Riverton

Hi Rivertonians!

Thank you to everyone who has been reporting bugs! This was an error-catching bonanza as I really wanted to devote time to working on bugs that have been more than quick fixes.

Presenting... the first Extermination patch!

Adjustments

• The Equestrian Center has reduced its entry requirements! Competitions can now either be entered with $500 cash OR an entry ticket! Based on feedback, it makes sense to require either the cheaper entry ticket (that you can also find for free around town) or the cash entry fee rather than both.
  • The Bazaar will continue to sell competition entry tickets, but Linda is now limited to selling 5 tickets per day. A real discount for a speedy shopper. Hurry and get them before someone else does!
  • Tip: If you have a friendship with Linda, she'll also give you a discount on your competition entry ticket.
• The forum now has notifications! You will get notified anytime anyone replies to a thread you start or reply to. The forum will continue to be fleshed out to better see unread replies at a glance.
• You should receive a proper error when clicking the Buy button in any shop without specifying a number to buy.
• Crafted items should now be able to be sold via your inventory.
• For some unlucky players, the Job Agency was handing out quantum jobs, tasked with finding an item that doesn't exist. This prevented players from even loading the page.
  • If you were getting an error page for the Temp Agency, you have received new item assignments and this quantum entanglement has been unraveled.
• Based on feedback, when your acquaintances and friends give you a job at Gallop & Grain, you will receive higher rewards.
• On mobile, your animals' health and mood bars on the management page should now display as they do on desktop.
• An eagle-eyed Rivertonian spotted a typo in the Boba Cafe! (Thank you, Myst!)
• News Center articles are now visible to logged-out users and guests!

With these adjustments, a bit of nerdy news: I'll be readjusting the versioning for Riverton to incorporate these patches to match best practices; the first number being major versions, the second number being minor updates, and the third, these bug fix patches.

Thank you all for your patience as I work through these bugs, and please continue to report them as you come across them!

Hi Rivertonians!

Some changes have been happening behind the scenes, fixing bugs that are being reported and adding quick wins from suggestions in the Discord server. (Thank you to the players there!)

Additions

• There is a brand new, baked-in forum! I apologize for how many issues we were having with the phpBB forum. Bringing it into the infrastructure will actually help later on rather than the over-engineered forum software. The forum.visitriverton.com subdomain will be discontinued and the old forum removed altogether. Only logged-in members can see and participate in the forum. Please be aware I'm still working on notifications, so notifications for forum posts are not available yet.
• You can now grab a drink at the Gallop & Grain with characters around Riverton! You will see Riverton residents coming and going throughout the day and week, so be sure to visit different times to grow your relationships with them. As you grow in your relationships, Rivertonians will feel more comfortable giving you jobs or asking things of you and, as you become friends with your neighbors, you will also begin receiving discounts at their respective shops! There will be more jobs over time as well, so be sure to keep checking back.
• We have three new minigames: Apple Catch, where you're trying to catch falling apples (but avoid the garbage!); Dice Poker, where you're making poker hands with dice; and Harvest Memory Match, a matching card game!

Adjustments

• The trading system has been simplified and vastly reworked in a new iteration of the Trading Post! It should be much easier to trade items with other players and create public trades that anyone can provide a counter-offer for.
• Caught a couple of bugs:
  • You can now feed your adoptables Cheese.
  • Removing items from your player shop will now return them to your inventory rather than disappearing forever.
  • Pages and broken links have been fixed, updated, or removed. Please let me know if you find any others!
• Breeding will continue being tweaked as it is still bugged. I may rework the entire breeding process, but that would require the Breeding Center closing for a brief time. I'll keep everyone posted!

Coming soon

The biggest update I'm currently working on is the addition of costumes, backgrounds, and accessories for adoptables! The art has been mostly completed, but I'm taking suggestions for things you'd like to dress up your adoptables in, so feel free to comment on this post or chime in on the Discord!

Follow along real-time updates on the Development Roadmap. Thank you all for playing!

Hello Rivertonians!

Over the past month, it's been nice to rehabilitate my typing by fixing some lingering bugs and adding a couple of new features.

Additions

• The Stable Rankings are now available! First place every month gets $20,000 as a Grand Prize. You can always access the  Stable Rankings from the top navigation bar.
• Daily interest has been added to Central Bank. Every day, depending on how much money you have in your bank, you will receive an interest payment into your bank account.
• Badges are now viewable on player profiles and more will be added soon. There will also be a codex of badges so you will know how to get them!
• So many more Recipes have been added!

