MicroTown

VisualsI worked on various small visual changes to polish up some of the areas of the game that were lacking. At least more lacking than others.World effectsOne new effect \"type\" that I hadn\'t implemented yet was global world effects, which are not tied to a particular object, but rather occur randomly somewhere in the world. Technically, these would occur within the player\'s viewport with some probability.Since the trees don\'t have animations (and it would take a LOT of work to add those), then I added a falling leaves random particle effect: This triggers randomly with a matching color, but more often in autumn as the trees lose their leaves.Another obvious world effect is the ground raindrop splashes during rain, which were really missing before. Normally, people don\'t remark on small animations and effects missing, but raindrops is the one thing that people actually noted as missing. So I (finally) added those: (These don\'t at all sync up with the falling rain, which doesn\'t actually \"land\" at any point. But I don\'t think this is needed, nor that it would look good with pixel graphics like this. But it does bother me a little bit...)FishI also adjust the in-world fish visuals, which I never liked. I mean, what are these floating green bricks? There is of course only so much I can do with 5 pixels. But hopefully they now look more like actual submerged fish when more subtly blended with the water color: Of course, part of their lifelessness is lack of any animation. I think that\'s why other animals still look decent even if they are like 12 pixels each with hardly any features. So I added tail-wag swimming animation and some particle effects: Water animationI decided to finally redo and re-add water animation. This one was one of those \"how hard can this be?\" mini-features that I could probably write an entire blog post about.Some time ago I did have animated water. It wasn\'t very well made, but it was usable. It used 2 overlapping sprites that faded between each other so they looked like flowing waves. It had an ugly shimmering effect due to cross-fading. It also didn\'t really fit with discrete pixel animation style.Ultimately, I had to remove this whole implementation, because I was animating individual tiles and it was extremely performance costly. Since then the water has been a static sprite. It\'s not completely terrible, but it sure looks very dead.The new version works with a global animation timer. It\'s not very flexible (I cannot easily change, offset or expand animation logic that applies globally), but it does allow for repeating continuously-changing 

Changes• Tradesmen can now also deliver their own building\'s outputs to nearby buildings as input or storage• Building inspection to show its input and output items• Building inspection input, output, stored, material, and house reserve and road inspection material item indicators to visually show pending and reserved amounts and have tooltips list these pending deliveries and pickups for tasks, including delivery distance• Add in-game \"soft\" pause button and shortcut P• Tooltips only update every second by default• Add gameplay option for tooltip update frequency - periodic (new default) or continuous (old)• Adjust Herb sprite• Buildings can be placed on tiles with items• Builder will move items out of a tile before constructing buildings• Roads can be placed on tiles with items and built \"under\" them• Buildings and roads placed on tiles with items that are compatible building materials will use them• Buildings and roads can be placed on tiles with obstructing props (trees) and previously-discarded props (shrubbery, flowers) will stay• Builder will remove props from a tile before constructing buildings and roads• Add shortcut X for building and road deconstruction• Population overview tooltip to separate number of idle vs carrier workers and also show these numbers for civilians• Remove Tool label from top overview• Add task status icons and label to top overview• Move task info from population tooltip to task tooltip• Expand task tooltip info with additional details and numbers• Top overview labels to update continuously periodically• Add \"bug report\" button to save/load menu that allows directly uploading a save