April Development Update
Welcome back to our regular development updates! Over the past two months, we have been focusing on rolling out updates and responding to community feedback for the Nestables’ Founder’s Alpha.
Kicking off in late February, we have been greatly appreciative of those early supporters who took the time to test, troubleshoot and provide feedback on the Founder’s Alpha.
The Founder’s Alpha is the first main update to the game since our pre-alpha back in October 2020. Hopefully, you saw the substantial improvements and depth added to the Nestables gameplay!
Throughout the Alpha, the Nestables development team rolled out a number of updates to patch bugs and respond to feedback from the community.
Inventory and Shop Changes
A number of changes have been made to the ingame inventory and shop based off community feedback. We have simplified a number of the categories, add some new ones and hopefully made it easier to locate items that you want to sell or buy. Additional UI features have been added to make it clearer how many copies of an item you have and improve readability.
Farming Mechanics Changes
One aspect of the Founder’s Alpha which we received a lot of valuable feedback on was the existing farming system. A number of updates were rolled out during the Alpha to address issues and implement this feedback. The system is now easier and more intuitive than before. We have talked in previous development updates about some of the farming mechanic changes that were made since the pre-alpha, such as the automatic buying of seeds from the farm shop when planting.
Players can select a farm plot, choose what crop to plant and then drag their mouse across other farm plots to plant the same crop. This saves individually clicking each plot and will allow for better cross-platform consistency when we create a mobile version of Nestables.
Harvesting is a one click process, with the Nestable collecting all fully-grown crops in the area thanks to its AI system. Thank you to Jim Chopper for this fantastic gif which shows the improved farming system in action.
Other Development Progress
Over the course of the Founder’s Alpha, numerous bugs were fixed! Work was also completed implementing more UI changes, such as the offline progress report. We have also started work on some features that will be implemented before the public alpha, such as displaying the current effects a Nestable might have from drinking a tea.
Public Alpha
Many of you who didn’t support Nestables during the pre-sale have been wondering when you will get to check out this alpha! We made our pre-alpha free-to-play and that is the intention for this alpha as well. A date for the public alpha will be set early next month. We are currently in the process of fixing some further issues and implementing some other changes to the game. Hopefully, these won’t take too long.
