the grass art is incredible change. And I'm hoping that the negotiation won't stop with the first decline. For example: guy wants 100, is willing to work for 80, you offer 70, he declines and adds the difference to his lowest value, so his new lowest is 90 or whatever... and you go on as long as you are undercutting his expectations, or until his lowest reaches the asking price... This way, you are actually negotiating, you can learn some reasonable price ranges, etc. overtime and you don't loose talent because you weren't willing to offer the full price.
To me visual's are something that make or break a game, as they piece together the mechanics in a way the player can feel and interact with. The changing of the grass, in my opinion is excellent. It adds an amazing layer of polish to the game and you should be very proud. This is shaping up to look like an amazing game.
@@Athasin True, but you can also have some of the best systems ever made, but if the art is off, the game will go no where, it is easier to fix the clunkiness and jankiness after launch (which shouldnt be done) than replacing an art style. This is why AAA games these days always launch buggy, as they focus on the graphics, as this is what will sell there game. Never the less, you are right that controls are important, but the visuals need to be done well for a game to be successful
@@7dm758 Sorry, but I look at the existence of Project Zomboid and Valhiem, and then I look at games like Cyberpunk and the Callisto Protocol, and I just can't agree. Yeah you can go back and fix mechanics, just like you can go back and do a graphical overhaul. But the fact is, when you have a "horrible to play but pretty" game, you have to actually work to get people to just re-try your game after you've fixed it. Because the mechanics are that much of a drawback. You as a developer have to work towards overcoming that bad history. Meanwhile if you have an "amazing to play but ugly" game you can put out a remastered version and people won't just re-try it, they'll re-BUY it. Because mechanics drew them in originally, made them fans, and the new art work is just a BONUS on top of that. Art does not make or break a game, functionality does.
Perhaps a seasonal change as well: > snow during the winter months (snow free spots under the trees perhaps?) > flowers during spring and maybe during summer as well > or perhaps just grass as it is right now during summer (or something else, in the long run, perhaps butterflies / birds flying around?) > fallen leaves under the trees and near trees during autumn
Ironic timing on this video. I was just watching your last video wondering about a new update, and then boom! I see this. Lol. Updates look great. Glad to see someone giving lots of update on an isometric pixel art sim game. Keep up the great work! The art is looking great!
Crazy to think i've been following this project for over 5 years now! love to see how far it's came, keep up the great work and don't feel pressure to "finish" it, just take it at your own pace and keep making great videos man
7:00 it shouldn't be worst and better it should be less and more. For variety, after all its the players choice who they hire in the end, also a hint of luck. Also it should cost double and triple if you pick 2 or 3 different types
Interesting video Ben! Good luck with the Masters too! I think the idea of negotiating with hiring staff is super nice! Looking forward to seeing what kinda weird teams I could put together :D
Absolutely excellent work man. The game is coming out absolutely fantastic. The updated trees and grass tiles look great as well as the UI changes. Have you considered adding grass tiles that have longer grass on them that are animated to look as if they are swaying with the wind? I feel like that might add an extra level of coziness to the overall feel of the game. Maybe adding grass tiles that have different flower variations as well although I don't know if that will start extending passed the aesthetic you already have in mind. Either way, great job! Looking forward to playing it!
It's looking great and the pixel art aesthetic is wonderful. To me, the jank that stands out most at this moment is the workers only taking square paths... the pathfinding should be smart enough to cut a corner and go diagonally if that results in a shorter path.
Glad to see you back! The new employment screen is great, definitely a huge improvement. Would you consider adding full-on "3D" grass to add some more depth to the environment? And have a little wriggle animation whenever lumberjacks walk through it?
Love the development of this game, all the changes through the years, and the direction you're taking the art in! My one feedback for this video is that in the hiring menu, I couldn't tell that the personality trait labels were relevant to the bars underneath, and it was hard to tell where one label started and ended. I only realized they were related to the trait values once you started clicking on them. Maybe making them more button like, or reducing the gap between the labels and the bar charts would help clarify it! Thanks for another great video
Fantastic updates, really love the design considerations and the overall visual feel of the game its perfect. My only constructive advice would be to make sure your considering visual deficiency adjustments and accessability options so you don't have to retro actively change things in the future. Font selectors/ visual impairment selectors etc. in regards to your current pallet. Keep it up bud this is great progress.
