Hey there, and welcome to the State of the Game - April 2024!

It's been a while since I posted the last version. Sorry for the inactivity and silence from us. We've been hard at work implementing tons of features and technical changes that will make the development of future versions much easier! They have taken away our activity on the Discord server and Twitter account, as the changes needed a lot of attention to ensure that their additions do more to benefit our workflow than hurt it. With that in mind, here are some of the things we're currently working on!

Firstly, I'd like to address this as this can be a bit of a controversial move. The bad news is that we're removing old save files for this update due to the number of systems that will be overhauled in Beta 1.1. This move can be seen as a downgrade, but I will reassure you that this will make way for more flexible systems in the future! This change has already proven to make several saved files more stable and proves a wider range of flexibility when it comes to changes.

Main Menu

The new main menu systems are finished! Though there are currently still missing and unfinished features with this overhaul, adding new menus and related systems will be much easier.

I can't talk much about the development as I want to keep most of it a secret until release, but we have added several quality-of-life improvements, such as text box shortcuts and having for the escape button.

Structures

The structure system has had a major update! Several structures can now be generated via code instead of being manually built, meaning that we can now achieve a more randomized and natural look when generating certain structures such as plant life.

Along with "natural structures" as I call them, several structures can now also be generated with containers including randomly generated loot inside of them! Structures such as the abandoned campsite now generate a chest containing randomly generated loot data.

Oh, and also there are now more structures scattered around all the surface biomes and the caves. One you will quickly notice from here is that there's a new Birch Tree and moss clumps!

Several structures have been added already to the rest of the surface biomes but they're for you to discover.

Technical Changes

The game now uses keys instead of numbers that will be used to identify several data values, meaning that instead of the item dirt being stored as the number 0, it will now be stored as "phantasia:item:dirt." This system opens up a whole new set of possibilities for addon support in the future!

Several data such as biome data have also moved to separate JSON files instead of being hardcoded into the source code for a more flexible structure. (this also means you can directly mess with a lot of the game's data by changing these values but don't tell anyone that)

Here's an example of what the biome data for Greenia looks like:

That's all we can share for now. There will be tons more news following this Devlog once we start finishing up the content side of this update and polishing these features. We can't wait for you to have this update around August!