[2020] Tundra and Temperature Progress

: You can find the details for this event on the announcement page [url=https://steamcommunity.com/ogg/688060/announcements/detail/1682592620789698570]here[/url].

Hey friends!

This is a rather brief update on game progress and where I'm at.

The last few weeks I was updating some old systems that were poorly written/designed. That's pretty much done but I'm still working out some of the bugs that arise as I go along.

I'm also in the process of adding more natural 'platforms'. Platforms are more of an internal term for any floors that the game can have. For example, grass, wood tile, clay shingles, snow, etc. The bottom face of the game's block, essentially. Natural platforms are ones which appear on their own in the world. The two which I'm working on are grass and snow. Before, grass and snow were simply texture swaps to the grass platform. When I entered a new season I'd swap those textures. Now, those platforms will appear based on the tuning information for weather and season. So, when it rains, grass for that season will naturally grow and appear on dirt blocks. In Winter, if it's snowing, snow platforms will appear on all surfaces exposed to the sky. So, you'd have snow on your rooftops and such. All these weather and season sets are now tuned based on the biome. So, you'll no longer see that weird snow bug in the Tropical biome.

These new changes open up a lot of fun possibilities because I can now have varying seasons per biome, varying season lengths, unique seasons, unique weather per season, etc. For example, I could have the dust storm weather in the Desert spawn things like sand. Or, I could add a unique season to the Voidlands where everything is chaotic, weird plants growing out of control, temperatures swinging about wildly. That's just spitballing, but can see the potential.

After this, I'm jumping onto implementing the temperature system itself. This is what I was describing in my last post. Namely, biomes having a baseline temperature which is affected by weather and season. And then having props control temperature. Heating a house, keeping a greenhouse warm enough to grow crops and so on.

Anyway, the combination of re-writing a lot of the core game and adding in these new features has resulted in a very long wait for a new game update and I apologize for the delay. I know it's easy for games to seem like they are abandoned in this genre but have faith that I'm still trucking along. That's why I like to do my normal weekly updates. This one, however, is just impossible to get out at that normal cadence. Thanks so much for all your patience.

Best,

Waylon