Hello friends! It's time for another Friday dev diary.
I'll keep this one fairly short as I also plan to post a poll in short order. I've mostly been working on tying up some more loose ends for the Greek content, in addition to fixing bugs and so on. We're currently on v0.7.1c, so if you haven't updated since the start of early access, you may want to! In any case, public release will be coming on Sunday, with some more fixes and a few more things added.
Among the content added in the last week is updated name lists! The name lists hadn't changed since waaaay before release, where I looked up the most common one or two thousand names according to US census data and just put that into the game. Which worked well enough, but there was certainly room for improvement.
The new name lists have been assembled by HeartsDmise and include many suggestions from others. The algorithm itself has been extended also, allowing us to do things like have the rare unusual given name or unfortunate last name, and to have nonbinary names more representative of what they are in the real world according to some actual studies.
This will mean, for the first time since release, that using a familiar seed will generate different names than it did in previous versions. However, if you want the old names back, there is a legacy names option in worldgen settings that you can turn on.
I've also added the Riverside Municipal Center, a contribution from Meat Glacier. This is basically Riverside's town hall and is the place for official town business. Currently, its only function is to change the PC's name, if you'd like to — and in the future, anything else along these lines will have a home here.
For my part, I've been adding more events, mostly opportunities, that make it easier to complete some existing pledge tasks or bring some more life to pledge season by making it seem less like you're the only person doing anything.
So, mostly it's been a lot of polishing in a bunch of different areas, getting Greek life content into a good place so we can shift focus to the next major roadmap item. This doesn't mean Greek content is done forever, it just means that the broad implementation is complete, so it can become another area for iteration in smaller monthly updates.
Speaking of the next major roadmap item... I'll be planning that out starting next week, following the poll, so next Friday's dev diary will be all about that.
That's about all I have to say for now! Thank you for reading, and thank you as always for your support, it really does mean a lot. Until next time!