Public Testing #1

Last Wednesday I did a public testing of Homestead at my college. Unfortunately not many people were in attendance that day. I will be holding another test in September when there are more students in the common areas so that I can get more feedback!

As for progress I have done quite a bit since my last post. I added a hunger bar, polished using tools, added more to the forest, redid the foraging mechanic, added more cooking recipes, refined cooking so that it runs smoother, changed the inventory and equipment system so that it is faster to use and more streamlined, implemented more animations, made it clearer how to leave the wilds, and I tweaked how spawning works.

Foraging in Homestead will require learning how to identify whole plants as well as leaves. Mushrooms and roots will be added at a later date. I will also be adding a foraging book that tracks discovered plants and also allows NPCs to add to it if you befriend them so that less trial and error is required when foraging. Picking the wrong item slightly reduces the player’s health while picking the item that is not poison gives the player an herb that can be used to craft meals or medicine. It’s a very simple system at the moment but I plan to flesh it out more as I go along.

I have a couple of weeks between spring and summer semester so I am hoping that I can make more consistent progress for a little while! I really want to get a lot done over the summer so I can show a game that is closer to completion in the fall. We will see though, college classes in the summer often end up being a lot more work because 15 weeks of content are crammed into 10.