan. I have a good sense of what I want this game to be at this point. Much of it is already in place but I can go back and ensure that I have the details sorted, and develop everything in a more cohesive manner that should enhance the game in general. Similar to the map rework this is less of a “time to make the whole thing again” and more “time to polish and make this the best it can be”.

As for engines I’ve been fiddling with a few in recent weeks. I narrowed it down between Unity and Game Maker as choices eventually. It took a while but I’ve landed on Game Maker as I think I like the IDE more and I feel it caters a bit better towards 2D games where Unity is more all purpose. For any who are wondering Game Maker also has a track record of games that have come to Steam and other platforms, Undertale, Hyperlight Drifter, Shovel Knight and Hotline Miami to name a few popular ones. I mention this only to say that unlike Construct I don’t expect to have export issues that cause the game to just crash or not work on random computers.

So, what does all this mean for you. Well, a lot, and also not much to be honest. As you are probably expecting the current game will stagnate for a bit. Attached with this update is a small patch that will hopefully address a few more issues that were brought up just to try and bring what’s there to a more stable state. After this however I plan to let it sit.

I will start the process of redeveloping the game as a sort of 2.0 version in Game Maker. I don’t know exactly when I’ll start uploading the new version. I’ll probably wait until its at least comparable to what it is now before doing so. To answer a question that might be on your mind, no, you will not have to repurchase the game. Once the new version is ready, I’ll just overwrite what is currently on Steam and you’ll have the new version.

I apologize for all of this however. If you asked me about 4 months ago if I thought I’d go in this direction I would have thought you were crazy. It’s a conclusion that took me some time to come to but has been in my idle thoughts for at least a year now. For a long time I believed I could just push through the issues and fix them but I eventually realized it just wasn’t meant to be. I feel sort of cliché saying this but I want this game to be the best I can make it. Its 100% a passion project and I want to do it justice. This seems to be a painful, but necessary step to accomplish that.

I do plan to continue posting updates on progress each month so I won’t just go completely silent but to be honest I don’t have a good idea of how long this will take. Once I get stuck in I’ll probably get a better idea. I can essentially cheat off of the current version of the game so it shouldn’t be nearly as intensive as making everything originally. Not to mention I wasted a ton of time in original development just learning and making systems that wouldn’t come to fruition. With a proper plan in place none of that should be much of a problem.

This is however where you all come in, if anyone is still reading this lol, I’m sorry its so long. As I think I’ve said in the past I don’t expect much in the form of feedback, but the game is early access and I believe hearing the opinions of players is important to the creation process. While I can’t promise anything, starting in a new engine does have many benefits. Most specifically, almost anything can be changed. So, if you have something you really want to see, or something you hate about the current game I’d love to hear it as I can take all that into account when creating the new one. I already have a laundry list of modifications I want to add to make the overall experience smoother. From little things like making the cooking interface easier to read at a glance to big things like remaking the map and maybe sprucing up farming to have a bit more substance.

Basically, everything is on the table at this point so feel free to let me know. I am going to say this one thing however, because I’m sure it would come up. Multiplayer. Multiplayer is something I’ve seen people request. While I think it would be cool, I have done some contemplating on the subject. As with planning I’m trying to look ahead for potential roadblocks. Multiplayer would be cool but I think that the game is already really big, putting it in a new engine will surely have its own complications. Trying to implement multiplayer on top of that would likely result in huge issues. While I wish I could do it, I think I have to make the decision to forgo it.

Anyway, thanks for reading, being patient, and generally awesome. I know this game isn’t some massive internet hit but it makes me happy to have any player base that enjoys something (flaws and all) that I’ve made. I hope that this signals the start of something even better that you all will get to enjoy.

And as usual, below is a list of the changes for the new patch, they are fairly minimal as it feels like a waste to really go hard when the game isn’t going to be developed in this engine anymore.

Verdant Village V0.4.8.5.2 Full Changelog

Bug Fixes

Made some slight changes to pastures that should hopefully stabilize them
All crops will once again patch (although this doesn’t matter too much given that this is the last patch)
Fixed an achievement to get 10 rabbit’s feet
Fixed an achievement to tap a certain number of trees
Fixed an achievement to gain a certain number of honeycomb
Fixed Full Time Forager achievement
Fixed achievement for getting 9k heat (if you are already over 9k just add more heat and it should give you the achievement)

Verdant Village Patch 0.4.8.5.1

February 10, 2023

Small hotfix incoming. I expected there would probably be a few issues despite testing the new pasture systems. Thankfully nothing was terribly out of line, but there was enough happening that I wanted to address it now rather than waiting for a normal patch cycle. Below are the details for what’s been modified. These things have been tested with player save files so they should fix the issues, if you find you still run into problems let me know.

