New Year's Devlog: What we did in 2021, and What we plan for 2022 (Patreon)

Happy New Year,

I’m Dwarf2500, from the programming team, here to share a progress and plans update. First off, let’s take a look back over the last year! (or just skip to 2022 to see what’s coming up)

Winter 2021

A year ago we were still in the middle of addressing major stability issues. It had become clear the previous fall that there were a variety of structural issues in the project’s original code, which we could not effectively continue forward with, without addressing. 

However, thanks to your support over the previous year (2020), Team Nimbus was able to bring in additional staff and these new team members not only allowed us to tackle more tasks, but they also brought in a lot of new experience to the team, experience which helped us identify and address these issues. The first batch of these improvements were still wrapping up at the start of the year, (any new code creates new bugs), and things were still a little shaky.

Despite these “background” changes, we still wanted to introduce new content. While part of our team continued to focus on building new dungeon floors, another began focusing on introducing more seasonal event mechanics, which for this season meant the first components of the spring Royal Matchmaker event (which is coming up again soon😏).

Spring 2021

This led up to our first major updates of the year: Savannah 6 and Monster Palettes! Savannah 6 included a lot of new mechanics, while also being the intended floor for Tro’s lab (which we had been sneaking into the end of previous floors, pushing it along with each update). The Monster Palettes were also a major milestone and introduced quite a bit of variety to farms, combat, and breeding. 

Along with the implementation of palettes, all monster abilities were now working, all monster types were enabled for combat, and a little later, SFX were finally introduced for those abilities.

During this period additional changes were introduced.

• We’d started trickling in some new pirate types (Drunken, Musket, Poacher, and Headhunter), which were seeded throughout existing floors.
• The Joy King event was introduced.
• Improvements were made to Save game handling including optimizing version conversions, and recycling autosaves.
• Meanwhile in the background we had also been hard at work making significant improvements to our item data…

Summer 2021

A significant number of item changes (prices, value, recipes, etc), as well as some performance improvements to related UIs (Inventory and Cooking) were finally released. 

Bug fixes were now established as a major priority with each build and, thanks to our generous players taking the time to report issues on our discord👍, the game was growing more stable than ever; despite the sweeping background changes made during this period. This even meant new bugs were being discovered, as players began to interact with more of the game’s systems😂
Mid-summer also saw additional changes.

• The new Summer Event put the new item changes to good use. The event included new mechanics requiring special seeds, “harvested” pages, it’s own “boss” encounter, and a special fertilizer reward.
• A new popup dialog was introduced, along with monster personalities, allowing you to talk to your monsters.
• We updated the cooking mechanics to make it (a little) easier to discover new recipes.
• We began trying to improve combat balance and scaling issues (ongoing).

Finally, at the end of summer, Savannah 7 was finally released, as well as two more structures: the Hot House to support hatching more eggs, and the Weather Balloon to predict the weather. Along with weather prediction, we also updated the Calendar UI, making it easier to track future events, like holidays or graduations.

Fall 2021

New content to wrap up the year included:

• A new Log window, to better inform the player about background changes on the farm.
• New gameplay and event changes to the Hallow Haunt and Provision Day (Autumn and Winter) events.
• The Plankton pen which, while the player’s variety of types is currently limited, is an additional source of ingredients on the farm; including ones the player cannot refine from crops.

As well, just in time to make it out this year, we also released our second set of significant code changes; this time related to character (protagonist, monster, companion, and enemy) data. We’d been working on these since the start of the summer which, in addition to addressing background issues, added intended function (cooldowns and states persisting), new design (companions now use the player’s level, instead of their own), and laid the groundwork for future features (ability levels). 

Along with these changes, the Party Window, Party Selection, and Training Room UIs were updated. Those new UIs included new changes to the new standard “character card” which were added to the previously updated Harvest/Breeding UI, such as: new filters, new sorting, equipment, improved point spending (level up), as well as a variety of new and improved tooltips for that information.

Fun fact: To give an example of how much the project has been cleaned up: a legacy save [0110f] made in the current version [0125c] is 30% the size (70% smaller), for all of the same data. None of that is improved compression, just junk/duplicate data removed.

2022

So what’s coming up this next year? Well immediately going into the new year we’re trying to wrap up:

• Improved scaling and leveling changes.
• Improvements to how Buffs/Debuffs stack and are displayed.
• An updated traits UI, which includes “links” to parents (allowing you to step through a monster’s ancestry).
• The final floor of the Savannah, and the events and encounters that will wrap up that “arc”.

Further along:

• Ability leveling will finally be functional
• A variety of UIs are still due to be updated, such as: Inventory, Combat Rewards, Hatching, Jobs Board & a new Monster Contracts board!
• Early Savannah floors should see a polish pass
• A new Forest dungeon will be introduced, populated with new enemy monsters & bosses
• Further tweaks and balance changes to the Farm based on player feedback.
• Multi-tier upgradable farm house, with plans for customizable rooms

As well, a third (and hopefully the last for a while🤞) set of “sweeping” changes will be started; this time improving our dialog and quest data. Those changes should finally allow us to make larger, and more frequent, additions to the game: adding story, tutorial, dating, and town content throughout the game (which we are well aware is sorely missing). To put it another way, after these improvements are made we should be able to switch a lot of focus away from stability and start introducing new content and story at a much more regular pace.

I don’t think anyone on the team expects to finish up the game this year (2022)... But I believe we all expect this to be our best year yet, and to finally put the end in sight. Thank you for all your support so far, as well as your continued support going forward.

And keep those error reports coming. They help so much. Dropping reports off on our Discord ( https://discord.gg/GXt973Q ) is effectively handing your report directly to the programming team. (We programmers monitor Discord directly, though not other platforms, such as Patreon or Steam).