Development Update

Hi everyone,

Huge thank you to everyone for all the thoughts and feedback so far on the experimental Beta release! The dev team has been hard at work incorporating your feedback, squashing bugs, and generally getting the next version ready for you. We're getting very close, but in the meantime, Greg and I (that is, I'm Tim, CEO of the publisher Hooded Horse) have been talking and thinking together on how to keep all of you informed of what's going on, by sharing interim updates like this one between versions talking a bit about what is being worked on and coming with the next version. This is the first of many such regular posts, to share frequent news of what the dev team is doing on an ongoing basis.

We'd love your feedback on this as we implement this process - some of what we'll be sharing will be minor stuff, like about how this or that bug is being worked on, so if you end up feeling we're giving you too much detail let us know, but if you like getting that kind of detailed frequent updates, let us know as well! This is a bit different than before, where we'd sort of wait to have big new features to show you, so we do want to make sure you enjoy these much more frequent updates on all the aspects of development.

The approach we're going to try is this - Greg has let us into his internal development team server and planning board, so we can directly see him and his growing team working on everything, see what they are doing and saying about this and that bug or new feature or balance tweak, the current task lists, basically everything as it happens. I'm staring at the board and discussions now, and Greg and his growing team have a lot going on we can talk about. We're then going to report on all that to you, and convey some examples and details on what the dev team is doing. That way, Greg can keep his full focus on managing his team and getting the updates ready as fast as possible, while we focus on giving you regular reports on what is coming by observing the team working directly.

Ok then, diving in to this one! So I'll be writing this one myself, since we just got into the development server and board today and it's a Saturday, and I'd rather ask myself to work on a weekend than have someone else on our team do so, but I didn't want to wait any longer to give you some news - but I'm kind of a useless CEO at this point and can ramble a bit. But for future updates, you'll usually have one of our great community team writing this, and they are much better than me. But let me give it a try!

Balance Changes

A lot of the changes the team has been doing as they prepare the next release are focused here. Yields of things like goats and orchards have been adjusted, the costs of many buildings modified, consumption of garments and footwear has been reduced, export values changed, and so forth. I'm seeing dozens upon dozens of balance changes in the dev records, many informed by the feedback players have been giving, touching so many aspects of the game - thank you to everyone who has been giving all the feedback on the experimental version!

Gameplay Tweaks

Here the dev team has been doing a lot to improve the