Oh, and I’ll probably address this again later, but thanks to everyone for your feedback on potential map changes in the future. I’m still churning ideas in my head but the input helps a lot so thanks, I appreciate it.

Verdant Village Patch 0.4.8.5.1 Full Changelog

Bug Fixes

Coop layout was modified slightly, I had accidently placed assets that covered up the chest in the building
Pasture tiles (pink tiles) in certain situations would fail to delete themselves causing a host of issues
Gates, specifically large gates, could cause problems with the pasture calculation process
Fixed small visual inconsistency in winter cliff tileset
Fixed small visual glitch in the woods area
Fixed a glitch that could cause arrows that were fired when hunting to not collide with anything
Fixed an issue where pigs would still find truffles in winter (with the pasture change pigs only find truffles if they can go outside, since animals don’t go outside in winter they shouldn’t find truffles)
Fixed glitch where sheep couldn’t be sheared despite having fully grown wool
Fixed a visual glitch where animals would walk in place instead of idling

Verdant Village Patch 0.4.8.5

February 1, 2023

Alright, patch time is here and there is much to discuss. As I think I stated in the last monthly update this took a bit longer than expected, regardless we are here now. Simply put this patch has tuned up livestock a bit and made room for future additions as now the systems are set up.

By tuned up livestock I mean a few things. First, you can let animals outside now. Where you normally look at the status of your animals you can now select an option to let them outside. Doing this will tell the game to calculate a pasture for the animals in that building. Pastures are formed as you would expect. The game will look at the space outside the building and qualify tiles as pasture until it runs into walls or other solid objects like buildings or trees. So basically, throw down a fence, or other things to block an area off and you’ll have a pasture.

I didn’t want to just directly mimic other games so I modified this system a bit. Using stardew as the example you grow grass in that game, but I always found it sort of inexact. In Verdant Village there are now more than a few new crops two of which will grow through Spring, Summer, and Fall, and give repeated yields like berry bushes. Animals you let outside will eat these crops to feed themselves assuming they are planted in the pasture.

As you might recall I said there are a few new crops. That’s because only two of these crops feed animals. The others serve two functions. Two crops are also dedicated to allow for breeding animals. Feed an animal the crop when they are an adult, they get pregnant, totally just like real life. A few days later they will give birth, or lay an egg which will hatch.

The other set of crops is there to add some variety that I thought would make livestock a bit more interesting. Not everything is in yet, I have a couple other ideas that I want to add eventually, just a matter of time and priority. For now, chickens and cows each have two different forms that can be attained by feeding them certain crops. I won’t spoil that bit I guess, but you can expect a few other things like this in the future once I get more time on my hands.

All that said, quick hint, if you want to find these crops you can can’t just buy them, I suggest checking the fields to the left of your home.

Aside from that there have been some bug fixes and small QoL stuff done as well but the majority of work was just the animal systems. The details are, as usual, listed at the end.

Now, onto the meat of this post. As some of you may remember at the start of December I decided to try a new update schedule. The idea was once a month I’d be putting out a smaller patch. The idea was to keep updates consistent while I worked on combat, the next big system, in the background. So we are two months into that and I’m finding that I may need to modify it a bit.

Long story short, time is hard to come by as an adult. I don’t want to work on the game less, that isn’t the problem. If anything I want to work more, but unfortunately I have to sleep and work a full time job. So, how things currently work is that I work on the smaller patches during the weekdays and combat on the weekends. Problem is that while the weeks are fairly consistent the weekends are not meaning the time I spend on combat gets shorted quite a bit.

The best solution I’ve come up with so far is basically a switching schedule of one month small patch work, one month combat work. So basically every other month there would still be a patch. It’s not ideal admittedly, but I think if I don’t dedicate a realistic amount of time towards it, combat is never going to happen.

I try to be transparent about all this stuff given that anyone reading this has probably already bought the game. As you’ve already given me your money, I think you have a right to know what I’m thinking/doing. While I don’t think anyone is going to lose sleep over something like this I’d be happy to further explain the thinking if anyone wanted more info.

Okay, last thing, I know, lots of things. This is something that’s been tumbling around in my head for a while. I don’t usually ask for feedback, I’m not sure how much I’d get anyway. However, while I still hold creative control over the game this was something large enough that I wanted to pose the question.

The game world for Verdant Village is big, to put it bluntly. I don’t mean that as a compliment to myself I just mean that compared to other games of this genre most are more compact than this one. Now, I don’t want to get rid of zones that I have or have planned, that isn’t the issue. The issue I’ve been bouncing around is that the scale is wrong for this game.

To give a brief history, the reason for the size of the environments in this game stem from me as a child playing Harvest Moon and wanting more world to explore. When I started making this game the large zones were created by design to fulfill that. Problem is, well, turns out people who make games are smart, and there’s a reason zones in those games didn’t stretch on forever.

