This week we were focusing mostly on combat, which requires a lot of time to be made, but with this framework in place we can add more units/monsters pretty easily now.

Graveyards now can become haunted and start to spawn skeletons which may go and attack your city. Monsters will also attack everyone (except animals) in range. This means that you may want to protect your merchants and migrants from them.

Combat system is pretty much done (yay!). Every unit gets experience points and can level up. Currently, the level of the unit only affects damage and resistance, but this may be extended later.

Chancellor %random_name% brings some important news.

Buildings can now get damaged and catch fire. Both buildings and units regenerate hit points automatically. Units regenerate much faster in their barracks.

I had to rewrite some of the unit AI/pathfinding code, so now they can't be in the same tile simultaneously, which looks much better.

Also, archers now shoot moving targets with some prediction.

Every character has got its death animation and a corpse (he-he).

Horseman has been slightly changed.

Cursed earth around graveyards now has some bones and stuff on it.

I recorded a bunch of new sounds for units, skeletons, chancellor etc. Also combat sounds. There are still some sounds to be added, but we'll finish that next week. Ideally I want different voices/quotes for every profession, but not in the nearest future.

* * *

There's mostly only monster AI/extra combat related stuff left in the to-do list (as well as lots of testing), so we're aiming for the version 0.2.0 to be released at the end of next week (if nothing goes wrong). Fingers crossed!

* * *

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, 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

This week we continued work on squads, did more improvements (some of which were suggested by the community) and started to work on combat system. Here's what we've done in detail:

- Bridges!

- Roadblocks have returned and still prevent peddlers and tax collectors from passing through. Unlike Zeus, roadblocks are useful only if you need to separate one housing area from another (if peddlers in those areas have different settings), otherwise you don't need to micromanage them.

- Abandoned hosing plots now wait three months before new migrants arrive.

- Pathfinding has been optimized a little bit more.

- Building radius is now a circle (expect scarecrows); and you can see the radius while building window is opened. Also, they have been tuned up a bit (for example, woodcutter's radius has been increased, while grower's radius has been decreased).

Click to enlarge

- You can now see how much stone you have while building something that needs stone.

- You can now take screenshots by pressing F2. Screenshots are being saved to screenshots folder in game directory.

- Squads panel has been added. Much like the stocks panel you can leave it opened all the time, and in case of emergency select all your squads with a couple of clicks.

Click to enlarge

- "Send home" button added, which sends all selected squads home.

- Units now require coins. Certain amount is paid when you train a unit, and 10% of that is paid every month as upkeep.

- You can now click units to see their stats.

- Graveyards! Not quite finished yet, but it is the last big task before the next update.

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, 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

First of all, thank you all for the support! Seeing that a lot of people like the game is what keeps us going.

We need a couple more weeks to flesh things out, so Hearthlands 0.2.0 will be released this month. You will be able to download an updated version through Humble or Groupees.

Here's what we've been working on this week:

At Sunday I decided that pathfinding in the game could be made better and ended up rewriting the whole thing from scratch. Sometimes parts of your code become just too complicated, which makes it more difficult to add new functionality. So rewriting the code, making it easier to understand and expand, before you need to do that saves time in the long run.

As a result a bug with a peddler getting stuck in his tent was fixed; migrants and merchants now prefer roads over rough terrain and it will be much easier to write monsters/invaders AI.

Other changes:

- Stocks screen added, showing the total amount of every resource in your city and how it has been changed in the last 12 months. Opening the stocks screen does not pause the game.

Click to enlarge

- Barracks now produce units (axemen, spearmen, archers and horsemen) - 8 units (1 squad) per barraks. You can select the squad by clicking one of its units or the squad icon above the barracks and give it orders. Shift and Control-clicks are also supported. Left-click on a squad icon centers the screen on that squad. There's gonna be an army screen showing all of your squads in one place as well. Units will attack enemies at will if they get close to the barracks or you can send them to a mission yourself.

It was quite difficult to implement a proper unit behavior mostly because you need to guarantee that there's gonna be one unit only in each tile. This screws up the pathfinding, especially when the army needs to go through gates (which are 1 tile wide). Also the game should not freeze for several seconds when you send a few dozen of units from one side of the map to another. I'm quite happy with what I ended up with; it's interesting to drive units around and see how they try to form a square when they reach their destination.

- You can scroll the map and use the mini-map while a window is opened now. This may be useful for example if you need to see a radius of a building.

- Stables (produce one horse out of 6 grain)!

Next steps:
- Army screen
- More units-related stuff
- Enemies and combat
- Various improvements

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, 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

This week we were focusing on lots of small improvements, some of which were suggested by the community. Thanks to Mynx, Shatari, Loki and Luthan! See the discussion here.

There are still lots of improvements to do, so we'll keep doing that next week.

The other big thing for this week was fortifications. With the unit training and military production pretty much [rewritten and] complete, we can focus on monsters and combat itself next.

I've been thinking a lot about distribution system and how it has to be improved especially for big cities. I ended up rewriting a big chunk of code to make it more flexible and with some changes it seems to be working much better now.

The third big thing was barracks and military production which seems to work as intended now. I'll probably talk about that more next week.

The changes for this week include:

Domestic animals can now be removed using "Demolish" tool.

Animals can not be placed over other animals.

A storage limit for every resource can now be specified in storage yards and marketplaces.

Click to enlarge

Distribution/storage system refactored (mostly to help me understand my own code better).

Buildings now send twice as more haulers to gather required resources (and other improvements). Also, production building will keep produce resources over their limit if those resources are reserved by haulers. Distribution seems to work much better with that in big cities.

Defenses added: Stockade, stone wall, guard tower and gatehouse. The last three require stone to be built.

Click to enlarge

Hunters keep hunting even if they reached a storage limit for leather (leather will not be added, though).

Icons in construction menu are replaced with awesome ones from game-icons.net.

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, 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 was away this week, but you're not a proper indie developer if you don't work at your vacation:)
There was lots of community work this week, so I'd like to thank everybody who gave us some feedback, comments, e-mails etc.!

Here's the progress that we've made:

- New building: Barracks

- Barracks screen shows randomly generated squad name. Here are some examples:

- Game logic cycle has been optimized a little bit for better support of large cities.

- Workshops now show which product is being created

- You can now specify which type of animal hunters will hunt

- And a type of weapon for weaponsmith's shop

- A nice title screen for the game featuring a merchant and some spoilers

Click to enlarge

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, 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