Paddlers
28.02.2021
Released version 0.2.1
The demo has been updated to a new version and the database reset.
The changes include:
- Quests as a new feature, with a new view accessible from the temple.
- 8 quests worth of content to guide through the start of the game.
- Send specific visitors at several stages of the game to provide a smooth start for new players.
- Players can now build nests and accept tenant Paddlers to live inside. Those paddlers give daily presents to the player.
- New building: The watergate / visitor gate. Arriving visitors queue up there until the player releases them. The queue has a limited size.
- Building upgrades can be bought. (Only watergate is affected by this so far.)
- Visitors can now move in either direction, as defined by the gate placement.
- Skill map view to display what perks have been unlocked and what they do.
- Letters now include an image of the sender.
- New water visuals, using a custom shader.
- Restructure UI: Mailbox as its own view, leaderboard and incoming attacks merged.
- Population: A metric for the number of followers has been introduced.
Read more about it in this blog post.
01.01.2021
Released version 0.2
The demo has been updated to a new version and the database reset.
The changes are mostly of technical nature and should not affect the actual game.
Read more about it in an external blog post.
01.06.2020
First teaser published
A short video about Paddlers is now available on YouTube.
31.05.2020 - Version 0.1.3
Greatly Extended Visitor System + Looking at Other's Villages + Generated AI Villages
- There are now two different types of visitors with respect to their path-finding. Non-hurried visitors will stop and rest until they are either happy or another non-hurried visitor takes its place.
- The starting story/tutorial now goes a few steps further and makes use of non-hurried visitors to ensure the player does not miss them.
- Each group of visitor will now send a thank you letter if any of them were satisfied.
- In the new mailbox view, rewards sent alongside letters can be collected. The mailbox view is accessible through a new secondary tab menu within the visitors view.
- Everybody can now look into anybody's village.
- A bunch of anarchistic places are now generated during world generation. (anarchists = AI controlled)
- The hobo-type of Paddlers now live in a new building type, nests, and you can invite them to visit your town. Nests are currently only available to anarchists.
- Numerous fixes and improvements in UI, consistency between server and client, robustness, and some attempts towards balancing.
Beyond that, this update most likely introduces just as many new bugs and problems as it fixes.
Note: The installation of the new version also came with a database reset.
26.04.2020
Demo database reset
All players have been deleted but the accounts remain in the user database.
Upon logging in, new player accounts will be created starting with an empty town again.
25.04.2020 - Version 0.1.2
Dialogue View + Clean Start for New Players
With version 0.1.2, I decided to write a quick summary of new features and improvements for each version bump.
Here is what is new since 0.1.1:
- Each player now has an associated "Story State" which tracks the progress in the main story.
- New players will now start without a temple and without the ability to place any buildings.
- A new view has been added, the dialogue view, which is used to show multi-slide conversations with Paddlers and UI buttons for player interaction.
- Selecting units or placing new buildings can trigger a view change now, to enable the dialogue view to be opened at the right moment.
- When loading the page, a story state dependent view is loaded instead of always the town view.
- Texts can now be loaded from a localizable .mo file, following the GNU gettext standard.
- Cleaned up the downloading process which now ensures that all data is loaded properly and in the right order.
- To prevent locked units, the game-master now refuses to place building where a unit stands or when a unit is currently walking to that place. Does not prevent the frontend to attempt it, yet. A refresh is required to have a valid view in the browser again.
- Technical changes regarding rendering: Fewer flushes thanks to finding a bug in the combination of meshes. Meshes now as general render variant. Experimental pre-rendered caching of town background.