Hello! First off, I want to apologize to anyone who was looking forward to this release, or anticipating playing this. I started working on this game a decade ago but my development has been intermittent due to life issues. Got married a couple years ago and started getting into my first love, which is music production. That being said I have always regretted not finishing this project and feel I am in a good place to finish this finally.
I have started working on heavily since the beginning of the year and have implemented all the features I really wanted to add.
Update to Monogame
I was still developing this on the original XNA code library back in 2019. The fact that I hadn't ported this project yet was definitely holding me back. I finally got the initiative to do that in January and it didn't prove to be quite as difficult as I feared. It did take me a while to move my audio out of the old XNA Audio utility but now I can ditch that and have all my audio loaded in game! So now it's much easier to add sounds and I've added a few new updated songs as well.
Update to NPC Logic
I've finally added pathfinding to my NPCs and now they can do all sorts of things to help you out. They will automatically chop your logs into wood planks and load ore into your furnace. In addition they go to sleep and use beds when it's nighttime! Check out the video below:
Infinite World Generation
Even more complicated was now the world has near-infinite procedural generation. You can walk to either edge of the map and it will load or generate the next area. You could basically keep going as long as there is space on your hard drive for new worlds but I have it capped at around 250 so I can have the some special worlds that you teleport to directly. 250 would already be insanely large but I should be able to easily adjust that as needed. I made a video of walking through a couple regions. Still some things to be fixed but you can see the world generation works pretty smooth.
Other updates
Now I am really working on focusing on polishing the first part of the game. I've been updating my tech tree logic. Before it was kind of weird you would just unlock the next tier by crafting items in that category but I am changing so you have to put the correct materials into the menu to unlock it. Also, some major updates on my dungeons. Before the rooms would not always link up correctly but I've found if you make the room images a uniform size they will always link up and create a correct dungeon. Otherwise I am implementing more enemies & items, balancing enemy hit-points, attacks, armors, buffs so it's starting to feel actually like a fun game.
I am aiming for 2025 early access, I think that should be reasonable to finish a beta by mid next-year. Thanks again to everyone who is following Ground Seal!