An idea about the hiring - maybe add a "training" or "apprenticeship" campaign where you can pay less to bring on someone less experienced, but then have other employees train them up so they gain ability stats, but obviously the staff helping them can't do as much work during this time. I think that could be really interesting. Another thing is that i think it might make more sense to have the different types of campaigns bring in people who want to work at the lumbermill for more or less time depending on the campaign type. If you were to implement both of these, i think that apprentices should gain loyalty to your company? After all, you helped them start their career! I also think it might be interesting to see people's stats change a bit over time, i.e. if you treat your staff well, their outlook and/or work ethic may go up, and vice versa. Also maybe if people get too upset with your company, their loyalty starts going down, and then, eventually, they quit. This lowers your reputation and makes it harder to get decent employees. This should be an incentive to treat your staff team well. Just some ideas, great video as usual, can't wait until it's out!
Really awesome feature . Just a small suggestion it would be good if you allow them to see the applicants even when the campaign is still running so they can stop the campaign early if they already see someone who they want to hire. Really love your work , Cheers.
Love the new palette and visuals - even though it's a little sad to see the change! I like your hiring mechanic - HR will tell you to never include a photo when hiring! St Andrews is a lovely place to live but the winters can be vicious!
Honestly,this was part of my reasoning for hiding the portraits - it often came down to a choice of “which applicant do I prefer the look of” which is problematic at best 😂
Is there a plan to add accidents that will take out employees? Something like a lumber jack back wedging a tree and destroying sections of usable lumber?
love the grass but i think the hiring screen is a bit 'busy', what about one lot of bars but keep the colour to differentiate good and bad can still have the number to make it clearer. would give you a bit more padding making it easier to read
You should make some stones or larger bulders that you have to eather pay to move or some worker can get rid of it. Perhaps the stone can be usefull idk, love your videos!
I really like the concept of the game and have been watching the progress far a couple of years now and gotta say I love the progress! 😃 Just one little thing, at 7:32 when you show the list, I think the distance between the columns should be just a bit bigger, it just seems a little bit cluttered 🙂 Otherwise it’s awesome 😃
To me, the ground looks wrong. How about dynamically generating the ground texture? Have a list of values - one for each tree type. Every time you cut down a tree, increase the value for that type, on that tile by an amount, and decrease all other types slightly. Do the same for surounding tiles but even less. That should leave the ground covered in pine needles and/or dead leaves? :) Alternatively just draw a ground texture that's c8vered in pine needles, moss, leaves, etc. Not much grass in most logging forests I've been in :)
I'm not sure if this is what you're already doing, but if you're using A* or djikstra for your path finding, you can make the employees take the fastest route while taking paths into account by lowering the cost of the tile if it's a path tile relative to the speed, so for instance if the path makes employees move twice as fast it's cost is half as much. You said you were already having them prefer paths, but I wasn't sure how you were doing it so I just wanted to suggest this
I absolutely love the new hiring system, but something about not being able to see the face right away seems impersonal to me, might feel like you are just building another machine or planting a tree, not hiring a human who will be working for you. May be giving an option of hovering your cursor over them to see more info with a portrait or being able to click on the line to get a "profile card" without being locked into negotiations would be a good idea. You can even let them say something to you, like a one-sentence-cover-letter
What happens when a sapling is placed on an active path line of another individual? Does the path finding auto reroute? Also, what happens if a path line is obstructed suddenly & it was the only path avalible to a destination?
Sorry I’m not clear on what the End Early Button provides? Does the campaign play out in realtime over x amount of ingame days or was it just sped up just for the video? It looks like a week of campaign took only a few seconds. Also, “There’s no refund if you end the campaign early”? So you’re saying then that there’s some sort of campaign refund if you let the campaign run the full length?
It was sped up, a week in game would have made for a very long video. Ending it early doesn’t give any refund, but it does reveal the applicants early if you don’t want to wait
@@BWDev than remove the dropdown, it's an unnecessary step that would drive me crazy if I would have to use it so many times to change what i'm searching for
Eh I disagree, it's a key step in an expensive process that I wouldn't expect the player to be doing all that often. Slowing the player down as part of that process makes sense to me, and keeps the layout clean
In my opinion, if you're looking for a little bit more variation, you could have stone patches where trees can't grow, change their size randomly too but keep them far apart to have enough room to automate tree chopping and such. It's really nice to see lumbermill devlogs again!
