Progress Update 2

Things are coming along nicely but I'm settling into the slower parts of development which is testing/balancing all these changes. To be honest I'm also second guessing myself a lot and struggling to decide what needs to be in this update now vs later.

Overall enchanting is feeling pretty solid with all its features working. Equipping armour and the new armour types is also finished.

A.I has had a bit of a pass to have some basic pathfinding so the enemies feel smarter and their spawning has been rebalanced so there are about 75% more animals in the world during the day. It turns out there was also a nasty bug preventing animals from spawning in a semi obscure circumstance if you placed your Totem near a particular corner of the starting island and it covered 0,0,0. I'm hoping that worlds feel much more consistently full of life for everyone once this is live.

Night Sky

Something about the nightsky always felt a bit off for me and I finally figured out it was due to the stars. I was using a tool that lets me manipulate the sky with a good degree of control at various times of day, which for during the day and dawn/dusk is great but at night its way of rendering stars was convoluted and frankly underwhelming.

So I've mixed its rendering with a traditional skybox and now nightskies are feeling much more dramatic.

View store page

Enchanting Bench

Since these posts are a little dry, here is the animaton for the Enchanting Bench. I'd actually made this animation Years ago for other benches so I'm glad to finally see it in there!

View store page

Roadmap

I'm still not sure when this will all go live, its a lot of tweaks that are hard to predict the end of. It will be done when it feels right rather than once X is finished. For example I'm now focused on more combat related things and I'm considering changing how stamina recovery works. One feature I've been considering is a change to cooking so that the first time you eat a meal it gives a small permanent buff to things like max health and stamina. So the question becomes, do I make this change now or leave it for a later cooking update.