Patch #25: Construction Yards! Roadmap to next update!

A Bigger Scope for the Next Update

Thank you everyone for playing our game! I want to give you all a heads up about our intermediate plans. You see, we've noticed players asking for a bigger scoped updates. A much bigger scope. Thus we've decided to focus for the next 4+ months on landing these big gameplay expansions.

Why we are doing this

If you are reading this during this development period: I want to reassure you that we are working hard! Whiskerwood is our passion project and we appreciate everyone who has given us their play time.

For background: exactly 6 months ago we released Whiskerwood into Early Access. At that point we started doing daily patches while writing down every feature request and bug report. We soon after 2 weeks of daily patches the features commonly requested were getting bigger & bigger in scope. In hindsight this was a natural progression. When doing daily patches we could only destabilize the codebase for 1 day. That limited the size of tasks we could tackle. Thus we realized we needed to switch to larger patches in incremental steps.

Thus we switched to weekly patches for several months, then switched to the current bi-weekly pace. Bi-weekly has proven a good balance, but now we've arrived at a point where a grand leap forward in gameplay is required. We cannot reach our next goal through bi-weekly updates. We need to ask for your trust, as we work longer on a massive update.

What we are working towards

You see, our goal for the next update is to add full ship construction, trading between other colonies, naval battles, and island defenses (towers and fortresses). This is a large chunk of work and we need to destabilize the codebase. We are in effect going back into production mode. We plan to post news about this update as it progresses, but I need to ask players to be patient. Please bear with us during this waiting period and please be excited for the new content we'll be able to add and polish thanks to this wait!

Once the big update ships we intend return to daily, then bi-weekly patches.

Daniel

Lead Programmer on Whiskerwood

Patch #25's Construction Rework

What we have shipped in this Patch #25 is a focus on stability and a much needed rework: construction. Now you can control construction workers more precisely, and even boost construction efficiency through the new construction yard.

Construction yard:

• Construction yard is now an insta-build/movable camp that can be assigned a required (apprentice) foreman and 5 additional builders

• Researchable in second research tier (T1)

• All workers gain a small speed/productivity buff, and use carts for delivery

• Yard workers only work on sites within their work radius (configurable)

  • Yard workers work on sites sorted by distance/priority relative to their construction yard.

• Construction yard supports overtime, with associated buff and ability to work through the night.

Construction sites and policies:

• Construction speed now accounts for whisker productivity. It was previously just based on builder count. with RapidConstruction applying a flat multiplier on top of it.

• RapidConstruction policy and construction yard bonus now act consistently via agent modifiers with productivity and speed bonuses. Thus the description of rapidconstruction has changed slightly.

  • Rapidconstruction otherwise scaled ridiculously high being a X2 mult over all other modifiers

• Late Construction policy has been fully removed from the game. Instead being a benefit of construction yard overtime.

• Globally, workers will try to finish a construction delivery in their hands instead of immediately failing upon