Release v0.2

Island RPG v0.2.0

Caves and Connected Progression — 29 July 2026

Version 0.2 transforms Island RPG from an overworld prototype into a connected
survival and progression experience. Players can now excavate cave entrances,
explore a persistent underground world, gather new resources, process them at
crafting stations, cook food and store their supplies.

Release highlights

Discover and explore caves

• Use a stone shovel to excavate clear, non-water terrain.
• Digging creates a persistent work site with material-dependent health.
• Completed excavations reveal whether a natural cave exists below.
• Attach a rope to a successful shaft to travel between world levels.
• Retrieve the rope, refill unfinished excavations or permanently close a shaft.
• Entrance position, rope state and light are synchronized above and below.
• Dedicated cursor artwork clearly identifies digging and climbing actions.

The underground is procedurally generated with blended rock materials, natural
boundaries, small waterways, ore deposits, vegetation, ruins and geological
formations. Darkness is treated as a gameplay environment: the player, cave
entrances, campfires and level-up effects provide local light, with nearby
lights blending together naturally.

Mining and metalworking

• Mine stone, coal, tin, copper and iron deposits with a pickaxe.
• Mining nodes have persistent health, accurate selection bounds and depletion.
• Large rock formations can be destroyed for Mining XP.
• The strongest available pickaxe is selected automatically.
• Convert copper and tin into bronze bars.
• Smelt iron ore into blooms, then reheat and hammer away the slag.
• Forge bronze and iron pickaxes, axes and sickles.
• Burn logs into renewable charcoal for smelting and smithing.

Metalworking now has a connected station-based workflow. Reach Crafting level 3
and work near a workbench to construct a clay bloomery and smithing anvil.
Bloomery recipes are only shown at the bloomery, while forging recipes are
filtered to the anvil.

Farming, foraging and cooking

• Harvest wild and tropical berries from climate-appropriate bushes.
• Berry bushes use persistent regrowth timers shared with world vegetation.
• Foraging awards Farming XP and benefits from improved sickles.
• Roast berries and fish over a lit campfire.
• Craft a bronze cooking pot and place it beside a campfire.
• Combine fish and berries into stew through the Cooking skill.

Persistent storage

• Craft and place wooden chests and storage barrels.
• Wooden chests provide 48 slots; barrels provide 40 slots.
• Container contents persist independently in the world and underground.
• Stack items and withdraw or deposit 1, 5, 10, 25, 100 or all.
• Quickly deposit the entire player inventory when space permits.
• Scroll large inventories and inspect items from the context menu.
• Storage uses a dedicated interaction cursor and the reusable container UI.

The developer item bank uses the same container system and can display every
registered item, grouped by category, for testing.

Interface and presentation

• Added a level-aware minimap and improved developer world map.
• Reworked settings pages and long lists around reusable scrolling controls.
• Added batched font rendering and a readability shader for UI text.
• Added optimized fireworks and a light pulse when a skill level is gained.
• Added persistent campfire lighting with larger skill-scaled radius and burn
  duration.
• Added skill guides describing unlocks and level effects for all eight skills.
• Added version information and credits to the main menu.

Performance and reliability

• Isolated overworld and underground simulation to the active world level.
• Prevented inactive world interactions and UI state from leaking across level
  transitions.
• Added cached vegetation, mining and interaction hit tests.
• Added reusable render buffers, fixed particle pools and GPU-atlas batching.
• Cached crafting categories and recipe availability.
• Limited scrolling controls to visible rows.
• Avoided rewriting unchanged deterministic cave chunks.
• Added versioned persistence for excavations, ropes, mining nodes, campfires,
  storage containers and other mutable world objects.

Compatibility

Existing v0.1 player and world saves remain loadable. Older chunk payloads
receive safe defaults for fields introduced in this release.

Island RPG requires a legally owned Age of Empires II HD installation at
runtime. Age of Empires assets are not included or distributed with the game.

Validation

Version 0.2 is covered by the automated world-check suite, including:

• deterministic overworld and cave generation;
• terrain seams and cross-level isolation;
• cave entrance, campfire, mining and storage persistence;
• crafting, smithing, foraging and cooking progression;
• interaction cursor mappings;
• save compatibility and malformed-data safeguards;
• render-buffer, particle and interaction-probe performance checks.

Thank you

Thank you for playing and helping shape Island RPG. Version 0.2 establishes the
core gathering, exploration, crafting and storage loop that future releases can
build upon.

Release v0.1

Island RPG v0.1.0

First playable prototype — 27 July 2026

Island RPG v0.1.0 is the first playable release of an isometric survival and
skilling RPG built with OpenTK and inspired by the visual character of classic
Age of Empires II.

Explore a persistent procedurally generated world, gather natural resources,
craft primitive tools, develop skills, fish along the coast and rivers, and
build a campfire for cooking and light.

