Hi, folks. The Rubble Ruins update has been out about a week and a half, and the work for the next update is well underway. However, it'll still be a while, so I thought I'd give a quick progress update in the meantime. I've also set up a public roadmap on Notion tracking high-level tasks in the short-term (which I've been updating live).

The Peanut Village update mainly constitutes major polish and rework of the dialogue system, some rework of the events system, and actually populating the village with NPCs, dialogue, and general NPC-centric content. (plus some other stuff). I've grouped these tasks together since the village would have been a major stress-test of the existing dialogue system, which works okay but needs a lot of love. This update also has a lot of overdue visual polish, like properly animating the peanuts and giving some life to the dialogue textboxes.

So far, work on the NPCs is effectively done. I've been setting up Peanuts to be randomizable, and to have a set of standard animations and expressions per body-type so that a populous area feels more organic. I've also finished some state behaviour to let some walk around town while others chat amongst themselves (until you rudely interrupt!).

Normally, I'd be much further along progress-wise than this, but my partner and I are moving apartments soon, and I've had to shift a lot of time toward the move. (I'm also still actively looking for work, which is my equivalent of a day job). For that reason I think it's likely it'll be a while until the next public update. It'd be wonderful to work full-time on the game, and I could clear out most of this update's worth of tasks in honestly just a week or two with more dedicated time, but I'm just grabbing a few hours here and there. Past the aspect of not really having much time to devote, I also find it hard to make meaningful progress with short batches of time vs really getting on a roll with a longer period of focus, so it's not an ideal way to use the time I do have, either.

In the time that I do have, I'll be starting work on more unique art (buildings) for Peanut Village, plus the dialogue system revamp.

As always, I post pretty regular live progress updates on the Discord server (including weird bugs!), and we hang out and play games sometimes too. You're more than welcome to drop in!

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