Hi all, I’ve got another dev diary for your consumption today. First off, an announcement: the Iron Village Demo will be launching on Steam on October 3rd! There’s been quite a few updates since the last demo release (full release notes to follow in a future dev diary), so feel free to give it a go even if you played the Itch.io version. That one will get updated too, don’t worry!

Be sure to wishlist to get a reminder once it’s available!

The decently big change I’m squeezing in before the demo release is a change to the level 2 resources. Currently, you can take wheat and combine it with water to make either bread or “drinks”. The drinks name was already lightly covering up that it was the manufacturing of beer, which I realized I would want to steer away from – while Iron Village isn’t designed for kids, I don’t want to needlessly steer kids away from playing.

The thing is, after thinking about it for awhile, just renaming beer doesn’t really address the fact that it’s obviously beer. Like, you’re putting wheat in a brewery and getting a drink that obviously resembles beer. I decided to remove beer entirely, but that leaves a bit of a gap in the resource tree, at least as far as player choice goes.

The solution I’ve come up with is flour. It doesn’t fully address player choice, but it does at least maintain some complexity. Once you’ve harvested wheat, it can be sent to a mill. I was trying to figure out how to make the mill an interesting building, until I remembered that there’s a Minifantasy asset for a windmill. I made some changes to it (mainly separating the blades from the base building and adjusting their size), but it really helps make the mill a distinctive part of town.

https://www.instagram.com/p/C_560yjxh9r/

That of course means the rest of the production chain and train makeup have to change too. The bakery now takes flour and water instead of wheat and water. Trains that would normally buy wheat no longer do so. Just about every resource in the game has some way of selling it, but now there’s the question of whether or not it makes sense for trains to buy flour, rather than its raw component (wheat) or its finished product (bread). So far the trains have either been purchasing raw goods (because they are not yet refinable in level 1), purchasing finished goods, or selling supplies for the player. For now, flour will be sellable to the “bailout train” – the train that comes by is you run out of gold. Later levels may have trains for purchasing intermediate products such as flour, once more are present in the town.

This does complicate backwards compatibility somewhat – I’m not promising backwards compatibility until the full release, but I’m still putting in a best effort. Existing breweries will still load, but new ones will not be buildable. That way, old saves with breweries won’t disrupt loading, and will still function – but with the other changes, gameplay will no longer function the same way.

Anyway, I hope that explains the changes that have been made, look forward to the updated demo coming to Steam on October 3rd!