Adding an option to one of the 3 classes to potentially remove those sections where trees are unable to grow might also be something worth integrating. (And perhaps even the option to *create* such spots for decoration if you choose to want them in a specific location) This could also be gated behind either a normal progression based on tools / buildings or perhaps even requiring the worker to have the max rank in their skill proficiency. Imo this would give even more weight to having actually good workers employed and not just for the slightly faster work speed they currently are offering you, thus adding another incentive to hire skilful workers.
I think it would be fun if the employees you've hired would arrive by parachuting out of some dinky plane that flies over the entire map in 1 direction. Or multiple jumping out at the in a line if you've hired multiple in one go from a single campaign
Love the new hiring mechanics ! I think it could be nice to also have the option to offer more than what the applicant is asking for. This could give a random chance of increasing one of the stats. The employee could be "Wow, for that amount I'll work extra hard !" and get +1 in ethics for instance. Sometimes you get no bonus stats, and just overpay an employee so you have to take a gamble each time !
That's a great idea! Perhaps making it more likely to improve traits when the worker overall has a lot of negative ones compared to already having a lot of positive ones, making choosing a worker with 2 perfect skills and one bad skill over one with 3 decent ones a gamble since the first worker could potentially become better if their stats get boosted by the overpay.
I'm so excited for when this comes out!! Just looks like such a chill game, something I think would be cool thought, is a tiny random offset to the trees to fix the plain tiling look. Great job!!
4:55 Isn't it fun that Unity doesn't have multi-select dropdowns for in-game UI, but has them for in-editor UI (enum flags)? I work in Unity full-time, and sometimes I'll just sarcastically mutter to myself "Unity is a very good game engine."
The hiring system is really nice! I do feel like doing the counter offer and then them either accepting or declining is a bit black and white. Would be interesting if you don't low ball them to hard (i.e., you get within a certain range of their "acceptance" range) that they could throw a counter offer back at you. I think that could also be funny if you could almost do that perpetually back and forth, although I imagine it'd be max 1-3 back and forth interactions. Might be more overcomplicated than you'd like, but seems like a pretty fun mechanic over all. Great work :D
It might be nice to see a visual indicating employee task when they are selected (eg: Walking home shows footprints along the path the agent has calculated)
The grass change is excellent, as a small detail you could add some clouds that float past the sides of the screen, and more importantly; what would add HEAPS of life and movement to the world, is cloud shadows across the landscape.
It would be cool to be able to offer more than they ask and it would improve one of their stats because they feel like they are working at a good place
5:05 when the drop down is opened, there isn't a clear separation between the buttons bellow it. It is the same color and that could be confusing. Maybe look into adding a shadow underneath it (as Windows adds a shadow under each window)
Hey there welcome back. Followed your channel a few years ago and happy to see some new notifications. Keep it up, developing a game solo is not easy and can take a lot of strain on a person - hence myself not having posted in a very long time. Love the direction you taking, you have taught me some interesting concepts and patterns. Looking forward to see what you come up with next :) greetings from a indie dev studio in South Africa
a suggestion, make some trees much larger, which cover the workers and smaller trees visually. they would improve mood, maybe some maps have varying climate like high temp where shade is helpful or high winds where the trees block the wind somewhat. you could fell the large trees for a small increase in growing speed, along with a lot of wood, but they take a very very long time to grow back (or just don't grow back at all) and that reduces mood/morale. it could also make the game look prettier, especially in combination with scattered rocks. also something to consider on the palette topic, render the sprites out using indexed colors where the color is used in a shader as a lookup into a palette. this could let you make shadows or lights look really good, if you have the palettes arranged in one axis and brightness variance in the other. you could also have some things dynamically lit, with a monochromatic light source plus emission on the other mapped color, and quantize those values before doing a texture lookup and it would look like it was drawn ahead of time. you could update light position in steps to look like it was a limited set of sprites and reduce noise.
