It has been a good week and here's the progress that we've made with Hearthlands:

All the animals and NPCs are pretty much done (yay!)

Top row: hauler, miner, aviarist, peddler, tax collector, emigrant, grower, hunter, immigrant, shepherd and woodcutter.
Bottom row: rabbit, turkey, boar, piglet, pig, large pig, chicken, rooster, goat, sheep and wooly sheep.

This is pretty much every mob we needed for the first release of the game (the only one missing is a fisherman).

Sound and music engine

The technical part of the thing is done, and now we just need to add all the required sounds to the game (which is quite a lot). We won't make voiceover for every character in the game just yet, but this is something we're looking for in the future.

Currently we have about 40% of the necessary sounds added to the game and we'll probably finish that next week.

Apparently rabbit sounds are quite difficult to find, although I'm sure that rabbits do make some. The sound library that we use doesn't have any, so I'll probably need to unleash the power of Google search for this.

We won't probably have a proper music theme in the first release of the game (that's always a tricky bit if you want original music in your game and can't make it yourself), but I've managed to find one of my old records which suits fine for now (unfortunately, it's quite short and I'm not a very good composer).

Sounds like a farm.

Technical stuff

I managed to launch the game on Mac and it seems to work just fine. Apparently, running a Java 7 program on Mac is kind of tricky, because for some reason OS automatically installs only Java 6 and you have to download, install, and setup 1.7 JRE manually.

I wanted it to be as simple as "download — double click — play", so I had to roll back to Java 6 and rewrite some Java 7 code (damn you, Apple!). On the other hand you can launch the game on Mac as a native application now (well, it looks like one) without any technical shizzle wizzle.

After some fiddling around I managed to make a Windows launcher for the game (in fact it is one line of C++ code), so now the game looks classy on both platforms (with icons and stuff).

Next step — Linux.

* * *

There are lots of things still to do. More sprites, more sounds, more small improvements which fill up our To-Do list after every playtest. On the other hand, we've pretty mush done in terms of functionality for the first release, which is good news.

* * *

At this stage of the development it is really important to get some feedback and understand that people are actually interested in the game. So, if you'd like us to keep being motivated and carry on with the progress, if you're interested in the game — please, let us know. You can do that by leaving a comment, becoming our watcher on Indie DB, or subscribing to one of our social network pages or YouTube channel. You can also write us an email (info@hearthlands.com) or if you're super cool — make a donation.

We'd very like to grow our community, so if you can tell your friends about Hearthlands — it will be awesome.

Thank you in advance,
Sergio

It has been a busy week and we've managed to make a good progress on Hearthlands. Don't know about you, guys (we'll see soon), but I'm actually enjoy quite a lot playing it now, though it doesn't really have any goals, other than ones you've created yourself.

This is a condensed list of what we've done in the last two weeks:

- A lot of code refactoring, optimizing, balancing, polishing and stuff (and still lots to do)

- Hunter's lodges

- Wild animals and spawn points (boars, rabbits, turkeys) — no sprites yet

- Buildings with no road access no longer get staffed

- Local map size can be set at the start of a new game

- Local map generation rework

- Employment priorities calculation rework (3 times this week), new Tax & Employment screen

- House evolve mechanics rework

- Shepherd's lodges can be set to a specific animal type (goats and/or sheep)

- Autosaving at exit and at the beginning of the year (can be turned on/off)

- Game menu

- Saving and loading (yay!)

- Scarecrow shows it's radius

- Appeal mechanics. Each house level needs certain appeal in the area. Beautifications (parks and stuff) increase appeal, workshops — decrease

- New GUI (not quite finished yet)

- Emigrants and immigrants (no sprites yet)

- New terrain (with animated water!)

- Appeal overlay let's you see appeal value for each tile

- Problems overlay let's you see problems in your city (missing road connections, starving citizens etc.)

- Vsync (can be turned on/off)

- Added economy overview screen

- Added animation for haulers, aviarists, miners, peddlers and tax collectors

Haulers actually have over a thousand frames of animation:

- Items have proper sprites now (yay!)

- Peddler's tents and storage yards collect resources much quicker now

I will make status updates at least every week from now. There's still a lot of work to do: some GUI improvements, technical stuff, fishing (literally, fishing) and most importantly - loads of sprites. Each time I play Hearthlands I end up with a list of small improvements, balance changes and bugs. Lists are getting smaller, though.

It's not "putting final touches" yet, but we're pretty close to finishing the first "Resource Management" iteration of the game, which we plan to make public.

At this stage of the development it is really important to get some feedback and understand that people are actually interested in the game. So, if you'd like us to keep being motivated and carry on with the progress, if you're interested in the game — please, let us know. You can do that by leaving a comment, becoming our watcher on Indie DB, or subscribing to one of our social network pages or YouTube channel. You can also write us an email (info@hearthlands.com) or if you're super cool — make a donation.

We'd very like to grow our community, so if you can tell your friends about Hearthlands — it will be awesome.

Thank you in advance,
Sergio

The "New Game" screen is taking shape:









Ruler name, title and city name are randomly generated. Later the player will be able to change that, but this is an example of what AI-opponents will have.

I really like the look of shields. Currently shields have over 40000 variations.

Some of the new buildings (mostly food production):

Smokehouse (uses meat and logs to create wurst), Dairy (makes cheese out of milk), Brewery (uses apples, water and logs to create cider), Bakery (uses flour, water and logs to create bread), Well (provides a source of water), Sawmill (makes logs into planks) and Woodburner's Shop (makes logs into coal).

Currently we've made about 70%-80% of buildings needed for the first "resource management" iteration of the game. After we've done with buildings next steps will be (apart from polishing): map features (bits of grass and stone lying around to make the map look nice), more NPCs (including animals) and UI.

Here's how the building menu looks at the moment:

As you may see, most of the buttons miss their icons. The background may also change, although I kinda like this simple semi-transparent black overlay. On the screenshot "Food Industry" section is opened and mouse cursor overlaps with the "Brewery" button which makes an appropriate tooltip to be shown.