Adjustments

• The Diary system is complete and polished. You are able to link to your post, edit your post, and it supports full Markdown! I look forward to seeing any lore you make about your Homestead!
• The top navigation bar now has buttons that match our style throughout the website. I hope it's a bit clearer where everything goes at a glance.
• The Breeding Center got a bit overzealous with Clydesdales. There was a bug that resulted in Clydesdales to be overrepresented. The bug should be fixed and the breed of the horse will be either of the parents' breeds. Please let me know if you have any duplicate Clydesdales that you want me to remove from the world.
• Horses can now ride through the forest every 2 hours instead of 6 hours. The cooldown has been reduced to help with balance. Don't forget to train your horses to improve your forest trail rides!
• The menu and mobile version of the site has gotten quite an upgrade. The navigation now uses categories for navigating around Riverton. If you're trying to find a place, you might want to start with the  Community Map, which is always accessible from the top navigation bar.
• The Trash Bags used for the Recycling Center are higher quality and significantly less likely to tear when collecting trash. It was way too unbalanced before!

Thanks again for playing! If you have any issues or need any help, don't hesitate to fill out a contact form or join the Discord.

Hello Rivertonians!

I'm trying to get as much done as I can before my wrist surgery on Monday, so finishing up these projects that have been on the shelf for a while. I will be taking a small break so I can heal from the surgery, but we'll get into some regular cadence when I return!

Additions

• New breed variations for Clydesdales, Dapper Greys, Bays, and Appaloosas, which also means the Breeding Center is now open! Right now, variations are cosmetic only at the moment, and breeding is not influenced at all by skills. I'm hoping to change that in the future, but this will be some time before I get it working.
• On your profile, you have some changes: buttons to replace the cumbersome way of trying to contact you and a Diary. Diaries are privacy-controlled by you, so entries can be Private, Friends Only, or Public, which also includes anyone who visits the website. They can be used for anything from private notes about your pets or things you see around Riverton to helpful player-made guides about Riverton games, strategies, and more. Your Diary uses Markdown, and I definitely recommend it for organizing your writing! This is being polished, so expect to see this visually change when I return.
• There are a lot more items to find, collect, and cook!
• We now have a Discord server now for folks who asked for it!

Adjustments

• The navigation has been cleaned up a bit. This might get reworked, but please let me know if there's any feedback you might have about the navigation!
• Your Homestead has expanded with links to your different areas of your home and farm for easy navigation.

Thanks for playing! See you soon!

Rivertonians,

I have such great news! I've completed all of the pre-launch tasks I had in our roadmap published earlier this year. This means after 8 months since first dreaming this up, Riverton has a true gameplay loop with so much more coming!

We are out of beta! Riverton has officially launched as 1.0. Please submit all errors you find or suggestions you may have via the form on the Contact Staff page. There are plenty of tweaks, visual additions, and improvements I want to make, especially for the mobile experience. Stay tuned about that.

Please keep in mind that there may be tweaks over the coming days to the navigation bar in particular as new content is being fit in. My intention is for everything to be either easy to get to or that it "logically" makes sense to get to where you need to (e.g. Community Map for the Boba Cafe).

Since the last update, there's been quite a bit added to the game that might not be entirely obvious if you're returning from a break.

Additions

• There are now more animals to adopt than just Horses! Befriend a Dairy Cow, a Highland Cow, or an Alpaca by purchasing livestock at the Northwest Cattle Company to join your Livestock Pen. One way to get other types of adoptables is through animal rewards that you will receive after achieving certain feats in Riverton. Right now, you are able to invite a Raccoon to your farm, with more adoptables coming very soon!
• Orchards are now available to plant Cherry, Apple, Plum, and Pear trees. Initial fruit can be purchased from Pepper & Pepper Produce for now, but this will likely change in the future. Both the new Livestock Pen and Orchard are accessible through your Homestead page.
• Speaking of which, all players have access to Collections, which are a merging of an achievement system and an item collection system. The first Collection is available to be completed once you've unlocked your Attic by upgrading your home.
• Riverton's history is now published, which will be helpful for any trivia or quests that might involve Rivertonian History. You can read more about it and the Almanac of the Seasons, an outline of our town holidays and celebrations, in the Library.
• The Avatar Creator is fully working as intended with tons of options (and new options!) for players, so please feel free to create an avatar that expresses your Riverton character's style! I've been loving seeing the range of avatars being made. :)
• A Boba Cafe has opened up in Riverton, and a cashier job is a good way to earn some money part-time. There's no limit to earning money through working at the Boba Cafe, unlike other money-making methods in town.
• In the Attic, once you've completed the Antique Curator Collection, you will now find random recipes you never knew you had!
• In the Casino, luck-lovers with short attention spans can finally play Lucky Slots, a new slot machine!
• Players can now Have a Picnic next to Green Lake. The match-3 picnic puzzle has a limit of three score submissions per day.
• New items for drops in the Blackberry Brook Forest so you're not just always getting soups! Items gathered from the Blackberry Brook Forest can also apply to your Collections.