Also I want to just say the redesigned trees look great! Everything’s looking super neat! Lastly, any chance you could leave us with a vertical slice playthrough at the end of your next video. It’d be super fun to see a peak of things in one liner slice with a bit of commentary. After so much time it’s not easy to remember how all the bits & pieces mesh together as a whole. Thank you Ben 🙌🏼
This is coming along really nicely, I've been watching since the start but haven't commented until now. The new grass tiles really add some charm. I particularly like the 2 bit style. You can try mirroring the tiles you already have for a more varied look The personality stats screen is fantastic, at first, its a lot of information. But it's also easy to glance and see if a candidate is mostly greens/reds. No need to look at every candidates stats individually, just look for the most green and then look for details Look forward to the next one! Love to see them :)
11:20 maybe youtube compression just wasn't kind to the new grass patches, but they kinda look like an old carpet with thin spots... you know the type - what you find in grandparent's homes
animating the grass could be an interesting/ambitious way to experiment with the visual complexity if you so chose to. anyway, good luck.. its wishlisted on the thing or that yeah. 🎒
I’d love to see an additional layer of tall grass/rushes to blend between trees & grass tiles. Some potential there to make the place feel more filled out or woody or foresty. - If it doesn’t make things feel more muddy to the eye of cause.
Great job on the update, things are really coming together. Loving the new visuals as well. One thing I will say is the grass looks a bit like carpet with some wet spots on it to me.
Considering the personalities tab : - Is there a reason to not center the header texts (Name, Ethic, Outlook...) ? They are all aligned to the left of their container, but "Name" has a bit of space before, to not align it with the job icon i guess. Maybe I'm too much into symmetry but it is something i see and seems weird to my eyes - 7:45 I think it is the best looking one, having all stat bars highlighted instead of just one. I can measure quickly that 3 green is better than 2 green, where it is not as obvious when I have to compare the bar at the third position with the bar at the second position - 7:55 I would not have guessed that i could sort the table elements by clicking the header. I know it is a common feature that could be expected, but there are no changes on hovering (cursor / background color) nor a sort button For the hiring process : - 9:00 maybe offset the radio to the right a little. I know the sprite is centered, but since the majority of the body is to the left it seems off-centered to the eye. - 9:05 i would have been "scared" to click the red button to end the campain early, fearing losing the totality of my investments by having 0 applicants even if there is the number of current applicants at the top. I liked your previous approach at 5:09 "End early & reveal candidates". The button could even be red, i would click on it without fearing losing all candidates. Otherwise, i like the changes you made to grass. Having little patches is definitively better. I saw a comment saying that you could add small flowers, and i like this idea also. I really like your devlogs ! I hope I don't seem too mean or cold in my comment, English is not my primary language and I feel it lacks emotions in a way. Also, I'm not a game designer / UX pro or anything, just a player, so maybe things that caught my eyes are just an issue to me and no one else
So I'll respond to those in order - - Header texts are all left aligned to make it clear where the left edge of each column is, and therefore where to read the column from. The "name" column is also left aligned, but you can sort by job type so theres space above the job type column to allow for sorting. - Arrows / more visual feedback are planned for the column headers for sorting. Agreed it's not clear that's possible at the moment. - Fair point about the radio icon. I'll try different margins and see how it looks 👍 - "End early & reveal candidates" felt like quite a long sentence for a button and I changed it for the aesthetic, but I can see why it makes the button feel "dangerous" without the extra clarity. Appreciate the feedback!
i am once again asking you to reintroduce the realistic letters notification system you removed years ago now, it was always one of my favourite visual elements!
Love the way you hire new staff! Something to consider is all players will just use the radio eventually making the others obsolete. It would be neat if the billboard was early game (cheap), newspaper for mid-late game (because its affordable and better than billboard), and radio for hiring essentially the same people from newspaper but with a good chance of hiring really exceptional people. So this adds some risk reward. It would be interesting to have an age on these people as that could indicate how much time they will work for you before retiring. So finding a young exceptional person is rare find and you should overbid on this person to secure the hire. I forget, but if you underbid a person will that person leave the hiring pool immediately? That would be cool as it's a risk reward scenario underbidding someone. Overbidding someone could also give a chance at raising one of there stats randomly as well. :)
Definitely like the idea of ages / time-to-retirement - thanks for the suggestions! And yes, once an offer has been made and either accepted or declined, the applicant leaves the hiring pool.
