Devlog #1

Hey everyone! Now that the first build's been live for a while and I've been able to collect a lot of helpful feedback, I'm starting to get into the knitty gritty of what comes next. And as such, I wanted to put out a little post like this to lay out what the plans are.

(Also, just want to say, holy shit the amount of support I've seen lately is insane. You all are amazing and I hope I can make this project awesome to show gratitude for all the generous support you all are putting into it.)

After the last poll I ran to see what major feature you guys want to see first, it seems like the crops won!

And of course, in a game like this, no ordinary crops will do. This is a cursed forest after all! What sort of normal crops would grow in a place like that?

The solution? Dryads, of course! To farm crops, you'll plant, care for, and optionally over-feed your dryads of varying types in order to harvest resources from them corresponding to the type of crop they represent.

It's a system that should be simple, fun, and have lots of room to expand (hee hee) further in the future as I work on other stuff in the game.

The basic idea behind it is this: You place crop plots down to have fertile soil to plant in. A single crop plot will be too small for most dryads, but you can link them together to increase the size of the area to plant in.

Once you've got a suitable area, you'll need dryad seeds. Where to get these seeds, you ask? Different seeds will have different places to collect them later on, but for now, the first dryad's seeds will be available from a new NPC.

Meet June! She'll be the village druid. While not exactly as skilled in magic as the village would hope, she does her best to stave off the curse of the forest and keep the village safe from its darker intent. She's also quite friendly with the forest's many dryads, so they're more than happy to supply her with seeds, which she'll happily sell to you!

And, no, she's not immune to cow-related antics. ;)

In the next build, she'll be able to supply you with crop plots and seeds to grow Wildberry Dryads, which will allow you to harvest wildberries from them at a regular rate once you've cared for them sufficiently.

That's how most of the crop dryads will work. Some will be easier or harder to care for than others, and every crop has variations of personalities (which will make them want different things in order to keep them obedient and producing resources). Which personality you get will be random when the dryad sprouts.

Currently, I've been making a bunch of the different sprite animations for the dryads and slowly implementing the crop plots. The framework for this feature will take a decent bit of work still, but I'm hoping to have the next build ready for high-tier patrons within the next two weeks, since that feels like a fairly attainable goalpost to shoot for.

That's all to share for now! But hopefully I'll have more news on the way soon!

So, is this something y'all are interested in? Giving updates like this feels like a good way to keep everyone in on the loop about what's coming, as well as a nice way to organize my own thoughts. So let me know if you guys wanna see stuff like this for each update as it comes! :)