Probably the most simple reason is that it just elongates travel time. While a game like Skyrim for instance might benefit from huge environments that is in part because it has the graphical fidelity to back up that scope. People want to just walk around in those games because it is pretty and interesting to just move around and find things.

While the graphics are acceptable, I’m under no illusion that Verdant Village is as interesting to simply move through as an Elder Scrolls game. This leads me to two thoughts. First, I’d like to update the world graphical a fair bit. I think there are things that could be added and modified to make the world just more interesting in general. In the process of doing this I am considering condensing the game’s areas. Like I said, I don’t want, or plan, cut out zones but I’m thinking it might be good for the game to shrink things down a bit. A perfect example of this is the fields to the left of your house. They were made that size because I wanted some sort of sweeping field but as anyone who has walked through them more than once can probably attest, they take forever to get through. And this is coming from a dev that 90% of the time cheats a horse in when they start and it still takes forever. I’d like to shrink down things like that to alleviate some pain points.

Anyway, as I said at the start of this tangent, I wouldn’t mind having feedback on this sort of decision. Its hard to get a true idea of what people think but if people just came out in mass and said “no I love walking around everywhere” that would probably sway my opinion. Otherwise, this seems like a good deal of work, but worth it to make gameplay tighter. As mentioned briefly this would probably result in some graphical changes. Not a complete redo, that would be insane, but some changes to make things more visually interesting in the world.

Alright, that was long, sorry to write a small essay here. As I said before I like to be transparent about what’s going on behind the scenes. If you have any opinions on what’s been mentioned I’d be happy to hear them. Below is the full changelog as usual. Regardless of what the patching schedule turns into I will continue to post these once a month to keep everyone in the know. Thanks for playing, more to come soon.

Verdant Village V0.4.8.5 Full Changelog

Additions

Added the ability to breed animals
Added the ability to let animals out to pasture
Added two additional forms for both cows and chickens
Added new crops/forage items to facilitate animal breeding and transformation
Added 3 achievements based around new livestock features
Added 3 tutorials related to new livestock features

Quality Of Life

Made minor changes to mineral node spawns in the mines to hopefully prevent them from blocking a player in when they enter/exit a room
Preserves Pot sprite and collision was been modified slightly to better fit on the grid
Created a failsafe for if saving fails so the game doesn’t just softlock
The shift click command to buy a set number of items should now accept numpad button presses

Balance Changes

Crops that are fully grown no longer need to be watered and will not wither regardless of time
Tweaked livestock and fowl movement algorithms slightly to prevent them getting stuck on things
Increased regular truffle sell price to 40g from 20g
Increased selling price of goat milk to 180g from 120g (this is to balance out better against cows)
Reduced cooked item sell prices from 1.4x the sell price of ingredients to 1.25x the sell price
Irrigation pipes have been altered so that they can be run under buildable walls (this allows you to water pasture crops automatically)

Bug Fixes

Fixed a bug where NPCs wouldn’t stop their walk cycle and face you when you talked to them
Fixed a bug where interacting with a cow or goat to milk them would alter their shadow temporarily
Readded collisions for fowl. I don’t think they were ever supposed to not have collisions so I’m calling this a bug, or I was unhinged when I coded it that way
Fixed music on the intro screen so that it now plays
Fixed automatic full screen, the game was always meant to try to jump to full screen but an engine bug was preventing it. You can still play windowed mode by selecting it from settings
Fixed a bug where entering and leaving a secret room in the mines and then using the portcullis would leave the mines map on your screen
Made a broad change to the inventory system to hopefully snuff out the rare softlock players have hit occasionally
Fixed a bug resulting in two different achievement bugs due to misnamed data entries
Fixed a compendium bug where seed entries didn’t list the seasons they could be grown in
Fixed a bug where shift clicking to buy multiple items at once wouldn’t charge the player
Fixed a minor visual glitch for chests where they moved when being opened/closed
Fixed a bug where secrets rooms in mines may not spawn in the correct biome style
Fixed a quest for Sven that was supposed to give you 5 iron bars but instead gave 5 braziers
Fixed a bug where stack text would show the ‘1’ if the stack had a single item in it

Verdant Village Patch 0.4.8.4

January 5, 2023

Normally I would just wait till the end of the month for this but I wanted to put out a small hotfix to address a few things. Really just two things. The simple reason is that one of these issues was rather disruptive if you were far enough into the mines. In short it would make the area unplayable at deeper levels.

Anyway, this should now be fixed as well some other stuff listed below. One other thing I wanted to mention. Some people have noticed a bug relating to Ben. Specifically dealing with his dialogue window locking in relation to one of his quests. I spent about 3 hours trying every which way to trigger anything with him but I got nothing. Whatever this issue it is it seems to be rare, or only triggered under extremely specific circumstances.