Island RPG is an unofficial, non-commercial project. It is not affiliated
with or endorsed by Microsoft. Age of Empires is a trademark of Microsoft.
No Age of Empires assets are distributed with this project. A legally owned
Age of Empires II HD installation is required.

Highlights

A persistent generated world

• Deterministic worlds created from a seed.
• Infinite 32×32 chunk streaming with asynchronous loading and unloading.
• Compressed region-based world saves and persistent player data.
• Continuous elevation, mountain ranges, cliffs, rivers and coastlines.
• Grassland, forest, rainforest, savanna, desert, taiga, tundra, alpine,
  wetland, beach and ocean environments.
• Day-and-night lighting with animated water, shoreline effects and shadows.
• Biome-aware trees, tree variants, shrubs, flowers, bushes and vegetation.
• Coastal shells, seaweed and animated freshwater, shore and ocean fish.

Character and interaction

• Character creation, selection and persistent world position.
• Eight-direction movement with walking, idle, gathering and action animation.
• Terrain elevation, slopes, shallow-water movement and depth-sorted sprites.
• Native context menus, interaction cursors, pathfinding and queued actions.
• Inventory dragging, dropping, item use and reusable inventory screens.
• Chat messages, action feedback, XP notifications and level-up messages.

Six skills

• Woodcutting — choose the best available axe, damage trees and gather
  logs, sticks and seeds.
• Farming — plant biome-aware tree seeds and grow persistent trees.
• Crafting — learn level-based recipes and create resources, tools,
  furniture and campfires.
• Fishing — use a primitive net to catch fish from appropriate freshwater,
  shore and ocean habitats.
• Cooking — cook raw fish over a lit campfire, with level-based burn
  chances and distinct cooked and burnt results.
• Firemaking — light fueled campfires and improve their duration, flame
  size, brightness and light radius through levels 1–20.

Each skill uses shared XP progression, a reusable skill panel and a level guide
showing its unlocks or gameplay improvements.

Crafting and equipment

• Stone axe, iron axe, stone hammer, stone pickaxe and stone knife.
• Primitive fishing net woven from gathered plant fibres.
• Tool statistics, woodcutting power, blunting and sharpening.
• Multi-step recipes that safely simulate inventory changes before crafting.
• Recipe categories, level requirements and clear resource availability states.
• Reusable workbench and campfire placeable objects.

Campfires and cooking

• Craft and place a persistent stone campfire.
• Add any supported log type while preserving the exact fuel used.
• Light fires using small rocks and a knife.
• Cook by dragging raw food onto a fire or using it through the context menu.
• Successful food returns to the inventory when the player remains nearby.
• Food left unattended drops naturally around the campfire when completed.
• Burnt food reuses cooked artwork with a grayscale and darkening shader.
• Fires illuminate the world and expire after their level-scaled duration.

Interface and developer tools

• Pause, settings, skills, crafting and guide windows with modal input handling.
• Display settings for VSync, adaptive VSync, frame limits and metrics.
• Optional FPS and frame-time performance graph.
• Developer-only XP controls, time advancement and teleportable world map.
• Scrollable reusable list controls and consistent menu navigation.

Performance foundations

• GPU terrain blending and atlas-batched world sprites.
• Visibility culling for terrain, objects, vegetation and shadows.
• Cached terrain sampling and gated world-hover queries.
• Asynchronous chunk generation, persistence and map generation.
• Reusable render queues and vertex staging buffers with minimal allocations.

Running the release

Requirements:

• Windows
• A legally owned Age of Empires II HD installation
• .NET 10 SDK
• OpenGL 3.3-compatible graphics hardware

Run from the repository root:

dotnet run --project src/IslandRpg -c Release

If the game cannot automatically locate Age of Empires II HD:

dotnet run --project src/IslandRpg -c Release -- `
  --age2-path "D:\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\Age2HD"

The AGE2HD_PATH environment variable is also supported.

Known limitations

• This is an early prototype, not a content-complete game.
• There is currently no combat, health, hunger, construction system or NPC
  simulation.
• Farming currently focuses on planting and growing trees.
• Cooking currently supports the available raw fish; additional meat can be
  registered as those resources and sprites are introduced.
• Furniture placement begins with the workbench and campfire.
• Audio and several settings categories are not implemented yet.
• Balancing, progression rates and world-generation density may change in later
  releases.
• Existing saves are intended to remain compatible, but save migration is still
  considered experimental during early development.

Validation

The release is validated with a clean Release build and automated world checks
covering deterministic generation, chunk seams, persistence, region storage,
skills, crafting, inventory behavior, fishing, cooking, campfires, Firemaking
progression and sprite composition.

Thank you for trying the first playable Island RPG release.