What's left until Peanut Village?

Howdy! Quick little update.

As I mentioned on my 11/2 update, most of my time this month went into a big IRL move. We're just starting to get settled in the new place and finishing up the last major unpacking/cleaning tasks this week, so I'm starting to have bits of time for the game again. As expected, I didn't really have headspace for the game while the move was happening, so we're not too mcuh farther along right now, but I'm hoping to finish the next update in the next week or two.

Per the public roadmap, here's the status of the Peanut Village update:

• ☑️Dialogue system rebuilt and readied for controller support, and given a heavy coat of polish
• ☑️Events system reworked to be query-able, and fixing many related bugs causing major events (like getting the wand) to perma-save
• ☑️NPC behaviour design is complete, allowing for NPC peanuts to be visually randomized, have different movement and behaviour patterns, and to have a variety of standardized animations and expressions to make conversations more lively.
• ☑️"Sprite slicer" script built that allows for advanced z-sorting in a 2.5d environment - aka, allowing for massively more complex buildings in general when standard sorting doesn't apply (like the round peanut houses).
• ⏸️The main functions of the village (ie. the shops) have been designed and have most of their art and conversations rigged up. The art needs a bit more polish and I haven't quite finished the 'hint system' NPC yet.
• ⏸️Need to draw a few more generic peanut houses for variation's sake.
• 🟦Peanut Village needs to have its layout finalized, then actually rigged up with a crowd of background NPCs to feel alive enough.
• 🟦One more 'event' in PV needs to be designed and written up, although all the preceding steps are in place.
• 🟦Haven't done key rebinding yet.
• 🟦A secret thing!
• 🟦A shader to show the wizard's silhouette when behind certain objects. Might not make it into this update, but it's becoming increasingly important!
• 🟦A few minor behind the scenes things need to be done to make testing go faster and to allow me to more easily manage uploading new builds. I'm not super concerned about these, and they may or may not make it into this update as they're low-priority stuff from the player's perspective.

Although it looks like I'm only halfway, the tasks at the top of the list are much more involved than the bottom of the list, and the only reason I haven't knocked this update out earlier is just an absence of available time.

I'm dying to work on 'truly new' content - level design, enemy art, character AI, etc - but it'll be a while before I can get to that still. The Ducklands update will have several new enemies and two spells, plus a bunch of new systems, but most of the work for PV has been refactoring or improving existing systems and code. It's a bit of a drag when 90% of your work is just interacting with older work, even if it brings the game forward and improves your foundations, but once PV is done I get to tackle a bunch of super exciting projects like the procedurally-generated environment decorator and group AI for Ducklands troops.

That's it until next time - don't forget to join our Discord (we're about to cross 200 members!) for live progress updates and general hangouts, and here's a quick peek of what's to come! Expect more regular updates again now that I'm back at it :)

"S.E.E." awaits you in the next update! What could it stand for?