I will continue to look into this and hopefully have a fix by the end of the month but if you run into this issue and can relay any info to me it would be appreciated. Generally speaking I would need to know what area you are in when speaking to him (if you are on his farm I’ll need to know inside or outside), what season it is, what dialogue line he spoke, if you interacted with a quest then which quest, and when the lock exactly happened (during regular dialogue, after you hit the quest button, after the quest dialogue, etc). I understand that is a lot of info, if you can’t remember it all or even any of it I’d still like to know anything you remember. Thank you in advance to anyone who can help with that.

Below is the change log, its short but rather important I’d say.

Verdant Village V0.4.8.4 Full Patch Notes

Bug Fixes

Fixed an issue where the mines would display the incorrect and eventually no tileset when delving too deep
Fixed an issue where the challenge for reaching level 100 of the mines would fail to iterate or proc, progress will retroactively be given so you may receive the achievement after the patch if you have already gone past floor 100
Fixed several odd visual bugs in relation to the mines involving incorrect tiles and animations

December News Update

December 30, 2022

Hello all, and happy new year! 2022 is just about over, that sort of just whisked by. Before 2023 I wanted to put out a quick news update just to keep everyone informed. Given that there were just two sales on Steam there are likely a good number of people who haven’t seen one of these before.
To keep things brief, I like to put out a (relatively) short post at the end of each month just to keep people up to date on what I’ve been doing. For those unaware I’m a solo developer for Verdant Village, although I do pay a few lovely people to do the art and sound. This means that progress is admittedly a bit slower than I would like, but I do what I can to put out regular updates.

Speaking of, some of you may remember my last post saying that I was going to try to move towards a monthly update cycle. Smaller updates, but more frequent just to keep things from stagnating. This is still the plan, but as predicted, December was, as always, a bit of a mess with all the holidays. I am relatively close to having a patch ready to go, but I probably didn’t pick the best thing to tackle during a month with limited time.

So, what have I been doing? Modifying ranching mostly. Ranching is one of those systems that went into the game a long time ago and while it functioned there were always some things missing. What I’ve been working on are a couple of things. First, you’ll be able to let animals outside finally. When animals are outside they can graze. I’ll compare to Stardew here because it’s the easiest example. In that game you can grow clumps of grass to feed your animals. I didn’t want to just copy that, and I wanted something a bit more quantifiable.

As a result, there will be a new crop specific for feeding animals that are in pastures. It does renew and grows in all seasons outside of winter so its basically plant it, and with irrigation you can just leave it sit all year. This crop can’t be bought it has to be found in the plains left of your farm to give that area more significance.

Aside from this crop there are also a few more. Specifically, 4 that will alter the forms of cows and chickens so they look different and yield different things. And of course, there is a crop you can feed animals to have them give birth to another animal.

All of these systems pretty much had to be built from the ground up or required modification of old code to allow for them, hence why its taking a bit. Unless something goes horribly wrong I have every confidence that this patch will be ready for the end of January. After that hopefully we’ll keep on track for once a month updates. I won’t 100% guarantee it because sometimes larger systems are just going to take too long for one month of work but hopefully I’ll keep on track.

Small aside, I am also splitting my time at this point for combat. I have an artist who has been tireless working to make sprites for the system. According to one of the many folders on my desktop I have 40 enemy sprites waiting. That whole system is still very much in the works but I like to mention it just so people know I haven’t forgotten. It’s the long-term project while I work on smaller things for monthly patches. Once there is more to say I’m sure I’ll talk a bit more in depth. The whole system has gone through several iterations and I’m currently doing lots of math and living in excel to try to balance stats out and such.

So that’s about it for now. To all those who bought the game recently I hope you are having fun. More content will be on the way as soon as I can manage it. One last thing I thought about and wanted to add here was something of a recap. I don’t normally do this because it feels sort of like saying “look what I did” and I’m not that vain. However, I was thinking that a lot of people might be new and I don’t know about everyone else but I’m often concerned when I buy an early access game, because you never really know how fast development is going or when the game will get an update, etc. I can’t imagine anyone would want to sift through old patch notes so below I compiled a list of everything that was done to Verdant Village this year. I figured it may be an interesting read for some or I thought it might serve to quell some concerns with having bought early access.
Thank you all again for your support this year. I’m excited to bring more content to the game and see what you all think. As I said at the start, happy new year, I hope you all had a good 2022 and wish you an even better 2023!

