September Development Update

I've been hard at work on developing Gravelston Island, the second villager island you will visit. I'm happy to report that ALL villager portraits for Gravelston have been finished!

I do plan to add a few more expression options for all villagers, but that will roll out a bit later. Right now I'm just focused on getting the primary expressions for all portraits completed. I've also been working on the smaller sprite sheets for each villager. I've completed ALL OF THESE as well! (17 full villager sprite sheets, showing only a few with idle directions)

I've also been streaming the creation of the portraits and sprite sheets on YouTube and Twitch. Feel free to follow me on either one (or both!) if you'd like to watch me develop the game in real time!

As for the island of Gravelston itself, I've been working setting up all building placeholders, some villager waypoints, and overall detailing and decoration of the island itself. That's all a bit too work in progress at the moment for me to feel comfortable showing (it's rough), but that should come in the next couple of updates here. What I can show, is the upper cave floor layout, and the cute little train that now runs through it! The train (also a WIP) travels around the island and into the upper cave floor. There is a purpose to the train but I don't want to spoil that, so just know it isn't just there to look nice. :) (don't mind the very WIP town area or cave inside!)

I can also show the WIP mineral/fossil/artifact museum. It will have over 100 things for you to find and donate and will award you various prizes for each donation and also for completing entire sets. The dialogue and functionality for donating is all done, I just need to add the rewards and also finish the museum interior to look a lot nicer (this is just a rough layout with no detailing or special art added yet)

Gravelston also is home to Gravelston Gardens, which is the landscaping shop run by Cooper Clast. I've developed the terrain modification tools, which you can purchase to raise and lower your island's terrain to terraform it exactly how you want it to look. You can also purchase items that can fill your lowered divot areas with water to create your own lakes, along with various other terrain items. The shop also carries a wide variety of decorations for your island! You'll need to get your island up to a high enough quality Star Rating to meet the demands of some villagers, so you'll likely be stopping by here more than a few times.

With Gravelston comes more furniture options, including the Wooden Furniture Set and the Steel Kitchen Set which is now nearly completed!

Over to combat, I've added two new Glob variants, the Oil Glob and Fire Glob. When Oil Globs slam down to attack you, they also leave behind an oil patch on the ground. If you step in this you'll go sliding! The Fire Globs are much worse, as they will leave fire on the ground after slamming into it. The fire lasts for a few seconds and will damage you if touched. I'm soon going to also add the functionality of a Fire Glob slamming on to an oil patch to ignite it for a longer burn. Oh yeah, and both the Fire and Oil Glob's abilities get cancelled out if they slam into shallow water! So you can use that to your advantage to get an upper hand. :)

Moving on to more general updates, the Town Board located on each villager island has now been updated and improved. The Town Board offers you a place to accept tasks from villagers in exchange for money and items. But now it also rewards experience points toward a skill. Each request is now linked to a specific skill, such as Fishing, Foraging, Woodcutting, etc. This is a great way to level up your skills quickly so you can unlock more Skill Reward Tiers!

Speaking of Skill Rewards, I've added a quality of life tool tip feature to the Skill Reward menus so you can easily see at a glance what each reward provides. I still need to do the icons for each Skill Reward here, but you can see some of the fun upgrades you can unlock.

I've also made sure it's easier to track exactly how much experience you have in any skill, as now the Skills menu displays both the progress bar toward the next level, and also the exact number of experience points you're currently at and how much more you need to gain. This is great for all those min/maxer specialists out there who really want to pump up their numbers efficiently.

To top all of that off, you'll now see a little status indicator pop up over your head when you gain skill XP for all skills. This way you can see exactly where all your experience is coming from. Finally, I've just recently finished up the leveling up functionality, so now you can properly level up and see your accumulated experience push you to new levels!

Along with all this development, I've also continued to improve and optimize the game and try to make sure it will be as bug free as possible. I've added full keyboard only/controller support for the Crafting menu now, along with a few other UI elements that were missing it before. I'm making it a goal to ensure the game launches with full controller support and key rebinding options.

That's it for this update! I'll be continuing with the development of Gravelston for the rest of this month. The goal is to get it mostly wrapped up as soon as possible so I can move on to the final island (Stratus) and that will bring us much closer to a release. Thanks everyone for your continued patience and support. The feedback and comments have been quite wonderful and supportive and it really helps me as a solo developer to keep pushing to finish this game and not let everyone down.

I plan to stream more development over the coming weeks so if you want to see that, be sure to follow, but of course it's absolutely not necessary! I just want to share a little bit more of the game's development and talk with the community, so feel free to lurk or say hello.

Until next time!

-Koni