--Introduction--

Hey there! Here I'm going to write about some thoughts about the game as an introduction to the idea, if you are only interested in the information about the update skip to the overview section!

I'm SoyVixterDev, one of the developers of the game, and as you may know this project started as university project made in two weeks, under a pretty limited free time schedule, this is why some parts of the game didn't get so much attention and polish as we wanted, for this reason we started this new Update, with the intention of fixing some of the problems that emerged because of the limited time frame, and also reworking some mechanics with the intention of making them more easily expandable and lay a foundation for possible future updates.

In this post we will be talking about everything we've changed and upgraded for this update, and also start sort of a series of posts where we explain some of the innerworkings of the game.

--Overview--

-Major Changes-

The biggest changes in this update relate to the world generation, the items system, inventory and crafting.

Every one of these points were reworked and remade to fit better the needs of the game and make them more easily expandable in the long run.

The most noticeable change related to the world generation is that now we have each biome separated by a river and some bridges, this river not only acts as a more immersive way of traversing the biomes but also provides a constant and universal water source.

The world generation was remade from the ground up, originally it used rng to generate the resources and biomes every time you start a new game, and it wasn't very upgrade-friendly because it relayed a lot on "unpredictable" rng and hardcoded generation. This was fixed by generating the world using Noise profiles instead of simple RNG, allowing the world to be generated taking a seed as a starting condition. 

The resource generation was also reworked and now supports adding new resources and editing the generation of each one a lot easier than before.

The item system was also reworked completely, this time unifying all items into a single object type, a change that's crucial to other changes necessary to enhance the game experience, and also makes it a lot easier to add new items in possible future updates.

The first enhancement that uses this new approach to the items is the Inventory, now instead of having just a single item in your head at a time, you can have up to 4 different items in a Hotbar. This was a tricky addition because we didn't want to ruin the feeling of the game, but with some feedback the final decision was made to make carrying items less of a pain.

Following the hotbar update we wanted to expand the crafting system because originally it depended on different crafting tables and dropping the objects into them to craft different items. We are still debating on how to exactly do this new crafting system, so we can't really say how is going to be in the end.

-Minor changes-

We'll also change some minor details that couldn't make it in the original release, like reworking the menus, sounds, particles, details and some visual changes.

Some of the visual changes include Sprites for some objects and particles, an addition of a cloud shadow shader to add a little touch, more polish in some animations and borders for the biomes.

We'll also add an options menu and some preferences that can be set at the start of each new world.

A fun addition is an optional cheat console, originally made for testing and debug but we made it accessible to anyone because why not! (This function might have some problems but fixing those minor errors are not a priority because the main use of the console is to debug during development)

--Information--

This update doesn't have an official release date yet, but we are working hard to get it done as fast as we can without compromising a lot of content. We also plan on releasing some Devlogs focused on specific changes and share some insight on how it was made and how it works, so stay tuned for that! 

And about future updates, depending on the amount of support this game receives we have planned a bunch of possible updates for the game, but because we also want to work on other projects and we have very limited time we'll wait until we have a confirmation that is worth the effort.