2022 Update Recap

Additions

Added 5 NPCs to the game
Added 17 quests to the game
Added 6 zones to the game (this count includes house interiors)
Tree seeds can now be cooked into a small snack, this recipe is available from the start
Added small bee sprites to apiaries, so now you can be afraid of getting stung while collecting honey now
Added a visual movement to water in the world so it now moves up and down slightly
Barley and Rye seeds are now available in the general store year-round, minus winter
Placing fishing traps in the ocean now has a chance to yield shrimp
Added a path from the Narbell Farm to the Dig Site, no unlocks required
Added jam making
Added the Compendium (In brief this is an internal database that tracks most things in the game, as well as has tutorials)
Added Achievements (in game these are challenges, some correspond to Steam achievements, however there is cap on how many you can have so not all of them unlock a steam achievement. Additionally, those of you who are patching will likely get a few by default as some are given via non-repeatable events)
Added full tale for 1 NPC
Added 1 new exchange shop (Small note, it doesn’t have all its items yet, so expect it to expand in the future)
Added 1 archeology keystone dig
Added Mail System
Added another biome to the mines for floors 75 through 100, before it was just lava land for 50 levels now the lava biome is only 25 levels like the others
Additional mine biome comes with its own set of fish as usual
Added cloud save functionality to Steam versions of the game

QoL (Quality of Life)

Barn and Coop animal UI (the book) will now darken slots to show how many total spots are available in the building for livestock
Added a tooltip to the Watering Can and Hoe to explain that they can be charged when used
Chests can now be picked up with the carpenter mallet, however they still need to be empty to do so
Trees will no longer allow you to plant them if they are too close to another tree where they wouldn’t fully grow
Cooking station now shows your totals for what ingredients you are using next to the cost of an item
Cleaned up the code around the object placement UI so that it is no longer overlapping other UI elements regardless of its position
Stack limits for all items in the game have been raised to 99. The exception to this is stone and various woods which remain at 200
Removed the “Topics” button from the dialogue menu. This was done mostly because the current button doesn’t really do anything and its probably more misleading to new players than anything. It will reappear once that system is implemented properly
Extended the discovery notification background for alchemy to more fully fit all the text that appears on it
Added currency values to the descriptions of items. Gold was already shown but now uses the icon, and the archeology currency will appear on the appropriate items
The silo will now check if feed needs to be distributed when the silo UI is closed. In short if your silo ran out of feed and then you added more to it that day to compensate you now won’t have to manually feed the animals that day as well
Silos will now automatically add extra feed to a tier 3 building if you buy and place an animal in such a building
Changed dirt tiles to turn back into grass after one day regardless of their watered status
Added a small effect to keysprites in the mines to make them slightly easier to find, this will hopefully also compensate for those who are hard of hearing or just play without sound
Added a meter to the fishery UI to show how close fish are to spawning an egg and how close eggs are to hatching
Chest inventory search functions now search chests based on distance to the player instead of via the arbitrary array indices. In short, this means if you cook something at the cooking station and it needs to pull ingredients from a chest it will pull those things from the chest that is physically closest to the player instead of potentially from some random one on your farm
With the addition of Lauren to the game the inn now has two different menus you can order from depending on who is currently running the inn
When scrolling your hotbar a small text prompt will now appear above the hotbar to indicate what you have selected
Changed objects that you pickup manually to disappear as the player reaches down to pick them up
Made a very small visual change to the interaction guide
Changed object placement to round to 1px for objects that don’t adhere to the grid. This still allows creative freedom but if you want to line things up to look nice it is no far easier to do
Changed the collision on the bottom wall of the player house to match other interiors
The shipping chest now operates on all of your chests as well as your inventory
The forge now operates on all of your chests as well as your inventory
Cleaned up the forge UI slightly
Added the pickup sound to all objects in the game not just the ones you pick up manually. This is something I was sort of back and forth on, if you have an opinion on it feel free to let me know
Animals will now stop walking when being milked/sheered
Added SFX to objects such as looms and drying racks for an extra indication that you have interacted with it
Added falling leaves to trees in autumn
Made several minor changes to the world environment including some shadows, a deeper layer of grass and other minor modifications to spruce up areas
Made a large change to the terrain in the upper right corner of The Whistling Fields zone. The purpose of this change will be made known at a later date
Updated Main Menu and Exit Game buttons to match the rest of the UI
Slightly modified settings menu to look a little nicer
Quest rewards are now visible to the player in the quest log when a quest is selected
Quests can now be pinned in your log to keep them at the top of the list
Alchemy breakdown has been changed so that you are no longer limited to working from only your player inventory. How you select items to breakdown has also been modified
A certain flower has had its name changed to Clivia Lily as its old name was insensitive. Apologies to anyone who was offended, I had no idea the old name was also a slur
The forge can now be moved once it is repaired, this can be done via the building menu with Simeon
Made an alteration to the message you get when you haven’t reached floor 10 of the mines and try to use the minecart, this is to prevent confusion
Gave cooking slots a small plate for the stack information so the text is more readable
Added code to ensure that you cannot double bind keys in settings
The quest log now shows your current, available, and completed quests
Fish are now filleted in a separate tab in the cooking station which allows you to choose what to fillet
Alt currencies will now only appear in the inventory screen when the requisite shop has been discovered
Alt currency trade ratios will now appear when hovering an item in your inventory next to the gold sell price (This only happens when you have unlocked the shop)
The dock below your home has a shadow now (why did it not before? I have no idea)
Gutted the old tutorial system in favor of the compendium to keep things consistent
Changed several UIs back to their older versions in a push to make UI more consistent in general
Modified the popup notification code to place notifications on a separate layer so they don’t get caught behind other UI
Made slight visual changes to items in stores
Added simple item descriptions for furniture items as all other items have them
Made slight updates to the map (more to come as it still isn’t fully accurate)
Altered setup to allow demo saves to turn into normal game saves if you buy and play the demo first

