This week I moved to a different apartment, which took ages, and realized how much crap I have and never use. In other news:

Rivals can now send you gifts (if they like you and/or are scared of you)

And make requests for goods and money.

If you decline the request, you get an opinion penalty with them, but if you accept and then fail to fulfill the request penalty gets bigger.

After some more testing and fiddling with diplomacy I'm going to move to armies and wars. Invading forces will have red uniform to differ from your troops.

Beehives now have use different sprite if honey is ready to be harvested by a beekeeper. Wells now also show if there's water in them, and you no longer can supply your entire city with water with just one well. You will need approximately one well for every two buildings that use it.

Also, we've made some progress on supporting Inter HD Graphics 4000 display adapter. Turns out, we have too much stuff in the game and the graphics card can't handle it. It is still a little bit glitchy and may not work if the drivers are too old, but it may make this problem less common.

As always we would like to get as much feedback as possible, so please comment and send your thoughts to info@hearthlands.com. If you become our watcher on Indie DB or Desura, that also helps a lot! Don't forget to subscribe to one of our social network pages or YouTube channel. If you want to support the development — you can just purchase the game.

Thank you,
Sergio

Hearthlands version 0.3.2 has been released and will be available for download either now or very soon.

Changelog:

- Diplomacy and dynamic trade are temporarily disabled in this version, because we're still working on them. I decided to rework trade a bit, in order to make it combine with diplomacy better. You can still trade in this version, but trade routes won't be able to open or close.

- Alchohol industry is finished, you can now brew cider, beer, mead and wine; grow grapes and hops; collect honey from beehives.

- You can now choose the amount of natural resources your starting position will have.

- You can now choose if your starting position will be on the coast or not.

- Skeletons and elementals now despawn after a while, which makes them less devastating.

- You can now choose your appearance and culture. Your chancellor also has randomized appearance now.

- Your culture defines which buildings you can build, which units you can train, special traits of your people, and your unit of choice. Unit of choice has reduced cost, upkeep and requires less XP to level up than a normal unit. Cultures are quite basic at the moment, but I have some ideas how it can be expanded. You can set your culture to "Common" to have access to all of the buildings and units.

- Fixed bug: Houses evolve to level 3 even if there's no alcohol and start complaining about the lack of booze.

- Fixed bug: Big font can be invisible for some users.

- The game now has a log file which can be examined to see what happened if it crashed upon launch.

We've got several reports about the game not launching properly on Windows, which happens mostly either because of graphics drivers being outdated, or graphics card not being able to handle game's assets. This happens mostly/only on laptops. For example the laptop I'm using for development has two graphics cards one of which is integrated Intel HD Graphics 4000. If I disable the other one, forcing the game to run on the integrated graphics card, it won't launch. By default the integrated card is not used, but that is different from laptop to laptop. I thinking what can be done to make this card compatible, but for now the only way to avoid the problem is to make sure the proper graphics card is being used by default instead of integrated card.

As always we would like to get as much feedback as possible, so please comment and send your thoughts to info@hearthlands.com. If you become our watcher on Indie DB or Desura, that also helps a lot! Don't forget to subscribe to one of our social network pages or YouTube channel. If you want to support the development — you can just purchase the game.

Thank you,
Sergio

We've been greenlit!

Big huge thank you to everyone who voted for Hearthlands! Together we've made it possible. I have to say that without your support it would be impossible for us to carry on. I always wanted to play a game like Hearthlands and I'm very happy that there are a lot of people who think the same. Hopefully, getting on the biggest PC games distribution platform will help us generate enough sales to keep up with the development progress and further improvement of the game.

It still will take a little while for the game to actually appear in the store, there's a lot of stuff on Steamworks which we haven't looked into yet. I'll keep you noticed on how it goes.

Thanks again for your support!

This week we continued to work on diplomacy, which (hopefully) we'll be able to finish in a couple of weeks.

The New Game screen has been changed and now consists of three pages. On page one you can set up your realm and choose your culture.

You can choose from 5 different cultures. Culture defines which buildings you can build, which resources you can produce and which units you can train. Also, each culture has specific traits, like higher alcohol consume rate or lower taxes. With the addition of magic, religion and heroes cultures will be expanded further.

On page two you can set up your ruler (a character that represents you in the game). It is quite basic at the moment, but fun to play around with. Your chancellor will have a randomly generated appearance as well.

Other game settings were moved to the third page.

In addition to gifts goods can now be requested from AI opponents. The chance they will fulfill your request depends on their opinion about you, your relative power, and the cost of the goods requested. The more they like you or the more scared they are of you, the more likely they will provide you with goods.

Diplomacy screen now shows ruler's appearance and details on how his opinion of us is calculated. This obviously will be expanded as we progress with diplomacy.

As always we would like to get as much feedback as possible, so please comment and send your thoughts to info@hearthlands.com. If you become our watcher on Indie DB or Desura, that also helps a lot! Don't forget to subscribe to one of our social network pages or YouTube channel. If you want to support the development — you can just purchase the game.

Thank you,
Sergio

This week we've finished alcohol stuff and continued to work on diplomacy.

New buildings: Winery, Grapes plot, Beer brewery

Wine-maker gathers grapes from a grape plot and takes it to a winery to make wine. Beer brewery needs grain and hops to produce beer.

Skeletons and elementals now despawn after a while, which makes them less devastating.

Found a bug: houses evolve to level 3 even if there's no alcohol and start complaining about the lack of booze. This will be fixed in the next update.

New settings: Natural resources and Water

Natural resources let's you choose how rich your starting location is going to be in terms of natural resources (iron, coal, gold, stone, fish, wild animals, etc.). Water makes sure you start on a coast (if enabled), or inland (if disabled).

Diplomacy is starting to take shape

Every opponent has several stats: opinion about us, power and wealth. Opinion is self-explanatory (we can raise it by sending gifts and it drops if we fail to fulfill his request). Power is important to determine if the opponent is scared of us (our power is higher) or not (his power is higher). Wealth determines how much loot we will get if we attack him.

Currently the only thing you can do to your opponents is send gifts to them.

A new video (based on a previous version):

As always we would like to get as much feedback as possible, so please comment and send your thoughts to info@hearthlands.com. If you become our watcher on Indie DB or Desura, that also helps a lot! Don't forget to subscribe to one of our social network pages or YouTube channel. If you want to support the development — you can just purchase the game.

And, please, do vote for us on Steam Greenlight!

Thank you,
Sergio

I continue to work on diplomacy and there are several new buildings and objects for the upcoming alcohol-themed update.

Cider brewery

Cider brewery has got a new sprite to match with other alcohol industry buildings.

Flowers, beehives, beekeeper's lodges and mead brewery

The more flowers are around a beehive, the faster it produces honey. Honey is collected by a beekeeper. Honey can then be delivered to a peddler's tent and used as food, or brought to mead brewery. Mead is a type of alcohol alongside with cider.

Oast house

Grower harvests green hops and brings it to an oast house, where hops are dried using logs. Hops are needed for beer production. Here's an oast house IRL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oast_house.

As always we would like to get as much feedback as possible, so please comment and send your thoughts to info@hearthlands.com. If you become our watcher on Indie DB or Desura, that also helps a lot! Don't forget to subscribe to one of our social network pages or YouTube channel. If you want to support the development — you can just purchase the game.

And, please, do vote for us on Steam Greenlight!

Thank you,
Sergio