9.2025

Jade Spring: Development Notes #6

Hello everyone! It’s been a little while since the last Jade Spring update in June, but I’ve slowly been chipping away at additions and improvements to the game, and now 1.3b will be coming out on the 27th of September. I made a video about progress on this update a couple of weeks ago! (You can also read a bit about it here.)

One of the main additions to Jade Spring will be the Otter’s Enclave, a special room which allows you to create, manage, and swap garden designs. You can share your layouts and import designs that your friends have made, too. I’d like to give a huge thanks to anari, who has been doing some really comprehensive testing of what's been a very spicy feature to add!

I’ve been enjoying putting some Kodan decorations into the game. Actually, I was going to add a lot more decorations before releasing 1.3b, but I decided to go for a release as soon as possible for two main reasons:

AMD recently released a GPU driver update which caused big issues for all Vulkan games, the graphics API which Jade Spring is built on. I recently added DirectX support so that AMD users can continue to play the game without having to roll back their drivers, and I'd like to get that out as soon as possible!
I found a very small bug which makes the performance cost of the default garden home (and any build with lights in it) like, more than three times as high as it should be. I could have done a patch, but I like the idea of getting this all out together. When you play this update, you'll notice a big performance improvement.

Which leads to what’s coming after 1.3b! The place I’d like to get Jade Spring into is a very stable state where I can do regular small decoration updates, as a sort of side-project and continuous testing ground for future developments (I’ve been thinking a lot about a full-fledged architectural simulator). So the next update after this one will be 1.0 (woohoo), and subsequent updates will be for adding different decorations from various expansions.

As always, thank you so much for all of your support. It has been so fun developing Jade Spring this year, and it makes me excited to make more architectural stuff!