Balance Changes

Oil and Stock have been increased to 60g and 80g respectively to balance out being able to craft them
The mines have had ore spawns rebalanced. Coal should now be far more abundant and it exists in every level of the mines. Other ores have also been balanced to be easier to find in their respective levels
Planted berry bushes have been calibrated to be more profitable. Each bush regrows more quickly now, listed below. Also the sell prices for each of the seeds have been reduced by 30g
Strawberries regrow in 2 days
Raspberries regrow in 1 day
Blueberries regrow in 2 days
Cranberries regrow in 2 days
Blackberries regrow in 1 day
Lowered construction time of most buildings by a few days
Lowered upgrade time of barns and coops
Increased the drop rate for animal fat from all animals
Fishing XP has been modified to give more XP per fish given the time it takes to catch one
Fish traps now grant minimal XP when a fish is retrieved
Slightly increased Hoe XP to compensate for the tool not being used that often
Irrigation Pipes now water all 9 tiles around themselves as opposed to the 4 directions (up, down, left, and right)
Irrigation Pipe orders have increased to 8 pipes per order
Tree tapping restrictions have been lifted and trees on your farm can now be tapped in all seasons outside of winter
Watering Can charge patterns have been changed to be square instead of diamond shaped
The Watering Can now has more charges at each level to compensate for the new watering patterns, charges per level are 15, 36, 48, 64, 80, and 100
When hunting, the tracks left by a fleeing animal last longer
Hunting animal spawns have been rebalanced to be more even across the board, also a bug was addressed which was making the spawns lopsided towards particular animals
The “Close Shave” perk will now always grant the player a 3rd wool when sheering a sheep
The Profit buff from fermenting is now, well, more profitable. There should be a much larger gain when fermenting drinks for profit,
Dynamite rooms in the mines will now spawn chests instead of other random objects like stamina crystals or buff pillars
Stumps that are dug up now fade faster as the animation was a little strange before
Decreased the material cost of fences and paths by about 5 of the required material
Dark furniture recipes now require pine sap to be made
Removed spice plants from spawning in any area that isn’t grassland
Modified additional forage spawns given via the forager perk, you now get fewer
Increased stack limit of all items to 999
Modified stamina drainer spawn rate in mines to keep them from spawning as often
Modified stamina drainers to remove some barricades surrounding their spawn location so you won’t have to knock down barricades to reach them as often, note that this can still happen but the chance is reduced
Altered fermentation ingredients to have fewer health and stamina restoring properties and instead a far more varied assortment
Changed several fermentation ingredients to allow players to gain the tracking buffs from brews they make
Modified several quest requirements to make them more manageable (less of a grind)
Increased the number of objects that can be bases in fermentation
Changed bases in fermentation so that they are doubly effective in whatever benefit they give
Altered tastes of fermentation items to be far more balanced with far fewer sweet tasting items
Altered prices of the items at the inn so that they are not cheaper to buy than they are to sell
Changed wheat seed sell price to 10g from 30g
Added more immediate rewards in the form of gold or items to most quests (For those who have already completed the quests only the gold rewards will be retroactively applied, rest assured you have not missed any significant items)
Removed the requirement of owning a chicken for the first hunting quest to make hunting easier to start
Increased all raw fruit stamina gains slightly to make them mildly viable as an uncooked snack
Slightly modified keysprite effects to make them more visible

