August News Update

Hello again, we’ve once again come to the end of a month and I am once again confused as to how we got here. I’ll get right down to business however. If you read the previous news update you may be thinking to yourself “Hey Exodus, you said you were looking to patch this month, why are you a big ol’ liar?”. To which I would say, “This is the reason it’s a bad idea to specify release dates”. In the words of my father, my mouth is writing checks my ass cannot cash.

In all seriousness, I did mean to patch this month, but two things happened. First, and this is the big one. There was just too much art left to do and I miscalculated on that. There has also been some swapping around with artists and the mixing of things there slowed things down a bit.

Aside from that I came to a realization about halfway through this month. I had been quietly starting to brush certain parts of this patch off saying things like, “I can drop that for now.” or “We can put that off until next patch, it isn’t that important”. I realized a few weeks back that this was a terrible plan, mostly because it spits in the idea of a roadmap, which I just drew up and posted about two or three months ago.

I determined that while it may take longer, I should put what was intended into this patch. This means not rushing it, even if it takes a bit longer and I have to look dumb because I said I would patch this month. This post so far has essentially been a long protracted, oops, and I’m sorry.

With all that said I did actually do stuff this month for Verdant Village. Both NPCs have their schedules set for every season. Dialogue is basically done for both, got a few lines left to write for one NPC. Quest wise two have been added, there are a few more to write. As for zones, I’ve added two (basically three) zones. The third on basically needs a sprite drawn for it and that’s it. Then I got one more to make to meet the four zones quota for the roadmap.

Outside of that, the compendium is done, at least for its current iteration, some stuff will be added later as it becomes relevant but for now its working. I think for the compendium specifically what was actually finished this month was implementing the 100’ish challenges.

Speaking of challenges I actually have an update on that. There are plans for more of them yet, however I discovered an issue I was unaware of. Apparently, Steam put a cap of 100 achievements on any game on Steam, which I was unaware of. I was just going to make every challenge a Steam achievement because that made logical sense to me. Since that limit is in place I’ll be picking out specific ones to make into Steam achievements. I apologize for the discrepancy, blame Valve I guess. I did look into it, apparently the reasoning is that some games were going onto Steam with literal thousands of achievements which they didn’t like.

Last bit about challenges. The reward for doing these was originally was intended to be the Steam achievement, because I mean, that makes sense. Given that not all of them can be achievements I have it written down to add some sort of in-game reward for completing them. I’m not sure what this will be honestly. I’ll have to give it some thought, might just be like a golden player statue or something cosmetic of that nature. I just wanted to mention this because I personally was kind of disappointed by the fact that I can’t make them all achievements. Sort of undercuts the feeling of accomplishment a bit I think.

Aside from all of that there is a mail system planned and I may put that in during this patch to allow for a brief, I guess tutorial or set of easy objectives to ease new players into systems. Verdant Village is relatively devoid of teaching moments honestly. Unlike something like Stardew the opening also doesn’t give you a firm objective like “rebuild the farm”. You are basically dropped in so there should probably be some sort of gentle guiding for players less familiar with this type of game.

After all of that there are also plans for another exchange shop like the archeology one but I’ll be honest that may get neglected for this patch as putting it in would probably take a bit of development time plus a fair number of assets. While the Isabel’s shop was basically just furniture, which is easy to implement this one would actually have gameplay related stuff making it a larger task in general. So it will probably something for the future.

I think that’s basically everything. Sorry to write an essay here but I figure you all deserve to know what’s going on, not to mention that’s the point of these. To address when patching will happen, I don’t know. I would like to say it will be in the near future. Given where development is at, I would think it will still be soon, but with the creation of art being a bit harder to predict I can’t say for sure. So, your patience is appreciated. And for my part I will attempt to not give harder deadlines for patches when I can’t predict them as well as I think I can. Hope you all have fun playing for now, you’ll hear from me again hopefully sooner rather than later.