Yeah, this is a weird title for sure - but I'm touching on a bunch of different things in one post, so I can't really think of anything wittier.

First off, some marketing housekeeping: we're going retro and have started a mailing list! You can sign up below to get dev diaries and other development news sent directly to your email inbox. That way, instead of relying on the current social media overlords to deliver updates to your algorithmic feed, or sorting through a bajillion Discord notifications, you can instead rely on other tech companies to deliver it to your email address! Anyway, sign up if you want a more reliable way of getting updates, or don't, it's your call.

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As I mentioned in the last update (the release of the 0.5.09 demo), I was off on a family trip for a bit over a week. This week has seen some development in scattered areas, but the biggest update is clothes and hair! Yes, sadly the little pops are no longer allowed to run around naked. They all get shirts, pants (trousers), and shoes - although each shoe is literally one pixel. There's a few colors that the game randomly selects from for each article of clothing, and then they stick with those clothes for the rest of their lives.

Hair works similarly, except there's random styles the game will choose from - or it may just skip it and make them bald. There's also a chance of having facial hair, which right now I have set to 30%, and that facial hair could be a goatee, a moustache, or a long beard. At this scale though, the moustache and goatee basically look the same.

The funny thing is that this is now the first time that we face the concept of gender in this game. I went for an "everyone wears the same clothes" approach for clothing, but the hairstyles mean that some villagers may now have some gender presentation. Technically any of the hairstyles could belong to any gender, but a pony tail or long hair, in the absence of other characteristics, is generally going to give a first impression of "female". Short hair (or none at all) would likely come across as "male" at first glance. With so few pixels for each pop, specific pixels have a significant impact on how the player sees them.

Does it really matter? Well, as far as game mechanics go, no - there are no advantages or disadvantages to the hair styles, and no in-game concept of gender whatsoever. But on the other hand, the little pixel blobs are representative of people, so I wanted to remain inclusive. I'm hoping that the randomization of styles and the 30% facial hair probability keeps the gender ratio looking relatively even, or at least substantially plausibly non-binary, but those rates are definitely subject to change if not.

Finally, a heads up on the pace of development: I've been on leave at my full time job for the past couple of months. On the one hand, that's been because of mental health issues exacerbated by the current iteration of shareholder capitalism*, which also lowered my ability to actually work on Iron Village. On the flip side though, it did give me more time to work on it - time that's going away next week when I return to work. There'll still be some dev time, it's just competing for room on the schedule now, so things might slow down a little.

*Specifically three things: obsession with randomly laying people off in the worst ways possible, random firings for work-related protests, and "AI" LLM-related obsession.