Iron Village Dev Diary 29

Diary #29 – Steam Demo Mk. III

Hi all – it’s time to drop another demo! Huge shout out to Bea for testing and logging a bunch of bugs, this new build doesn’t cover everything but should address the majority of issues raised.

Also, we have new store art! Thanks to Nico Square for that, I commissioned him to put together the “capsule” art and it is fantastic!

The demo is up on Google Play too – it’s out as a public test, which should make installation a bit easier than sideloading it from Itch.

I’ve got a list of release notes if you’re curious about all of the changes.

  • Adjusted the Build Menu to fully block the Train UI when open.
  • Upgraded Godot to 4.3
  • Fixed the Build Menu to make click and drag work as a scroll method. (Mainly to make the Android version work better, but this is technically cross platform.)
  • Add a “Loading…” pop-up, and load in background thread(s)
    • Known Issue: Single-threaded loading in MacOS, for some reason multi-threaded loading caused the game to crash.
  • Make sure controller hints stay hidden at the start – this would be confusing for Android players (assuming they don’t have a controller connected).
  • Added new settings:
    • Enable/Disable Tutorial Hint Bubbles
    • Toggle “Extra Zoom” – Adds +1 to the scale factor between the game’s coordinates and the screen coordinates. See Diary #11 – So You Want a Resolution for more info.
    • Fullscreen is no longer an option in Android – it’s always on.
  • Certain in-game pop-ups are shifted to the left on Android, to allow room for the on-screen keyboard.
  • Change the Build Menu to put buildings in separate tabs.
    • This also includes an ordering system, so that within each tab there is a logical ordering.
  • Add steam engines that can travel to the right. (Not available in the demo.)
  • Create a more in depth tutorial system. (Still not huge, but should be enough to get most people started.)
  • Fixed an issue where selling goods to a train would replace the goods already present.
  • Can now click and drag a stone road over a dirt road to upgrade it. (Required demolishing and rebuilding prior to this.)
  • Fixed an issue where one type of tree said “Demolish” instead of “Chop Down”.
  • Fixed an issue where a transparent part of the Train UI was blocking clicks to other UI.
  • Rather than displaying the next train’s spawn time, the UI will show an estimated arrival time.
  • Finally fixed a navigation map generation error that occurred on the second load since start.
    • I’m not sure how often this actually had any real impact, but there would always be a weird log message about the navigation mesh having overlaps whenever I started a game, exited to menu, and then started or loaded another game. Turns out I just forgot to do some cleanup on exit.
  • Switch LT/RT with LB/RB – Train UI now uses the bumpers for navigation, time uses triggers. This allows us to use bumpers for build menu tabs as well.
  • Later steam engines require more water.
  • Adjust cargo train/passenger train ratio in favor of cargo, to reduce immigration rate. (Having too many people was making the game too easy.)
  • Block demolition (or chopping trees) when the storage is too full to hold the resulting refund.
  • Keep the cursor in bounds when the camera moves, and vice versa.
  • Reserve capacity when demolishing. This prevents a workaround where you queue up a bunch of demolitions, and then go over wood capacity when they finish.
  • Fix a issue where trying to overwrite a save in “Save As…” would still hide the dialog, despite requiring further player input.
  • Use Godot’s own translations for built-in UI (i.e. Save & Load Dialogs)


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