November's Planned Updates

October Wrap-up

October was a huge month full of content, updates and growth for Farm RPG.  Along with a pretty large Halloween event, a lot of great features and items were added to the game.  We had over 15,000 people register in October!

Here's a high level list of things that happened last month:  Haunted House and a bunch of Special Help Requests (thanks Quest team!), Whispering Creek, Feed Mill, Pig Pen, Storehouse Storage, New Fishing UI and a ton of small updates, bug fixes and content.  I hope you enjoyed the events during the month!

November's Planned Updates

• Glassworks is now Craftworks - I really wanted to add Glassworks in October.  When I finally sat down to do it I realized I didn't like the idea of a farm building just for glass items when there are so many other items we need regularly.  The Craftworks will work like Auto-Crafting, except with a few major differences.  
  
  First, you will need to master an item, like Glass Bottles, for example.  When you go to the Craftworks you'll see Glass Bottle with an ON/OFF switch by it.  Flip this ON and the Craftworks will automatically craft Glass Bottles as long as you have the required components and Silver in your Inventory.  This will probably happen every 15 minutes (subject to change).  
  
  Your Craftworks will have a limit to the number of things it will craft at once and you'll be able to increase this number with Silver.  You won't have to go load it up or anything, it will just run continuously making the items you have set to ON so long as you have the resources.   I'll have to setup some sort of Order System to make this work as some items use the same resources.  
   
• Bookshelf - I'm 2 months behind on adding this system.  Mostly because it didn't seem as important as other updates, but I do hope to try to build this in November.  Patrons can read about the concept here.  Basically Books give you a temporary effect and can be "read" daily.
   
• Google In-App-Purchases - The Android app is in need of a few updates, including the addition of real IAPs so that you don't have to use PayPal.  This is on track to happen during November.  IAPs are very complex to setup so thank you for being patient here.
   
• Cooking Skill - I'm going to be honest here and say this one is probably going to get pushed into December.  It's on the roadmap for November and we'll see, but this month is a holiday month for many of us and I may not be working as much in the latter part of the month.   I've been laying the foundation for it via places like Whispering Creek and other items.  
  
  Cooking is going to work like Crafting, except the recipes will be based on 4 ingredients and not published, so you'll have to pick 4 things and see what you get.  You'll add a Kitchen to your Farmhouse and Ovens to cook different meals at once.  Each meal will take quite a bit of time to cook and show up in your Inventory as a "meal" type item.  The use of Meals will be similar to using Books in that it will create a temporary effect (like +25% XP at Ember Lagoon for 30 minutes) or the meal can be sold for large Silver amounts.
  
  This is phase 1 of Cooking.  When the Tavern System comes into play it will expand greatly in what meals are good for.  It's a massive update that is going to take a lot of work and testing before it can go live.  Cooking will have it's own levels and give you more Skill Points to use for perks, etc.
   
• Other Updates - I've got a list of new perks to add, new achievements, new pets and new items.  The Quest team is hard at work on a ton of new Help Requests also.  I'd like to have a few XP weekends and something a bit bigger around Thanksgiving too.
   

In regards to the speed of my updates

If you've made it this far, thanks for reading and hanging in there.  So far, I've managed to keep a record pace on updates and content.  I'm excited daily to build new things and keep the content flowing, but at the same time the game is HUGE now.  With that said, I'm going to have to do a better job at pacing myself to ensure things go live when they are ready so that nothing major breaks or unbalances things too quickly.  It was easy to roll out content when only a few hundred people played daily.  We are approaching 8,000 daily players now in less than 6 months!

So while the Roadmap is great and useful and everybody loves to know big things are coming, just know that it is subject to change as the game evolves.  As much as I want to stick to it, sometimes that just won't happen (see Glassworks) and things will inevitably get pushed out.

Finally...

I guess there's not much left I want to say, but I do want to say thank you again to all my Patrons and those that have supported the game so far!

Here's to the next 6 months!