Video

Maple trees often have a greyish trunk. Changing it in the game could add a bit more variation.

That "Pathfinder" fellow has too much issues, probably therapy would solve it.

The unity engine is the deal breaker for me to follow and like your content. Good luck anyway!

Finally a new devlog. I was hoping to see the game again :D + the old style is back, yes :D

pls release on mac so i can play

Really nice visualisation of the lazy lumberjack tree chopping bug

Good job and welcome back.

Ive got a question is the price gonna be free or will you have to pay

How did you make the AI action system?

What editor do you use for your art designs, like where you're editing the stumps? Been struggling to settle on one and I like the looks of that one.

Return of the king

Brilliant progress! I like how you've pointed out your small bugs but seeing the new worker behaviour is amazing.

Uh that means you go with Destroy() rather then some pooling for the objects to save memory and improve responsivness?

"Canada"

4:05 naming the maple island Canada gave me an idea of how you could include different generation settings in the game. Maybe at the start of the game you could choose a country or location and that would affect the difficulty, or just be a visual change. It brings it mind Rollercoaster Tycoon, where the different levels had different aesthetics, maybe you could do something similar with Lumbermill?

you might want to allow walking thru all trees, just with a big slowdown. otherwise workers could get stuck, and having them take a bit to free themselves would be less annoying than needing to direct another worker to free them

I love the music! I am in excruciating pain because i have to wait for lumbermill to come out before i can listen to it outside of the devlogs

I've been having the feeling your pixel art doesn't feel much like pixel art, since the gameplay is very zoomed out. Maybe making everything with less resolution, or less colors, more saturation or outlines? Don't get me wrong, your art is pretty cool as of now, but I think there's a pixel art feel that most pixel art have, so if you tweaked your art a little it would feel more pixel art-y

sometimes you just need a break from intense projects. its ok to put things down. Hopefully you can take that lesson with you into the future. Also, I am surprised you didnt branch when you moved to top down. You wouldnt have had to revert your changes and could have kept both versions alive. Anyway I am glad to see your back at it. best of luck to you!

do paths grant a speed buff? I feel like they should to not be purely cosmetic, also, tooootally unrelated, idea to add rails and minecarts that go zoom so your workers can move faster on megabig bases (lategame tech tree)

Have to say your game has a special feel to it. Well done!

Awesome devlog. There's so much in here. I liked your sapling solution to the pathfinding issue. Without it, the planting and cutting turns into a Conways game of life simulation! How far off (in terms of features, not time) a demo do you think you are? Love your devlogs but then you knew that!

he's alive he's alive oh lumbermill i missed you

Gonk :D

So glad to see the core gameplay loop complete! Having a MVP to iterate from is such a good motivator

Finally, the world is in balance once again. Lumber devlog just dropped, life is good :D <3

I know you said the maple only island probably won't be in the final game, but I have an idea on how you could make it more interesting. You could make it so you could tap maple trees for sap (making Canada the perfect place for optimizing sap production) and/or make it snow on Canada, adding a potential new challenge for the player.

do you think i could draw art for the splitter and combiner? i really love the art style and have been learning it recently.

I'd love to have maples only map in the game. It looks majestic!

Excellent work, this is looking like an automated dream 👀 Was curious as to what project planning/ticket tool you're using? It looked cool!

Had a good laugh at the "Canada" island type.

please have the "Canada" generation preset be in the game

5:05 What bug tracking tool is that?

In real life, stumps are removed by nasty chemicals or some semi-heavy machinery that removes the visible part and then lets the roots decay over time, which, you know, takes a considerable amount of time, making that area useless for planting new trees. So that might give you some ideas. Chemicals would obviously have long term negative effects, but work fast. Machinery - don't know how you would visualize that, but if so, it would be the more sustainable option. It would impact yield though. New trees in the same tile would grow slower and be smaller. Or perhaps it would be chance-based. Anyway, point being, there are lots of things you could do with this, rather than just remove the stump in one go.

Hey! Is the pathfinding A* and a part of the behaviour tree designer?

cool

Oh damn Lumbermill is back!!!

Looks like you were pretty stumped by those stumps.

Are these AI behavior nodes coming from a Unity package or did you create that tool just for Lumbermill?

The solution of making the saplings have no collision makes me nervous, I still feel like there's a fail case there where the plot gets filled out in a way that would make a tile inaccessible, the player decides a different task needs doing, the trees then grow and you end up with the same fail case again.

😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍

i had found yourt twitter and found that you were having health issues and it scared me, having been a cancer survivor so i unfollowed, will follow again because i love your devlogs and lumber mill

idk how useful that will be (or if it is implementable in Unity) but: as for the issues with sprites in isometric perspective that you are having since the very beginning, look into Indie Stone's dev post called "Play your cardz right" about depth buffer

I don't think there's anything I can say that others haven't already! I simply love how cohesive the project feels, even at this stage of development. You're truly making something special here, and I can't wait to see more :)

In Unity, you can set the default font asset in the TMProSettings scriptableObject asset, so you don't have to change it for every text object separately when creating one! Just a small tip to save time

I completely missed your last video and just saw this pop up on my feed. I'm so glad to see you are back on this project and going back to the isometric style. I am trying to develop game stuff myself in an isometric style and there are a LOT of headaches, especially with a simulation game like this. I'm glad to see you're back at it. Hopefully we can both finish projects that we really like without driving ourselves crazy! Haha

Honestly so happy this series is back, I absolutely love your content in particular when it comes to the "devlog" genre and I love watching the development of Lumbermill. Seems like you're making good progress and I can't wait for the upcoming videos!

WHAT