This past week I’ve just about finished the “overhaul” of the initial gameplay, which will be the subject of this dev diary. But first, an announcement:

Iron Village will be at the Boston Festival of Indie Games next weekend! The event is Sunday, December 15th from 10am to 5pm at Cyclorama, 539 Tremont St, Boston, MA 02116. You’ll be able to get your hands on the full build – i.e. including level 3, not just the demo! I hope to see some of you there! (Please note that face masks are *required*!)

Anyway, I’ve been away from home for the past two weeks – basically a combination of Thanksgiving, a wedding this weekend, and not wanting to for back and forth with the kids in the week between the two. Thanks to my day job’s office attendance policy, I had to take this as a vacation – though I really needed it, to be honest.

This left me with a week where I could actually get some solid time to work on Iron Village. One of the things that has been neglected in Iron Village is the setting – what’s going on here? Why are we building a town here? Why is the land empty? Is there any detail to the setting besides generic medieval/fantasy? Some of this will be addressed as you play, but the beginning doesn’t really have that much to it.

First off, the New Game screen has been updated. It takes the form of a Royal Proclamation – literally telling you to go make a town to support the new railway, which is being built to facilitate trade with Nova Porthladd, a city which recently opened up for trade. This new screen does commit the sin of regurgitating exposition at you, but at least it’s doing so in character?

Level 1 of gameplay has been shaken up quite a bit. The aesthetic change is that farm fields are now 2×1 in size – I felt like they didn’t take up enough space in proportion to other buildings, so literally doubling their size should help. There are now *four* different crops to choose from: wheat and giant mushrooms are still in place, but now potatoes and peppers have been moved from level 3. Potatoes serve as an initial food source (more on food needs in a moment), and peppers have been rebranded as magick peppers. There’s some lore to be fleshed out about tropical dwarves and spiciness as a form of magic, but for now just keep in mind it’ll be an important resource.

The biggest mechanical change is hunger & thirst. Is it crazy to be adding new mechanics this late in making the game? Probably. Thankfully though, the state machine for villagers was set up in a way that made things fairly straightforward. The easiest part to explain is thirst: villagers get thirsty over time, and get thirsty faster while working. When they get a chance, they’ll pop over to the water tank, have a drink (taking it from your water supply), and then get back to work/sleeping/whatever they wanted to do next. If they get too thirsty, their satisfaction takes a negative hit, which eventually causes them to leave.

Hunger works the same way, although different foods can be more or less filling. In level 1, potatoes are the best source of food, providing 60 fullness. (This is an internal value that is not exposed in the game, FYI, although depending on feedback I could see that changing.) Magick peppers and giant mushrooms also work as food (20 fullness each), but they’re lower priority since their main purpose is manufacturing other goods.

I’m going to leave it here, discussion of changes to levels 2 and 3 will wait for another diary. I want to close out with a huge thanks to John Walker, whose Thanksgiving tradition of highlighting unknown indie games on Kotaku led to Iron Village showing up in an article! Over the course of four days, that got us from just under 300 wishlists to over 700! Go check out the article, as well as part 2 to see some other titles deserving your attention!