Diary #17 – 0.4.03 “Pride” Update

I wanted to drop another update this week before I’m off to California for an extended weekend/vacation. Mostly it’s just a bunch of bugfixes after the 0.4.01 release two weeks ago that unlocked the second progression level, plus the special Pride train I posted to social media earlier this week. If you haven’t already, please go ahead and try this build and provide feedback – it’s vital to shaping Iron Village into a fun, complete game!

Here’s what’s changed between the last upload (0.4.01) and this one:

  • The MacOS build finally works again! (Sorry I didn’t realize it wasn’t working earlier, whoops.)
  • Buildings, crop rows, and other structures have been split into separate sprites in order to allow drawing pops between the component parts.
    • For example, this allows pops to walk within a farm field without being drawn completely above or below.
  • Sprite origins adjusted for better y-sorted z-layering
    • If a pop walks in front of or behind a building, it will now be properly drawn or hidden. This usually happened before, but frequently didn’t.
  • Tree buildings are now separate sprites, and have been adjusted to remove depth-clashing.
    • Trees that were lined up in a row overlapped with each other, something which looks off if you stare at it closely enough.
  • Pops can now “enter” buildings: if applicable, they walk to the front door and disappear, rather than being drawn on top of the building.
  • Load window: Select a specific save file, rather than just loading the one save slot that comes with the game.
    • By default, games are now saved in a “saves” subdirectory, whereas previously they were stored in the default user data directory (e.g. AppData/Roaming/Godot/app_userdata/Iron Village/ on Windows).
    • The Save As… button allows for you to make separate copies of the save.
  • Continue button: load whichever town was most recently played.
  • User-customizable town & railway names
    • The town name also gets displayed on your train station
  • Pride Train: For a limited time, the first train of a new game is decked out in an LGBTQ+ pride livery. At some point after June I’ll make it an optional feature so it’s not just a limited holiday feature.
  • Smoke from the steam engine now correctly renders when the clock speed is adjusted. The code was in place, it just wasn’t consistently triggered.
  • Wheels now move relative to the speed of the train.
  • The recent transactions section of the Railway Status menu has been tweaked for better legibility.
    • Added icons to show which resource was given.
    • Properly removed older entries to prevent the list getting too long.
    • Fixed issues with saving the approval data properly.
  • Tweaked building icons in the build panel
    • Previously these were just using the same asset as the building itself, but this wasn’t feasible with them being split into separate components.
    • In most cases, these are now even smaller images, but upscaled with more descriptive icons.
  • Hide progress bars in production buildings when no work is being done. This should reduce visual clutter in larger towns.

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