Adjustments

• Player shops will now automatically close and be removed from the main list of shops if the shop is empty, with no items, and it has been longer than 7 days since the owner restocked the store. Both conditions must be met. If your shop is closed, you can always add new items and reopen it on your Shop Dashboard in the Flea Market. Closing your shop only removes it from the list and does not delete any information or items.
• I decided not to implement a fertilizer system since right now. I don't feel like we especially need it. If the economy needs adjusting, I think that'll be when I introduce it.
• Visual art and backgrounds will be added and adjusted for a bit as more art comes in for newer areas.

Coming soon

What's next? There's no timeline on these additions. I'm going to be moving the roadmap to a kanban system so you all can see what I'm working on. :) But here's a preview:

• More minigames!
• Bartending job and minigame
• Variations of current breeds of horses for breeding variety DONE [6/28/25]
• Community contribution system to build up new features
• Diary/blog system that publishes to your profile (can be used for roleplay, creating guides, etc.) DONE [7/18/25]
• Museum system with Riverton relics to be turned in
• Winemaking and craft beer production
• Food processing (e.g. pickling, preserves)
• Weather system and emergencies
• Starter tutorial for new players
• Reputation-based quests from NPC guilds
• Jukebox mechanism on-site with collectible cassette tapes, which will unlock songs you can play on your Walkman
• Public pet profiles (with custom CSS capability?)
• Career system
• Seasonal events from the Almanac
• Leaderboard for monthly competitions and point system for ranking.
• Sportsbetting on racing
• Decorations for adoptables like saddles, bows, blankets, hats, and more
• Custom adoptable backgrounds to decorate your featured pet.
• Blackjack to play in the Casino
• Player skills that will eventually get you benefits (e.g. higher gardening skill gets shorter growing periods)
• Books for skill-building
• Dialogue options for storylines
• Item galleries for players
• Different color houses and farms per level
• Customizable interiors to houses
• Pets for your pets
• Skill genetics in breeding
• NPC relationships that can affect your pricing
• More places to explore
• Bank interest DONE [7/19/25]
• Own a racing team, horse agency, or guild

Riverton is getting quite exciting! Since earning money and owning animals has been fleshed out, I'll be trying to focus on expanding items, customization, and rewards for a bit before returning to more ways of making money.

Thank you for being here! You playing the game has helped motivate me so much. I hope you're having fun!

Last updated: June 24, 2025

Hello Rivertonians!

Development has been chugging along, adding new features every week! We are on track to hit June 1 as our launch date! As of right now, we only have these features left to add from our roadmap:

• Fertilizer to speed up plant growth!
• Other animals to adopt than just horses! DONE
• Farm animals that provide item drops periodically! DONE
• Display treasured items on profile or featured pet! DONE
• Lore and storylines! DONE

We also officially have player-owned shops, which was not in the roadmap initially! I took a crack at developing it and it was much faster than anticipated. Some other quality-of-life updates were made like avatar uploading, easier navigation back to pages you were already on, navigation changes, help center creation, and explore map redux.

Now that the feature list is beginning to dwindle to add before launch, I'd like to make some additional quality-of-life updates:

• Revamp navigation menu for desktop and mobile (ongoing)
• Making sure all pages (including transactional ones) match the style & feel of finished pages DONE
• Add more items to discover to tell the story of Riverton DONE
• Add user profile functionality, adjust look & feel (ongoing)

If you have any suggestions on what would make Riverton amazing, feel free to suggest any new features below in the comments!

Thank you to all the folks who have signed up! We're just getting started.

