I added a level for the chicken coop. There are only a couple of levels right now but it is designed for a place to collect eggs. There is a a new NPC on the farm with a small side quest requiring eggs too.

As I am now in the phase of development where I am looking to fix or improve as much as I can, I finally turned my attention to something that has been bugging me for awhile. If you play the current version you might have noticed some slight jittering when moving your avatar around. 

Tracking down jitter issues in the past was a little tricky and I was not exactly sure when this started happening. After a little investigation, the fix was fortunately pretty simple. I had refactored avatar movement at some point last year and I had the movement code get called in the _physics_process method instead of _process. So the movement calculations weren't really syncing with the frames causing the microstutters. Simply moving the code to _process made it all go away. whew!

I tried making some animated GIFs to demonstrate the before and after but it was a little hard to capture the difference. If anyone is interested in see the difference, I can make a video. Just let me know.

There was also another annoying movement issue where the avatar would stop animating when still traveling on the map. This was an issue when changing states from moving based on clicking on a destination and then switching to manual movement (using keys or holding down the mouse button in the desired direction). It's nice to have that fixed too.

I had left this issues for so long because they weren't game breaking and I was a little worried it would require a lot of time. I had at some point , spent a lot of time reworking the movement to support the 3 types of controls (using keys, clicking somewhere on the map or following the direction of where the mouse cursor is when the left mouse button is pressed). Allowing switching to any type of control at any time made the code a lot less clean than I wanted.

I am almost finishing with another little gameplay mechanic for the farm so I will post about that soon..