Ancient Savo beta 30 : pottery, children learning skills, and the modding script

[Erkka]

Ancient Savo public beta version 30 is now available at itch.io. And the work continues towards planned September release on Steam

This version adds pottery and related tasks. You can dig soil to get clay, and craft clay items. Construct a pottery kiln to fire clay items to turn them to ceramics.

Another new feature is simulation of characters learning skills when working together with more talented people. So, typically children first helping their parents, then working together with them. Each skill can be defined to have unique learning curve, and skills (very) slowly degrade if not used regularly enough.

There are also some new ailments, and accidents. The likelihood of an accident is mostly determined by the character fatigue, and partially affected by skill level. An accident can simply spawn an ailment, or trigger an interactive text story so that player decisions will affect the outcome.

Like most of the other game elements, ailments, accidents and text stories are defined in XML files making them fully moddable. The modding system was already capable of handling variables and logical conditions. Now there is also a GOTO statement, which can be used to re-direct the script flow.

For more information see the release news on itch.io

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And, a little bit of background information for those who haven't been following the early stages of the Ancient Savo project; this is an Enormous Elk sideproject, a smaller sister game to UnReal World. From the development point of view this gives me a development sandbox where I can freely test with different algorithms and simulation mechanics without a risk of messing up the vast UnReal World codebase. So, some of the Ancient Savo features might eventually get adapted to UnReal World. But also, as a side project Ancient Savo allows coding adventures of its own. Ancient Savo is built to be moddable from the ground up. At the moment the weather and the map generation are hard-coded. I have some simmering ideas about a possible future sequel, which would be just a set of tools for any modder to create their custom survival scenarios. Ancient Savo already has fully moddable menus and submenus, and the modder can add pretty much anything from terrain types to animals and items and their variables. Well, but future developments depend on the reception and resources - and after so much of coding Ancient Savo my fingers are increasingly itching to write some pieces of UrW code to help Sami with the development.