Last updated: June 23, 2025

Hello, Rivertonians!

Development on Visit Riverton is coming along swimmingly! Since the last news update, we now have:

• Care UI has been completed. You can find this in Your Stables when managing any of your adoptables.
• Jobs via a Temp Agency are now available and completed. These will refresh daily once you complete them. If you do not complete the job, you will have to complete it before getting another.
• Cooking is now available in Your Homestead after finding your Kitchen Keys, which are lost somewhere. You will need to pick up Recipes, which will remain in Your Inventory, but cooking two items will consume both of them in favor of the made item. A Recipe is available for sale at the Bazaar.
• Farming is now available in Your Homestead. You can buy Seeds of all sorts at the Farm Supply. It takes 5 days of watering to get a harvested plant, which can be sold or traded.
• Fishing has been completed with a total of 25 fish to catch and the final UI is completed. New art is courtesy of Visit Riverton's background artist, Ken. Thank you, Ken!
• Upgrades to your House and Farm which initially cost $10,000. More costs will be laid out later.
• Help Documentation is available from the userbar icons.
• Forums are open, but require an extra step. Players already have an account but will need to reset their password (accessible from the login screen) and activate their forum account before being able to log in. The forums include the ongoing changelog, a thread for suggestions and feedback, and bug reports.

The intial expectation of entering Beta was February 1st, but some aspects of farming took much longer than expected. As far as the future roadmap, we'll start here. I'd like to have these things done by Beta and 1.0, so I'm going to put them here as the official roadmap.

Visit Riverton Roadmap

Beta, March 1st:

• More Recipes! DONE
• Clean-up job will be available, where you gather trash and litter around Riverton and turn it in for a paycheck. You also will have a chance to find lost historic items that might trigger a storyline. DONE
• Random item drop to collect daily. DONE

Launch:

• Homepage revamp! DONE
• Explore map overhaul to match the rest of the visual vibe of Riverton. DONE
• Horse competitions to finally face against other players in racing and, hopefully, more categories soon. DONE
• Training to improve your horse's skills. DONE
• User shops to sell items. DONE
• Dirty/clean mechanism for adoptables so the care brush isn't just for moods. DONE
• Fertilizer to speed up plant growth!
• Explore game to dive into the nearby Blackberry Brook Forest. You will choose which direction to go and determine the path you go. At any point, you might need to turn back! DONE
• Other animals to adopt than just horses! DONE
• Farm animals that provide item drops periodically! DONE
• Display treasured items on profile or featured pet! DONE
• Lore and storylines! DONE

Post-Launch:

These are features we'd like to launch and not a guarantee that these will be implemented if we are limited for some reason.

• Careers, different than jobs, would allow players to choose a specific role with a specific mini-game or daily task. Every day, careers will give a paycheck at the Bank.
• Seasonal events!
• Leaderboard for monthly competitions and point system for ranking.
• Betting on racing or monthly competitions will be an additional way to earn money and add to the economy.
• Decorations for adoptables like saddles, bows, blankets, hats, and more.
• Custom adoptable backgrounds to decorate your featured pet.
• Two card games (Backjack, Cheat) to play
• Orchards for fruit trees! DONE
• Player skills that will eventually get you benefits (e.g. higher gardening skill gets shorter growing periods)
• Books for skill-building!
• Dialogue options for storylines!
• Item galleries for players!
• Different color houses and farms per level!
• Customizable interiors to houses!
• Pets for your pets!
• Skill genetics in breeding!
• NPC relationships that can affect your pricing!
• More places to explore!
• Bank interest!
• Competition teams!
• Inventory organization! DONE

Got more? Suggestions are welcome! Post in the forum thread, comment below, or send in a suggestion via the form on the Contact Staff page.

Thanks for coming on this journey, Rivertonians!

Hello everyone!

Thank you so much for your time and energy coming to test this lil' game I'm cooking up.

Please keep in mind this game is actively being worked on and features are being added every week.

If you have registered an account now, you are considered an Alpha Tester, and you will receive a reward at the end of the Alpha period. I expect to go into Beta on February 1st.

This is a crucial time for building things out, so I need your help! If you encounter any bugs, have any suggestions, or have any issues, please go to the Contact Staff page and report it. You can upload any screenshots you might have to show the bug or issue.

I'm so excited about what things are to come. Thank you all for coming on this journey with me, no matter how long your stay.

Welcome to Riverton!