Returning from the Christmas break to wish you all a Happy New Year!
I hope you managed to incorporate some Medieval traditions into your festive celebrations from our previous blogpost.
I have postponed this weeks devlog on animals in order to launch it as the same time as a the animal artwork. Instead this week I will be looking at something I have sunk a great deal of time into over the festive period, dyes.
Far from the popularised view of the Medieval world as a place of drab colours, Medieval people of all stations loved to dye their clothes in a spectacular plethora of colours.
Of course, the wealthy and the poor had significant differences in regards to the material used and the colours produced from their respective dyeing processes but for the sake of Under The Yoke, a medieval peasant game, we are only interested in how the 'poors' did it.
Firstly we have the list of colours and what was used to produce those colours:
Brown - Rust
Orange - Clay
Black - Nuts
Red - Madder
Yellow - Weld
Blue - Woad
Green - Yellow & Blue
As you can see, we have a few more colours than just 'Brown'. Dyes must be crafted using Lime which can be made from either burning bones or purchased as limestone. Then, using a Vat, any item of clothing may be dyed a new colour.
While some of these ingredients are easier to gather than others, clay can be dug out from the pond and nuts can be found in the forest, players may choose to grow others in their herb garden, such as Madder, Weld and Woad. These can then be harvested on a yearly basis and used to create dyes which can then enhance your own clothing or be sold.
Obviously, as the character's portrait is informed by their clothing, clothes will also change colour based on the dye on the clothes. If a player has a comb or shears they may now also cut and dye their character's hair/beard.
As an aside, due to the vast quantity of clothing items and colours, I created a new system for sorting jobs into groupings, where if there are more than 6 jobs available to a character you can sort through pages of jobs. Also, on the Vat only jobs that you have dyes for will show, a unique feature of the Vat to avoid confusing players.
I hope to see you here for next week when I should have some new art to show alongside the animal system.
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