Bug Fixes

Any existing fermentation recipes have been deleted, this is due to a bug with the calculations which is addressed in this patch, a brief explanation is the 4th paragraph in the patch notes
Fixed a bug where pigs had a chance to disappear or shift barns when finding truffles
Fixed a bug where dialogue lines would get mixed and interchangeable in the first and second floors of the inn
Fixed a bug that would cause patching to take multiple minutes depending on how many irrigation pipes you had placed in the world
Fixed an issue where food that gave the “Sure Strike” and “Prospector” buff would mince the two buffs, with the cooking station reversing them in the effects listing
Fixed an issue where cooking recipes that were crafted instantly wouldn’t subtract the required heat
Fixed a bug where the player couldn’t add animals to a barn or coop when it was being upgraded
Fixed a few bugs relating to the crafting of fish fillets
Fixed a bug where plants in the swamp cavern were giving cotton as a resource
Fixed a bug where pine trees could be tapped but not give anything while consuming the tap
Fixed a bug where you couldn’t place specifically Desert Flooring in any room with specifically a controller
Fixed a bug where the silo wouldn’t feed barn animals
Fixed a bug where cranberries were considered a catalyst in fermenting
Fixed an issue where certain light sources would turn on/off before/after others
Fixed a bug where Isabel wouldn’t actually sit at the bar in Summer, she’d just walk into it like a broken Roomba
Fixed a bug where carrots wouldn’t provide the dark vision buff when used in fermenting despite saying they would
Fixed a bug where wall objects could be placed half way into the walls due to a collision error
Fixed a bug where NPCs weren’t running the proper schedule when it snowed
Fixed a bug where cantaloupe seeds would grow more quickly than they were said to. The seeds now take 9 days to grow as the tooltip states
Fixed an issue that would cause much of a marine décor to be hard to place. The fix unfortunately will move any placed piece to the right, these will have to be manually picked up and moved back
Fixed a few bugs with marine décor hitboxes
Fixed a bug where the wool count in the barn book for sheering sheep was incorrect as it wasn’t counting the amount gained properly
Fixed an issue where truffles could still spawn under objects in the barn
Fixed a small issue with cow animations
Fixed an issue where cracked ring, pottery shard, dull knife, and crude etching couldn’t be traded in the artifact shop
Fixed the Fireblood Potion sprite in the alchemy UI
Fixed a bug where items in alchemy that you had already discovered all the recipes for would still appear in the discovery listing causing cascading problems
Fixed a bug where alchemy recipes weren’t paging correctly and they were skipping recipes
Fixed an issue where certain tiles in the swamp were not shifting correctly with the seasons
Fixed a bug where the message about the silo running out of feed was running off the message box
Fixed a bug where archeology fragments were not being distributed properly causing certain fragments to be far more common than others. Namely Divine and Fae fragments should be much easier to find now
Fixed a visual issue where items in the recipe section of the brewing UI would overlap the UI awkwardly once you got enough of them
Fixed an issue where selecting fermenting recipes wouldn’t delete the ingredient sprites from the previous recipe selection
Fixed a bug where flavor compliment multipliers for fermentation wouldn’t calculate correctly
Fixed a bug that caused fish in the fishery to take an extra day to lay an egg when initially put in the fishery
Fixed a bug that made all fish eggs hatch at the same rate
Fixed a bug where ore would spawn awkwardly from seams
Made changes to the inventory system in the hopes of alleviating a softlock bug. Unclear if this has fixed the problem as I can’t seem to trigger the issue
Fixed a bug where placing objects too close to doors would cause them to incorrectly z order in the world
Fixed a bug where chopping down trees in winter could trigger them to come back in a different seasonal state
Fixed a bug where perks and level meters in the “Perks” tab of the inventory screen would show the description box as huge for a tick before displaying the appropriate information
Fixed a bug where lightning would still flash even when the game was paused
Fixed a cascading bug where certain sections of the mines wouldn’t generate the proper tiles to cap walls off the correct way
Fixed a bug that would create an extra text box depicting your HP in the center of the screen
Fixed an issue where braziers would lose their shadows when they were lit
Modified shadow positions for several different objects in the game
Fixed a bug where minecart tracks in the mines would hide the player’s shadow
Fixed a bug where the angler buff was not augmenting the fishing minigame as it was supposed to
Fixed a bug where fermentation barrels would always spawn a drink after a patch. This fix will not take effect during this patch but will work for future patches
Fixed a bug where Simeon is standing the wrong way when building a fishery
Cleaned up the fishery construction sprite so the grass will always match the season
Fixed an issue where the silo wouldn’t hold its animation frame through a patch, I.E. it would have feed inside but show as empty in the game world
Fixed a bug that was causing all food in the snacks section to have the incorrect sell price
Fixed a bug where you could continue clicking the Main Menu and Exit Game buttons despite a confirmation prompt being present
Fixed an issue where controller you couldn’t access the Main Menu button
