Emerald Woods - Ponytail [0.4.3]

A new version of Emerald Woods, the chill no-combat farming, building, and exploration roguelike, is now available!

Play for free for now (online/windows) at https://slash.itch.io/emerald-woods, even using your phone! we are still in an “Earlier Access” phase, so let us know any suggestions you have in the discord.

If you like the game, you can still become an Early Supporter (only 6 remaining!), and get your name into the game.

It’s been far too long since the last version; while this one doesn’t avance a lot towards the 0.5 in the roadmap, it carries some long desired improvements and fixes. Let me go ahead and share some of them!

First off, I started working a little bit in player customization; you can now select from four hair styles and three clothing styles; some infrastructure was built so that I will be able to plug in a lot more content made by a real pixel artist. Further customization will also include skin, hair and clothing color.

All this is now accessible from the improved “New Game” panel, which also now shows a preview of the season and some info on what you might expect.

The onboarding has been improved with season-specific tips, as well as tips when you swim for the first time, or an item is put automatically in your backpack.

A bunch of UI/UX improvements were also made, including:

• Removed “current mode” info from HUD, instead the dynamic instructions on the left bar are much more complete now.
• Improved contrast of floating messages when shown over bright tiles like snow.
• Animals that are “happy” now have a heart indicator on top, making it easier to know which animals from your farm you have fed.
• On the container popup, you can now use the main action key to transfer a single item.
• Also on the container popup, some fixes were made when using items from it, and this was restrict to only eating.
• Incorporate Ctrl as “confirm” key all around.
• Add [i]nventory command replacing Plunge, so you can easily check your backpack at any time.

On the audio front, I added season-specific melodies with a new pack of “spring” tunes created by QuietGecko; they are less melancholic, maybe a bit too energetic. I still don’t decide if I like them fully or not. What do you think?

This version is light on gameplay changes but not completely devoid of them; berries now have a much lower chance of producing seeds to avoid overabundance of them. The boxes now have their capacity doubled, and carts capacity has been reduced to 20.

Some work was also made in the “true pixel” display model; the goal is to display sharp pixel art, without any filter applied to it. The problem comes with our scaling method, since we scale the viewport to fit any size of window, it causes pixels to be of uneven size. Still devising a way to tackle this.

Scattered documents have been added for 13 new Early Supporters, thank you! There are still 6 tickets available for this, in case you want to make it to the game!

Some more assorted Fixes

• Prevent building on top of plants
• Fix leashed animal pulling logic to stick to player
• Fix appearance of rotated middle sector of gray table
• Fix issues with using bedroll (warping through walls)
• Fix many typos

See you in the woods!