I wanted to drop another update this week before I’m off to California for an extended weekend/vacation. Mostly it’s just a bunch of bugfixes after the 0.4.01 release two weeks ago that unlocked the second progression level, plus the special Pride train I posted to social media earlier this week. If you haven’t already, please go ahead and try this build and provide feedback – it’s vital to shaping Iron Village into a fun, complete game!

Here’s what’s changed between the last upload (0.4.01) and this one:

• The MacOS build finally works again! (Sorry I didn’t realize it wasn’t working earlier, whoops.)

• Buildings, crop rows, and other structures have been split into separate sprites in order to allow drawing pops between the component parts.
  • For example, this allows pops to walk within a farm field without being drawn completely above or below.
• Sprite origins adjusted for better y-sorted z-layering
  • If a pop walks in front of or behind a building, it will now be properly drawn or hidden. This usually happened before, but frequently didn’t.
• Tree buildings are now separate sprites, and have been adjusted to remove depth-clashing.
  • Trees that were lined up in a row overlapped with each other, something which looks off if you stare at it closely enough.
• Pops can now “enter” buildings: if applicable, they walk to the front door and disappear, rather than being drawn on top of the building.
• Load window: Select a specific save file, rather than just loading the one save slot that comes with the game.
  • By default, games are now saved in a “saves” subdirectory, whereas previously they were stored in the default user data directory (e.g. AppData/Roaming/Godot/app_userdata/Iron Village/ on Windows).
  • The Save As… button allows for you to make separate copies of the save.
• Continue button: load whichever town was most recently played.

• User-customizable town & railway names
  • The town name also gets displayed on your train station
• Pride Train: For a limited time, the first train of a new game is decked out in an LGBTQ+ pride livery. At some point after June I’ll make it an optional feature so it’s not just a limited holiday feature.
• Smoke from the steam engine now correctly renders when the clock speed is adjusted. The code was in place, it just wasn’t consistently triggered.
• Wheels now move relative to the speed of the train.

• The recent transactions section of the Railway Status menu has been tweaked for better legibility.
  • Added icons to show which resource was given.
  • Properly removed older entries to prevent the list getting too long.
  • Fixed issues with saving the approval data properly.

• Tweaked building icons in the build panel
  • Previously these were just using the same asset as the building itself, but this wasn’t feasible with them being split into separate components.
  • In most cases, these are now even smaller images, but upscaled with more descriptive icons.
• Hide progress bars in production buildings when no work is being done. This should reduce visual clutter in larger towns.