Dev Log # 26

Lots of little tweaks this week! Most of the changes are to do with temporary status effects. Similar to permanent player traits these will affect things like dice rolls, stamina costs and damage taken. For example, if you are hurt too much during an event you will get the "injured" status effect and more likely to be hurt again until the injury heals. Status effects will show up as icons on the right of the screen but I've also added a new "player status" screen so you can check what an active effect is doing. It's very basic right now and I'll need to find some other information to show there.

Two of the effects, hunger and illness, also meant that eating and healing needed reworking. Eating raw food now has a chance to make you ill which stops you from healing until you recover. To prevent illness you'll need to build a cooking area and craft meals. I haven't play tested any of this yet so it's possible you'll die of food poisoning before you can gather the materials for a cooking area. There'll be a new test build out in a few days so I'm hoping you can all help check that for me!

I've also (finally) swapped out the bedroom text based menu with something more visual, one of the biggest changes I wanted for the UI update. I showed the art for that back in December but there was always something more pressing to work on until now. The new screen seems to be working but there are still some changes I'd like to make. One big one is that NPCs are available in the bedroom at all times and I'd prefer to have them come and go. There's a long list of NPCs changes I want to make but with the end of the UI overhaul so close I'm putting them off and will come back to them for version 0.5.

No new events this week but I want to add at least one more before the March test build. That only gives me a few days but having three out of four main events done is really irritating me. I've been working on a way to make events play out a little differently since they repeat so much now but that will probably be left until the April build. I hate to make predictions but if things keep going at this pace the April build might be the last test build before moving on to version 0.5!