Limiting scope is definitely one of the big challenges of video game design. Here is the current draft revamp of the farm using Modern Farm assets.

While I think it is coming along nicely. It is likely too big of the compact representation of the world in the game. You can see that the area of the farm is bigger than the rest of the island! Oops..

So I can either change the context of the island in that it is home to a large farm, shrink the farm or enlarge the rest of the island. Likely I will slightly shrink the farm and just add some more gameplay opportunities in the new area. Eg. the chicken coop/barn can hold some of the chicken based levels. More items to be found and and maybe some other encounters/NPCs. 

Godot 4.4 update

With the stable release of Godot 4.4 I decided to take the leap and upgrade Godot versions again. Going back to the start of my Puzzle Cross journey, I actually started the game with an early release of Godot 4.0. It happened because I foolishly tried updating my previous game from Godot 3.x (3.4 I think) to a late 4.0 beta and it was a disaster. I spent a month trying to update my code to get things to work but the map generator and other little things just weren't working right. I eventually gave up and took a little break. That is when I decided to try making a "small" new game from scratch in 4.0. This of course, became Puzzle Crossing.

So over the time I have been working on Puzzle Crossing, I have tried to keep the version of Godot I am using up to date. However, this time I would wait for either late release candidates or official stable releases. It felt like I was on 4.3 forever and it was quite stable but all the new juicy updates in 4.4 were definitely tempting me. Things like typed Dictionaries for export variables and better editor window management.

This time around I took the first release candidate and started a new prototype game to just see how rough or polished the release was shaping up to be. It went pretty well so when the official stable release of Godot 4.4 came out, I waited a few days and then took the plunge.

How did it go? Actually very smoothly. I tagged my last code check-in as Godot 4.3 and I backed up my project for good measure. Then I downloaded Godot 4.4, fired it up and pointed it to my project. It detected that it was built on an older version and asked if I was sure. I confirmed and it proceeded to update the project. After about 30 seconds it.. crashed!

I had seen Godot do it before when opening a project on a new version or machine so I just waited a few seconds, fired it up again and let it try to open it up again. After another 30 seconds or so, it opened fine! I launched the game and it worked flawlessly which was a big relief. One thing that did not work was the in game Dialogue Manager editor. The only third party Godot addon I use in the game is Nathan Goad's excellent Dialogue Manager. While the in game dialogue features worked fine, the in-editor editor did not load and threw an error. This had do with a signature change that Nathan addressed very shortly with a new release. After updating to the newly released addon version and fixing a couple of issues resulting from being too far behind in releases (oops), everything was working great again.

So the plan for the next week is to finish up the farm revamp and then look at adding a bit more polish to the UI and game juice.

Thanks for reading!