An ever-so-slightly late update this month (oh no it's July already!), and we're celebrating that Alpha 2.2 has been released. The main feature in this version is that you can now discover giant mushrooms (they're rare, they prefer to hang out in the larger caverns that you can discover in the middle of the mountainous regions) and harvest them as an alternative to lumber/logs from trees.

For now this is mostly just an unusual colour alternative to the kinds of wood you're used to, but in the future as the economy is added, giant mushrooms are very rare and much-prized by the dwarven community, so this will be a particularly valuable resource to export or craft with. Also, different materials will have different properties - perhaps giant mushrooms are softer/springier than normal wood and you might be able to find a use for this (a better material for a bow, perhaps?).

Alpha 2.2 also includes quite a number of small bug fixes and quality of life improvements. Bugs in systems-driven games like this tend to be darkly amusing and one that I quite liked is that previously, dwarves would jump up out of bed the moment they're starving or critically dehydrated. A change in Alpha 2.1 allows dwarves to sleep at least for a while with a life-threatening unmet need like this. The unintended consequence of this was that dwarves could now die while asleep in bed which they wouldn't do before. As this wasn't noticed during development, it's been possible for dwarves to die while in bed and quite literally stay in that bed forever, decaying away to a skeleton as each dwarf is responsible for getting itself out of bed (i.e. there's no job to go and pull a dead body out of a bed). Instead of the grisly task of removing bodies from beds like that, dwarves now fall out of bed when they die as shown in this dev mode video:

The main changes in Alpha 2.2 are those behind the scenes - I've implemented the artifact-based mod loading and parsing as described in last month's dev update. This massively speeds up the time to add and process new assets that make up the base mod, as well as being a future improvement for modders to make use of.

The other main improvement is that until now, when adding sprites to the game I would manually trim the PNG images down to eliminate unneccessary padding/whitespace from the edges and calculate how this would affect the offset of the sprite being rendered in-game. That was an extremely laborious, time-consuming process which I'm sorry to say I spent quite so long on sometimes. Now that I have a good understanding of that process, I've been able to write a simple automated tool which performs the same job, but taking milliseconds rather than minutes of manual effort! This will also form part of a suite of tools modders will be able to use to make it easier to add assets to the game.

The next milestone, Alpha 3, is the modding release. First I'll be tidying up the existing data structures and mod files so there's better (or at least some) consistency in the data files for modders to expect, as well as a general cleanup of unused or incomplete asset files and data. Part of this includes adding the Kickstarter-backer-specified natural resources to the game! I've only received about half of the possible responses to the email for that reward so please do get in touch if you haven't already and you were a Kickstarter or Backerkit backer who had "Add a natural resource" as one of your rewards.

Otherwise, see you next month and thanks for reading this update!