Restoring a Village, Week 1

Hello... Villagers!!

I’ve been putting off writing this post for far too long. That... probably goes without saying, eh?

So let’s jump right to the good news: active development has resumed on Village Monsters! The fabled v1.1 will release this October.

If you want to know more of the details of my hiatus then please take a look at the following post on my website.

I am so sorry to have abandoned the game without explanation. You deserved so much better than that, especially after the buggy mess that was v1.0. To be frank, the last year has be awful. Every plan I made blew up in my face, every decision I made was the wrong one.

The last thing I want to do is wallow even more, so instead I want to focus on what I can for you and the game right now. From here until release I plan to release weekly (or more frequent) updates on my progress.

Here's Week 1!

tl;dr

Everything is still on schedule for an October release for v1.1, aka the reboot, the restoration, the redo. Still gotta nail that name.

This past week has been mostly a technical slog as I get back in the saddle. It’s necessary but slow going work.

Previous Restoring a Village: Week 0

The Good

Flyswatting, aka fixing the small (but annoying) things

First thing I did was update GameMaker and look at all the errors, warnings and “suggestions” it made to me. There were… a lot.

Most of these are false positives or can be ignored, but going through them and fixing them was a really useful way to get back in the swing of things. The code base is now much more robust and should be less prone to breaking as I continue to bring it up to release condition.

Music and sound compression

One of the “small” bugs ended up turning into a bigger but worthwhile fix: many sound files (including music) were being incorrectly converted into a different format and then back again. This resulted in both crunchier sounds and audio bugs. It’s fixed now!

The Bad

Slow Going

I had hoped this part would go faster. I know that it’s all so necessary and important to dig my way out of my self-inflicted hole. But I had hoped to be able to show off more things, while 80% of the screenshots I took this week are all of code or bugs. Blech.

Missing Kickstarter Rewards

While auditing something unrelated, I noticed that one of the Kickstarter backer messages wasn’t where I knew it should be. I went and checked and found that many of them are in fact missing.

I added almost all the KS backer rewards during a two week stretch in early 2022. Most were just text appends and I hadn’t noticed their absence among all the other missing or corrupted files.

This is a huge oversight and was not intentional. I’ll need to re-add these items by hand and it is a priority to fix in this next week.

The Weird

When bad weather crashes the title screen.

Depending on the (in-game) season the weather on the title screen changes. However, some update or other changed how particle systems work when destroyed, and the punchline is this: bad weather could crash the game before it even started. That’s fixed now.