Finished off the first-ever playtest of the game. It has now seen eyes and touched hands that are not mine.
It went fairly well and I got a decent bit of useful information. There were a good handful of minor issues to patch as well as one or two major oversights. Unfortunately, one of the major ones was how Genetics/Mutations worked. Genetics and Mutations can give you upgrades for a crop's combo timer. This means that with enough upgrades you can get a combo timer longer than it takes to grow a crop, and sustaining a combo at that point can be as simple as holding two buttons. You don't even have to move your mouse. This takes a lot of depth out of planting, reducing it to about as shallow as it could be. Now, there is a legitimate way to achieve a similar outcome even without upgrades, but it takes a little more effort and is less likely to last as long. However, what this does mean is combo timer upgrades are being flat removed, as they are pretty much unbalanceable. This leaves only two other crop traits in the upgrades pool: Worth and Combo Max, both of which I like. But two upgrades are not enough to justify both Genetics and Mutations--I originally added those systems to create some player choice and agency, and a meager two options is not a shining example of a "choice". So I need to rework both of those systems. It's very likely that they may get combined or nixed altogether, and I will need to design a suitable replacement. As much as it sucks to roll back major features to square one, it is an inevitability of making games--or at least good ones, as a willingness to throw away underwhelming or dysfunctional features is the filter to a cleaner, crisper game. I'm honestly a little glad it has ended up this way--hindsight is 20/20, and looking back, Genetics and Mutations didn't offer very much to the overall experience. Or, at least not as much as they could've. Genetics are there for player choice and agency, and Mutations are there for casino-like dopamine hits (i.e. some semi-random rewards). However, I'm already starting to meld a few ideas and can envision a much improved v2.0. My attention and time is currently very split, and this rework will take a bit to do. I'll keep you updated on how I decide to change it. 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. Been a while. Doing a lot of backend cleaning. I'm not the world's most experienced coder, and I've been finding a lot of places where my old code just... isn't good. I've been doing some cleaning up, and while I'm unsure if it actually has any performance impact, it at least makes the project easier to read (and thus new features/changes may come slightly faster). I am slightly worried about my game's performance, as there are one or two major issues that could impact extreme scenarios, but on most gaming setups and player scenarios I'm not sure it'd even be visible. And as much as I hate unoptimized code, there is much more merit in a product to show--even if a little laggy at times--than nothing at all. Unfortunately, this is all really boring stuff no one wants to hear about, because it doesn't actually have any visual impact on the game. However, I have been working on something that very much does have visual impact on the game. Say hello to the starting lineup. From left to right: corn, tomato, wheat, eggplant, rice, onion, potato, carrot, chili pepper, and soybeans.
All that is left now is balancing, as well as a lick of design in the Mutations department. But after that, it's a functioning base that I am happy enough to show. The actual art of the plants needs real work, however, and is a little more daunting than the picked crop sprites you see above. It may take some time. This is the final stretch, though, and beyond that it is straight content (and optimization), which I already have quite a few ideas for. A sturdy base just takes the longest to build. This won't be the world's most exciting update, but there's a bit to cover. I've been touching up some neglected UI/UX. First, there's a lot of bugfixing. Changing most anything creates a lot of bugs, and I've been doing a lot of modifying. But beyond that, there's a list of things that have changed:
Otherwise, I've finally landed on a potential implementation for Genetics Points, which I was previously unhappy with. My placeholder implementation is super boring, so here's the new one: In addition to units, there will be a second rarer currency. You get these from Milestones like normal, but since it's a currency you can now get them from other places as well, expanding your options. Since it's a currency you also may use it on other things (it was originally just for Genetics), giving it more purpose. More acquisition options, more uses--more depth. Balancing Genetics also had me stumped for a while--I want players to be able to freely upgrade what traits they want on what crops they want, but I don't want them to be able to put all their points in one crop and never use anything else again. I considered a preset upgrade tree, but that severely limits freedom. This might seem like an obvious fix, but spending currency on a trait upgrade should simply increase the cost of the next upgrade. This means diminishing returns is my best friend, and while players still have total freedom, there's a rough point I can control where upgrading further just isn't worth it after so many upgrades. A soft-cap. I'll implement that and expand/iterate upon it as I get feedback, which leaves only Mutations left. I mentioned a while ago there were some systems I was unhappy with--Genetics was one, Mutations was another. I like my initial concept, but it seems a little flat and needs another layer. But after that it's nil for the major reworks and polish/cleanup is the only thing left. And the two-minute crop sprites are getting evicted soon.
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