Hi fellow Rebels, Gabeux here.

On behalf of the team, thanks for everyone that supported us by buying the game or simply showing interest and sharing our project around! And thanks to Itch.io for showing our game on the homepage and Twitter, it was a great feeling after all the work that went into this development stage.

First DevLog

Welcome to our first devlog. We will try to write one devlog each week or two to talk about the development, upcoming features, current happenings and so on.

For this one, we'd like to focus on our own experience during the first week after the release, what's coming up in regards to fixes and changes, and the Flora update coming very soon.

The Release Week - Kirthos, Gabeux

Kirthos: The last week was pretty exhausting. With the release, we started to do marketing, and to be honest, marketing is not what I prefer to do, but it's needed if we want our game to be seen.
We started to get some bug reports too. I already started to fix them, and an update will come during the next week fixing some issues. For example, we found an issue that can occur on the very first launch of the game with the settings menu.

Gabeux: Roller coaster of feelings maybe would describe the first week, as we saw friends and family very happy to finally hear that the little game we were working on grew up to become a published project. That's how we've been taking it for a year now, but it was reassuring to see others finally look at it in the same way as we do, and cheering for the same reasons. Funny enough, I couldn't have predicted the impact it would have on each team member, as I can feel everyone is still readjusting to the new reality. The Itch.io release was a Major Milestone, indeed.

The feedback we've got, even though it's very early both in the development and in the release process, already tweaked our directions and perspectives to better, clearer ones. An example of that is the further work being put into the rebels (pawns) behavior when it comes to path-finding and crafting orders. Some of those fixes and changes may already be seen on the next build planned by Kirthos.
Additionally, some people taking hints of where we might take the game feels strangely vindicating, when it comes to self-doubts over future plans. As we prefer to keep most things under wraps to not spoil the future fun (or to not have us lock ourselves up in less desirable priorities, designs or implementations), this signals that our sights are reasonably well-aligned..which is very easy to not be so when it comes to game development, as the industry is probably well aware of nowadays.

Some of us took some well-deserved couple of days off, as it was my case. Personally, it was hard to deal with the excitement and all the new ideas and opportunities that kept flooding the mind, and still keep focus on any task at hand. Coming back now, things are much calmer, the team is on duty, and the rebellion churns along. My personal thanks to everyone that contributed to the ecstatic last few days. 

Coming Up

For the next build, coming up in a week at most, we're focusing on issues that were reported or found through feedback, and also other issues we've found or had noted down ourselves.  These include minor visual fixes, up to path-finding improvements and changes to the crafting order logic- this one  is still being worked on, as it requires further testing to make sure we get a proper result, and may not be on the very next build is very likely to be on the next build, as it is passing automated and initial manual tests. Issues with the camera moving when the cursor is outside of the game (on a second monitor, alt-tabbed, etc) were also fixed.

You can have a sneak peek at what's coming on future builds and patches by joining our Discord and checking the #github-pr channel, as the fixes shown there may make it to the very next updates.

Coming Soon

Coming very soon™ (on the good side of soon™), we're looking at overhauling and expanding the Flora of the island.
Although TAR does not take place on Earth, we prefer to keep things human-friendly player-friendly by mixing common elements with maybe an added twist. This is a philosophy applied to the whole game, as it seemed to sit well with everyone in the team. Below, you can see a preview of some of the new plants and trees.

The Flora update may require a couple of systems to be put in place before it's released, and such systems may not be developed to their fullest in their first iteration. We really just want to get these plants out there, as they will support future interactions and industries, as well as making the game much more varied and colorful, and adding to its sense of scale.

The Flora update is just one of many features and content updates we're looking at. You can check some more features that are Coming Soon on the Itch.Io Store Page, but we're already working on making some sort of Rough Roadmap for our next Major Milestone available to the public.

Let us know your thoughts in the comments below. 
Thank you for reading and keeping up with the rebellion's affairs. We hope to see you soon, fighting the good fight.
CG Out!