Dear friends,

I'm making good progress on the development.
I've been lucky enough to find a place to live for the summer and I'm working full time on Idle Colony.
I've got a strong deadline for releasing the game this year and I have a solid idea of what all the features will be. (It's all written down in my GDD)
It is now all about production and it feels good to have a precise plan when going forward.

I wanted to share with you the progress made over the last couple of weeks so you have the opportunity to tell me what you think.
I thought the best way to do so was through a concise video, so here's my first Idle Colony devlog:
(It's only 2 min long!)

Yes you can roast me about my mic... Next time I'll have access to my usual recording gear.

Long story short here's the main points I've been working on:

-Rework of the fertilizing feature and it's automation, there's now a new type of colonists: the farmers.
-Introduction of the buildings: they help categorize the upgrades and sweeten the progression curve.
-Optional pathfinding optimization to make the game playable on a wider range of machines.
-Ton of various QOL including the transparency when drawing path
-A brand new tutorial that's non-blocking, skippable, more precise, and more polished.
-A new prestige animation.
-Last but not least, keys rebinding, wow!

Next time we'll talk about the stuff I'm the most excited about: the full rework of the technology tree and all the features that comes with it.

This small update fix some concerning bugs and bring some gameplay balance with the goal of providing a less frustrating experience on a couple points. It should also make the pace of the demo a bit faster.

There will be less frequent updates going forward (except for major issues) so I can focus on making efficient progress on new exciting gameplay features.
Thanks for your abundant feedback that I keep reading every day!

• Colonist should no longer get stuck inside walls
  
• Performance stats window (fps...) no longer merge with the stats pannel (production/gathering rate...)
  
• House level 1 effectively spawn two colonists when getting the second pallier technology.
  
• Fixed a bug that could reduce the Fertilizer stack count by one (and other technologies related bonus)

• You can now disable drawing the colonists tracks in the settings
  
• Fertilizer stack hitbox fixed to better fit the sprite
  
• Fertilizer count appear hover the little plant when hovered.

• Tree fruit tier is no longer capped at 5 (before being fertilized). Thus enabling for a wider RNG range, you might sometimes see very rare trees spawn.
  
• Tree fruit tier is now clamped to avoid having very low tier fruit where you would not expect them.
  
• Mole Money upgrade scaling increased from 1.57 to 1.7
  (means the $amount n+1 = $amount n+0 * 1.7)
  
• Flower max. combo increased to 8, and 16 with the technology (from 6 and 12)
  
• Flower base money increased to $10 (from 5)
  
• Flower money upgrade increment increased to $10, and upgrade price scaling reduced from 3.0 to 2.8
  
• Flower combo time increased to 2.0 seconds (from 1.5)
  
• Flower hitbox increased by 25%
  
• Flower nb of hovering required reduced to 4 (from 5)
  
• Manual watering time reduced by 66%

• Watering sound pitch now increase with the progression
  
• Tree have now a spawn animation with a sound.