Holstaur Milk Ranch 0.04 is now Available!

The new version of Holstaur Milk Ranch is now available for all Silver+ patrons. Lots of new animations in this one, almost all of the characters in game now have a proper walking animation, which is more than I intended to do in that area for this update. From a post I made on the Discord server the other day:

Initially in this version I'd planned to focus mainly on starting Level 4 and only finishing a few of the walking animations, mostly because I was concerned about the build size getting out of hand. I only recently noticed that it's full size on disk is around 3gb, shocking considering it compresses to 200mb with winrar. I've since learned that power of two texture resolutions are still very much an important consideration, even though modern engines have some features which work around it. This has been the culprit for the game's ballooning build size.

I figured out a great method for keeping character sprites optimized moving forward though. Before this update, the game had about 200 sprites (which are 95% of the file size) and was sitting at 3.15 GB. I’ve added over 250 new sprites, and the build only went up by 0.85 GB thanks to the optimizations, without them it easily would have been beyond double. I'll eventually go back and optimize the other 200 sprites but that's going to be a bit of a process. All this is to say that I was hoping to have more of Level 4 done for the next update, but it's been a good learning experience, and a lesson I can translate to my other projects very easily. That and I ended up finishing almost all of the walking animations, only two or three still need to be finished. I'll still be releasing the start of Level 4 tomorrow, although it may only contain a stage or two but no new pets yet unfortunately, however subsequent versions will see their file size reducing gradually instead of ballooning out of control.

Lastly, the Store page for Holstaur Milk Ranch has been approved for release by the Steam review team, but I'm still waiting for final approval on the Build. Once that happens I'll find a good date to release the game on Steam (which may be a couple months from the date of approval, perhaps even after the upcoming NextFest)

Beyond all of that, I've begun work on Level 4 which introduces a new mechanic where you must grow your own food on your Ranch. An area is set aside on the right side of the Level where you can chop down fields for food. You can expand your field and upgrade into the same food types as before, at a slightly higher cost. I also planned to add a new Ranch animal, Sheep who need to be sheared manually but I ended up running out of time. I'm going to upload what's ready now, and continue work on Level 4 and the Sheeps over the first couple days in November.

Download: https://www.patreon.com/posts/124907568
Changelog: https://noxdev.itch.io/milk-ranch/devlog/1100615/004