Fixed a controller mapping bug in the fermentation UI
Fixed an issue where the player house after being moved couldn’t be placed back in the exact same location. The solution to this is that the house’s starting position wasn’t aligned to the grid so if you experienced this you won’t be able to put the house back in the same place but the house is now positioned correctly in new games
Fixed a but where moving your house after upgrading it would cause it to visually regress to an un-upgraded house
Fixed an issue where it was possible to speak to Lauren normally when she was at the counter in the inn instead of getting the store
Fixed a bug where if an animal starved it could stop silos from feeding animals in tier 3 structures
Fixed an issue where opening certain menus would visually reset the portcullis
Fixed a bug where Caleb would teleport during a specific schedule
Fixed a bug where secondary cooking slots (any past the initial one you have access to) wouldn’t show proper details
Fixed a bug where controller support wouldn’t work if the mouse was still hovering certain parts of the game UI
Fixed an issue where after a patch you would be able to start fermenting something in a fermentation barrel despite it already being the process of fermenting something
Fixed a bug where gilded truffles generated on a pigs birthday wouldn’t count towards their gilded truffle count
Fixed a small visual glitch with drop down messages to keep them from stacking as heavily
Fixed several minor bugs relating to binding keys
Fixed a bug where the sleep and cancel buttons where mechanically reversed in the sleep menu for controllers
Fixed a bug where Blessed Powder was pulling the wrong name in alchemy
Fixed a bug where the “Chef In The Making” quest didn’t properly dole out its rewards on patch
Fixed a bug where the shipping chest wasn’t displaying stack UI above the items in the slot on occasion
Fixed several minor bugs revolving around adding augments to fisheries
Fixed a z ordering glitch with the description display in menus
Fixed a bug where the text for current pending orders could go out of the UI
Fixed a bug where the player’s mount shadow would disappear under the ravine bridge
Fixed a bug where an exchange shop could stop displaying potential trades
Fixed an issue that caused large gates to not patch properly
Exchange shops now show the appropriate item shop frame based on if you have the currency to purchase the item or not
Fixed a variety of monetary and visual bugs from exchange shops
Fixed a bug on controller where you couldn’t scroll through your quest log
Fixed a small bug with toggling between quest journal views
Fixed a bug that would alter the sprite of fishery augments when scrolling them with a controller
Fixed a bug where you couldn’t remove augments from a fishery on controller
Fixed a bug where you could use the quick pull from chest button while holding a stack which would lock you
Added some code as an extra layer to protect against inventory softlocks
Fixed a bug where rugs you placed in your basement would just disappear
Fixed a bug dealing with rug placement placing unwanted rugs when transferring rooms
Fixed an issue with a weapon rack not Z ordering in Sven’s house (It didn’t have collisions on. I troubleshot for an hour and I just had to tick a box)
Fixed a bug where the Neglected Palate quest gave the wrong rewards
Fixed a bug where the map pop up to show the zone name could appear behind the player location icon
Fixed a recipe bug with stone footstools
Fixed a text bug with the quest “A Noble Dilemma”
Fixed a small visual bug with Malcom’s sitting animation
Fixed a bug where specifying the amount of an object you were going to buy wouldn’t charge you anything when you bought it
Fixed a small visual glitch with characters sitting in chairs and z alignment
Fixed a bug where placing a carpet while holding more than one of them would cause a small visual glitch
Fixed an issue where dried deer jerky was using the boar hide sprite
Fixed a few bugs regarding perk gain SFX
Fixed a bug where you were supposed to unlock the refinement recipes for barrels and crates (decorative) from Simeon’s first quest (yay?)
Made a few cosmetic fixes to controller support when dealing with menus
Fixed a bug where passive functionality on certain items wasn’t always disabled when entering a menu
Fixed a bug where dyes could be alchemically broken down into fibrous extract
Fixed a bug where the automatic pickup SFX would play regardless of the item actually being picked up
Fixed a bug where the portcullis UI wouldn’t reappear after a patch assuming you had it unlocked
Fixed a very specific bug where holes dug with shovels that then reverted to a tilled tile naturally wouldn’t let the player interact with them
Fixed the Beginner Carpentry quest summary from leaving the area the text inhabits
Fixed sprite for the Muskellunge (that’s a fish btw)
Fixed a bug where cooking instant recipes with a full inventory would use the ingredients but not give you the item
Added a general distribution through Steam that will hopefully serve to handle extremely rare graphical glitches

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Verdant Village

Feb 21, 2020

July News Update

June News Update

May News Update

April News Update

March News Update

Verdant Village State Of The Game

Verdant Village V0.4.8.5.2 Full Changelog

Bug Fixes

Verdant Village Patch 0.4.8.5.1

Verdant Village Patch 0.4.8.5.1 Full Changelog

Bug Fixes

Verdant Village Patch 0.4.8.5

Verdant Village V0.4.8.5 Full Changelog

Additions

Quality Of Life

Balance Changes

Bug Fixes

Verdant Village Patch 0.4.8.4

Verdant Village V0.4.8.4 Full Patch Notes

Bug Fixes

December News Update

2022 Update Recap

Additions

QoL (Quality of Life)

Balance Changes

Bug Fixes