Version 0.705b

Teddy

Developer
Staff member
Summary: The feature everyone's been waiting for since day one has arrived (in a somewhat limited form): Player Housing! Also a potentially very significant bug fix.

Recommended level: everyone who's gotten past the first dungeon

Update Description

HOUSING

Alright, so here it is! The beta of the housing system! It's quite a big addition so I'm expecting there to be some bugs lurking around.

To get the house, talk to Carpenter and Kim in Evergrind City (they're next to the school).

What you can do right now is furnish the house with the ~150 items that are available right now, you can resize the room, you can save & load houses and you can adjust lighting.

What's there is just some polish and more content away from being what we would consider an acceptable housing system. In other words, where we go from here is kind of up to you guys! We did have plans to let players design much larger houses, with multiple rooms, or have some different layouts players can pick from, but then we felt we might be overscoping a bit too much on a feature that might already be at the point players expect.

POSSIBLE MAJOR BUGFIX

Alright, so this is a bug that's been eluding us for quite some while now... we've seen it before on computers our school lent us when going to a few events in Sweden, but could never replicate it ourselves. Then, a few weeks ago, Fred's computer broke down and we had to get him another one. Lo and behold, there it was!

By the look of things, there's a bug in XNA (or a bug on some computers, if you will), that makes XNA misinterpret the time. Basically, XNA believes time is running about 15 % slower than reality. Now 15 % slower is a lot and this has probably affected the feel of the game for a bunch of people. How many we can't tell.

By using some diagnostic classes that most certainly do have a firm grasp of time, I've made an alternate FPS-counter for the game, and the bug can be identified by the game itself by comparing that FPS counter with XNA's, and if they diverge, the game switches to counting time via my system (which itself is rather unproven, and so is only used on problem computers).

It will be quite interesting to see if anyone on the forums notice a difference! It will be quite huge, if so.

This bug might also explain some of the more aggressive lag complaints: if one player is running the game at 85 % speed, then it's a tough task for the other clients to sync correctly with that player.

PATCH NOTES

Hotfix June 1, 2017
  • The game is now saved when a house is saved
  • Shroomies once again dies when you kill them
  • When using a controller, carpets are now placed with A instead of X
  • Carpets can no longer be expanded onto other carpets, causing them to disappear into the void
  • The carpenter no longer upsets the space-time-continuum by existing on two places at once
  • Fixed a bug where you could rotate a bonsai tree in certain positions to break its hitbox and then crash the game
  • Although she deserves vengeance, Miki's ghost no longer crashes the game if the ball is placed right after getting your house

Additions
  • The carpenter has arrived in Evergrind and will now sell you a piece of land with your own house!
  • Player replies to NPC questions can now be translated
Bug Fixes
  • Added a potential fix to a bug that might've caused severe slowdown on an unknown number of machines
  • The protective cubes of the Winter Wizards can now damage the players multiple times
  • Jumpkins and Shroomies now lose their target on loss of sight, and shouldn't teleport through walls
  • Jumpkins and Shroomies now get pacified for a moment when hit by attacks
  • The Second Wind talent should now work properly for clients in multiplayer
 
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KoBeWi

Jumpkin
In other words, where we go from here is kind of up to you guys! We did have plans to let players design much larger houses, with multiple rooms, or have some different layouts players can pick from, but then we felt we might be overscoping a bit too much on a feature that might already be at the point players expect.
Well, houses with multiple rooms of custom layout and design... that's not too far from a dungeon editor. Seeing as Grindea already has different types of activities (Arcade Mode), having a way to create our own dungeons and share them via Steam workshop would be... interesting. :chicken: (Not sure if enemy AI has what it takes to handle arbitrary room layouts tho.)

That's obviously something to do when the game is finally finished.
 

res7less

Jumpkin
Whoa, that's quite a big bunch of stuff to decorate with! I was surprised by the size of the scroll bar and kept scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, scrolling... The first thing I did inside the house was placing Shiidu onto a wall to see if she says something. Not only did I feel rewarded by her blabbering, it's also possible to interact with her. Awesome! I love this update already.

