Progress has been slow, but 7 of the 10 crops now have art. Working on some small side projects to kind of refresh my motivation--I'll admit it's been low the last two weeks. Art is really my weakest link when it comes to time investment. I also redid the sprite for tilled soil, which was in long need of revision. Weebly kind of compresses it, but hopefully you get the picture. I greatly enjoy the little fertilizer bits that are more numerous and colorful the higher tier of fertilizer you go (left to right). The bottom row is what plots look like when watered.
Trying to figure out what I will be adding next, which has brought a roadmap to my attention. I should probably make one before getting around to the new site. I'm leaning towards crop infestations/diseases first, as that is one of the hallmark mechanics for realistic farming games. FreeFarmGame had them, and they add a nice blend of realism and complexity. I rarely see other farming games add diseases (probably because they're not very fun in real life), but I will try my best to have them add to the gameplay and not detriment it. Working through the last bit of polish before sending things off to some folks for initial testing. Art takes the longest out of everything, and consumes the majority of my time at the moment. I have to make 50 different planted crop sprites (10 crops * 5 growth stages), but mostly my time has just been spread thin and I haven't been able to get an immense amount of work done on them. We're 30% of the way there. Onto actual changes, though, the UI that represents the player state has been finalized. I may have shown it before, but now no matter what you're doing or state you're in, there will be a hotkey guide right in the bottom-middle of your screen to remind you what your options are. The icon on your cursor lets you know what state you're in. Just as a reminder, the main states are fertilizing, watering, and planting, with "querying" states for fertilizing/planting (as you need to choose what seed/fertilizer you want to use). And if your choice is finalized and ready to go, the UI will disappear. It reappears after you're done, reminding you that the state has reset. I've also come around to refactoring some of my crop stats. As you may have seen from older screenshots, I had three variables that managed crop growth: growth length, active growth speed, and passive growth speed. In practical terms, that's the amount of growth needed to mature, how much growth you get per click, and how much growth you get per second. However, as I was balancing values I started to see that I could consolidate them. Functionally, you can accomplish the same thing with just seconds until mature and growth per click (in seconds) instead of a miserable mess of multipliers and misunderstanding. I'll spare the details--it's not easy to explain. But the old values acted half like multipliers and half like flat rates, which was just unintuitive. Once I tried to ask how much growth progress (in percent) does a click give?, it turns into a horrible mess that just doesn't read. Now it's just seconds until mature and how many seconds a click will give to the progress. Not only more intuitive and less math, but it simplifies an already lengthy list of per-crop variables/characteristics. And the multipliers are left to fertilizer, which you can reasonably factor in with some rough mental math now. Before, it would've been a lost cause. This list of characteristics will be improved eventually. I'm not sure I mentioned it before, but you can already see the fertilizer, units, and EXP are cleaner to read--I plan on having more stats follow that format for readability. A long list of same-font stats just isn't practical. On the topic of readability, I also forgot to mention fertilizer requirements have in-game UI as well: Anywho, all the crops now have values. The game is effectively testable, and I'm looking into some initial, individualized observation-style testing just to get a gauge on things. Public testing is still on my mind, but only once the art is done and I've had some individuals run through it and give me some feedback. I also need to give the whole game a good playthrough myself to polish balance and pacing.
Sorry for the boring talk. We're almost there. |