November Update and December Plans

Patch Notes

• Added Wants and Happiness system for units

• Added wealth system for units

• Implemented player controlled Unit Schedule

• Made the starting town area bigger

• Added Timber Worker(Bow) building

• Added tool use for production buildings and home buildings

• Added outline to text

• Changed production time for some items

• Added visual floating icons and text when unit purchases an item to see what was purchased

• Added free unit recruitment depending on town happiness

• Raised cost of instantly purchasing units to 100 gold from 25 gold

• Added related entries in the help menu

Wants and Happiness

Units now all have wants and related happiness stat to them that they will raise by purchasing items from the market stall and resting at home. This replaces the previous purchasing system, where a unit will select a random item to purchase that is in storage. Now units will purchase one item of each want which will give that unit max satisfaction. Satisfaction decreases at 10% a day, and the player may set the threshold where they purchase though the UI by dragging the bottom arrow.

The exception is rest satisfaction, which replenishes at an hourly rate in the Home phase once a unit reaches their home. Rest satisfaction also goes down at an hourly rate, though it only affects town happiness once when a day begins.

If no related want item is available a unit will purchase a random item to prevent a situation where all storages are filled with currently unusable items. The wants and happiness stats are updated once a day, so player can get and obtain the max bonus for at least a day. Max happiness is obtained at 70% satisfaction currently and is supposed to represent units going through their reserves before running out. For the player this means that they can experience yet fix a shortage before it becomes an issue.

Wealth System

Currently as units buy items they will gain 1 point to wealth which will change or increase the selection of items they will buy as wants. This will also change the weighting of items towards their happiness.

Unit Schedule

With the implementation of rest as a want stat, I felt it would be good to allow the player to change the phases of the day, where previously it was static at what times units would do which phase. This will allow the player to control the amount of rest satisfaction their units get. Also if multiple home phases are queued in a row time will skip forward and rest satisfaction will be applied to all units per hour skipped. The screen will dim briefly in game to let the player know that the skip occurred.

Tools

A few buildings have the ability to utilize tools which units working at the building will buy at the market. Buildings will have the name of the tool and the speed bonus to production it gives listed in their UI, if they can use a tool at all.

December Plans

More Items and Buildings

I would like to spend December focusing on creating more items and buildings for the player to use with the new features. I had plans to implement items as I implemented features but find it disappointing to have these features with little to use them with and have decided to have more in now.

Town Area Expansion

To work with the new buildings and item income, I will also create a method to expand your town area using gold. The amount you can expand will likely be adjusted in the future.

Visual Improvement

Some examples of things I plan to improve visually are showing units working within buildings, and making more varied UI. This will replace the units repeating the movement animation outside the building entrance. Implementing more varied UI will also help eliminate some of the space taken up by X's for unused slots.

Price Raise

With the December update I plan to raise the price to a base price of $10USD. I would like to have a final base price of $15USD on release, which will probably be at the end of Q1 2024.