The only weird thing was to see the Carpenter still kicking his cart outside of Evergrind City during the requested stroll, while his other self was apparently building my house. Either that guy has a twin brother, or teleporting abilities. How is he even able to build a whole house if he can't even fix his blasted cart?
 

res7less

Jumpkin
Some additional thoughts:

- Chairs don't have a sprite, where they face upward
- Small Candelabra is present twice among the purchasable furniture in Carpenter's shop
- It would be useful to see the name (and description) of the item that is currently selected
- It would be awesome to be able to interact with the cat screen, for example being able to create logs like Professor Pine and Tannie did, which other players can then read
- Generally more interactions with certain items would be great - especially with those, that were found

Also:
Player replies to NPC questions can now be translated
Huzzah! Huzzah! Huzzah!
 
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KoBeWi

Jumpkin
I like how you can put the Cursed Ball from Tai Ming...
1eb43537-8162-4627-be43-c092895ea127
hjhA2Fe.png


Creepy :chicken:

Shouldn't windows give light tho? Or appear dark if you set light level to 0? Some furniture just don't seem to play well with light settings.

Also, the way you put lore into furniture item. Amazing D:
 

KoBeWi

Jumpkin
Now that I think of it, it would be cool to have a unique set of furniture not themed after any location in game, and after furnishing your house with this set, it would start to spawn some unique enemies, eventually granting entrance to secret mini-dungeon with some boss.

At least that's one of possibilities to add more gameplay functionality to housing.

EDIT:
It would be even more cool if this mini-dungeon was composed of same-themed houses of other players.
D:

MORE EDITS:
Just reporting that item identified as LongTableBlackName is named Basic Black Table. That's a mistake probably. Same with white one. And wooden.

And this:
1rgKbJX.png


Also, you can put carpet under carpet in moving mode, and you then can't remove the lower one:
m1M6oGf.png
 
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The G-Meister

Giga Slime
Aha! I'm glad I kept a spare eye on the patch notes forum ;)

Having only done brief experimenting, I'm liking what I've seen so far. Pleasantly surprised by a few features such as the lighting and the large room size, disappointed by a lack of a few things like placeable walls - stacking crate tables as a substitute didn't look too good.

My only major complaint would be everything from the later game is a tad expensive to be justified for me, even after you've spent many hours grinding, and I'd imagine it would be even worse if you've spent a decent amount of money on gear. I dunno, maybe I'm just being stingy.

Having said that, love the massive Flying Fortress flatscreen, well worth the money.

Also, love that there's no limit on how far you can stack things.

Stacking.png

As a final thing - seen as we now have the first proper goldsink, I've attached a .zip file containing my character with 4.2 million spinsect armor. Go sell that stuff and make all the money you could ever want! Would love to see what people come up with for fancy housing designs with essentially unlimited money.

Back to revising for exams <3
 

Attachments

  • Spinsect Armor.zip
    4 KB · Views: 5

TsReaper

Boar
I've been expecting the housing system for soooooo long and it's now finally in the game. Nice work!

Although it's a little bit strange to see the carpenter appear both beside player's house and outside Evergrind kicking his cart...

Also, maybe we can have a post in the forum for the players to show their house decoration?
 
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Naythan

Green Slime
Just from my own experience playing around with the housing system, perhaps if you run out of an item you're using, it could then skip to the next item in your housing inventory? I found it a little tiring placing all of my Christmas trees and then having to move across to select the next thing when they run out.

I love this update though and I like that you can expand the width and height of the house. I think the carpenter should offer additional side quests, like bring him x amount of rare wood and he will give you a new Blue print for a different house shape (or perhaps the outside of the house could change too).

PS: I find it creepy that the carpenter is randomly still staring at your house once built, waiting for you to come buy furniture. Surely he should have his own store and then you go visit him when you're needing more furniture?
 
Wooo! Loving the update and I'm gunna dump my review here out of the way.

What I like
# I love the system, it works so smoothly and the pixel art is brilliant as always.

