Welcome to 2024 first weekly update.

Late Happy new year to everyone! I've been taking a break since launching Defendor and playing TOO MUCH of Baldurs Gate 3 still. 

So let's talk 2024 for Almost a Pixel stuff.

Smallburg

New Packs

I want to release a Pack per month starting with the Fishing pack:

Next month I'll launch the Diving pack, a pack inspired by Dave the diver that will remove a dimension from Smallburg, going back to just sideways movement.

I'll keep you post every Thursday regarding the progress of the new packs.

Weekly updates

I want to deliver updates to the packs every week. I know, I tried it before and failed... My biggest issue with the updates I've tried to make before was that they were always massive and then I would burnout. So now, I just make them smaller but consistent. I hope this helps me improve the quality of the packs in the long run.

I'll try to update the packs every Sunday of 2024. Like I said, I'll try and make these small but consistent, so that by the end of 2024 we have a lot more content in all packs.

Sales Page Revamp

I need to revamp the pages of the packs, I need to sit down and create a template for all of the packs so that they are consistent between them.

Software Tools

The packs have grown a lot and it is now a bit hard to keep everything together so I will be creating a set of tools, which will come with the packs to create your animations and deploy them as sprite sheets so that you dont need to take care of everything by hand.

I'm working currently on a character creator that will allow you to add all packs into a single directory and it will enable you to select whcih animations, clothes, hairs and what not and generate sheets of pre made characters.

Week 1 of 2024 Update

Village Pack

Added flower gardens so we can improve the overall visibility of our villages.

Farm Pack

This pack changed a lot in 2023, Iit was supposed to be just the farm pack and then I changed to the crafts pack and now it has a bit of everything. Because I launched the fishing pack, I wanted to complement the fishing part of the Farm Pack with some fish. 
I added three different fish to the pack.

Dungeon Pack

There has been some requests about a hit animation in the pack. I never added it as I always though they could be done via code basically. But then I though to myself... wait if they want it, why not give them, just let them have the freedom of choice. So... I've added one.

I've only done the base body animations, and I'll be releasing updates for all armors, hairs, etc.

Mine Pack

I've always wanted to have small sets of carts connected in one unique train. So I added connectors to them.

UI Pack

I added a fishing mini game to the pack, very much based on Stardewvalley fishing minigame.

Fishing Pack

Yes, just because it was launched some days ago does not mean that I don't have updates already.

I've wanted the water ripples to be there at launch, but I just could not get them right, there was something off. But now I made them work.

I've also added the fishing minigame to the fishing pack as it made sense.

Games

So what is next after defendor? Frankly I don't know. I've release Defendor on Steam by the way, and it's done as I expected, not a lot. But I'm really proud that in 2023 I finally finished my first commercial game.

I have some ideas, and I will start a dev log for the next project whenever I have it, I will make this devlogs on tuesdays.

And that it. I really want to make 2024 a great year for Smallburg and I hope you'll enjoy what's coming.

See you soon.