# I love how easy it is to move around items, especially when stacked

#Carpets are amazing how they can be re-siz
ed

#Being able to put stuff in the middle of tables is amazing

#Being able to save multiple houses is an excellent idea

What I (Sorta) Dislike
# I'd like to turn off animations by interacting with it, such as the Fortress tables.

# I dislike the purple furniture right now. Its a strange colour of purple, and I find the purple wallpaper horrible (Idk why I wanted to make this a point I just really like purple) I'd personally prefer something Like This

# Some items are horrible to place together. A such example of this is the Small season bush, which is 1 high (prefect) but 1.5 wide (wut). This causes an annoying gap between them if you want to put it horizontally next to each other

#The carpenters sorting is really horrible ;~; I'd much prefer being able to sort by theme rather than "big stuff", or have both! So we can look for chairs that's seasone themed

#Stuff that can't be rotated annoy me to much. Even if it won't look as amazing it still feels limiting on what we can do.

What I would like to see in the future

# I'd love a "Tetris" like system where you can add rooms and such onto the main basic one. This way we could have our own little rooms that we can theme, like a a casual house with rooms for the bedroom, dining hall etc, but a spooky cave on the side with a strange shrine. I think it would open up a lot more room for creativity

# Let us put down our own walls. Sometimes we don't want the entire room to be perfectly square, we want to sleep in privacy!


#Second floor maybe?

#Being able to change the outside of the house would be pretty awesome as well, like the roof

#More stuff! Themed stuff, normal housing, other random themes
 

Teddy

Developer
Staff member
Thanks for all the feedback guys! :D

Feel free to keep it coming! We'll try to measure people's reactions over the following days, and we'll probably start a poll+discussion thread regarding the possible future additions to decide whether we'll expand the system or not (more items will come regardless, of course).

Anyway! I just uploaded a patch fixing many of the reported bugs:

Hotfix June 1, 2017
  • The game is now saved when a house is saved
  • Shroomies once again dies when you kill them
  • When using a controller, carpets are now placed with A instead of X
  • Carpets can no longer be expanded onto other carpets, causing them to disappear into the void
  • The carpenter no longer upsets the space-time-continuum by existing on two places at once
  • Fixed a bug where you could rotate a bonsai tree in certain positions to break its hitbox and then crash the game
  • Although she deserves vengeance, Miki's ghost no longer crashes the game if the ball is placed right after getting your house
 

JonathanW12

Green Slime
Here is an imgur album with all the bugs my friend and I could find: http://imgur.com/a/8wpML
I also found that the screen moves to the side quickly then back again whenever I moved against the walls. My friend also had this problem.
I agree that there should be an option to sort furniture by theme.
We had a strange bug in the new update where whenever entered a new screen we could move very fast for a few seconds.
 

JonathanW12

Green Slime
2qL7rfX

I pressed a button on my keyboard with the painting selected, and it disappeared. It wasn't in my inventory after and I found it again by hovering over the place it used to be at with the hand tool later. I could only see the outline but when I pressed the move button it reappeared.
 

subaru313

Rabby
Love the housing!

Carpets can no longer be expanded onto other carpets, causing them to disappear into the void
Actually I quite liked it that you were able to place carpets on top of each other. Gives the room this cozy overstuffed look :D

The Tai Ming bed expands out of the house when placed like this at the bottom edge:
upload_2017-6-3_9-28-28.png

In general I'd like to be able to rotate stuff more freely (as suggested by Smallsplat above).
Especially unnerving: my favourite item - the broomstick. It's brilliant with a nice animation but it's also huge and not rotatable vertically so it easily gets in the way.
Also the normal wooden chair cannot be rotated upwards which limits it's uses by a quarter :p

As for house expansion I really like this idea:
the carpenter should offer additional side quests, like bring him x amount of rare wood and he will give you a new Blue print for a different house shape (or perhaps the outside of the house could change too).

This way players who are not interested in the (great) housing feature would still have a basic housing option while we others could happily hunt for new blueprints ;)

Additional floors (=stairs) and outside changables would be really nice too (as mentioned before, just want to stress the point of how AWESOME that would be^^)

Thank you for your hard work! I'm looking forward to more housing items, interactions and space to fill.
 
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