Homegrown 0.6.0 - Town Features Finished!

After half a year of working on the town area, it's finally done! I've just been finishing up the last of the town features, which is all about marketing boosts that you can apply to your farmers' market stall.

Gamer Tier+ patrons can download and play Homegrown here.

And for Programmer Tier+ patrons the code is available here.

Gamer Tier+ patrons can also try out some simple mod creation here.

Marketing Boosts

The marketing boost update replaces the old trending items feature. Previously, a random set of items would be trending each week, and these items would sell faster at the market. The aim of this was to introduce a bit more strategy when it comes to choosing which vegetables to put on sale, but in the end I felt that it didn't really achieve that - the optimal strategy was always to just sell your trending items first, then any other items if you still have time. A bit too predictable!

Marketing boosts will hopefully make things a bit more interesting. Each week, the Stall Upgrade Shop has three random marketing options that you can choose from, and you're allowed to purchase one for that week. On market day, you apply the marketing to your stall to activate the boost and it remains active for the rest of that day. Check out the latest devlog for a full demo at the end of the video.

There are lots of different types of marketing that you can get (at least there will be - I've only made six so far!) and each one affects your stall differently. For example, Evening Boost increases your sales during the last quarter of the day, while Leek Soup Boost  gives a selling bonus to potatoes, leeks and carrots, provided they're all being sold together.

These marketing types should hopefully involve a bit more decision making than simply having some set trending items. It also adds a slight risk vs. reward aspect, as you have to pay upfront for the marketing and could potentially make a loss if you haven't got the right items to sell. Plus, with different marketing options appearing each week, every market day will feel a little bit unique.

Produce Categories

I wanted some marketing boosts to apply to entire categories of produce, like Root Vegetables or Berries. To make that possible, I added a category system for all the fruits and vegetables in the game. Their category is now displayed in the item info of both the seeds and the harvested produce.

Other Market Tweaks

ordered by price, economy changes,adding to offers

Seed Icons

One other little update this month un-related to the market was the seed icons. Previously, they had use the vegetable item icon on the seed packet, but I'd always thought they would benefit from having a more simplified image of the vegetable. The 3D-ish look of the vegetable icons had always felt a bit off to me, and they were just a bit too detailed for an icon that appears so small within another icon.

So I tried swapping them out for simplified 2D vegetable icons, which I think now looks a lot cleaner. Plus, I already have these 2D icons for all the vegetables anyway (they're used on the collectible medals from the vegetable competition feature) so it doesn't involve me having to do any extra work.

Other News

In other news, I've almost finished work on the 8-bit breadboard computer that I've been building over the last few months. I recently made a short video of it running a program that calculates the Fibonacci numbers, which you can check out here.

And finally, as Spring is almost here I've been getting started planting a few vegetables that I'll be growing on my balcony this year. The tomatoes, spring onions, and lettuce seeds have all germinated and are currently growing in the kitchen until the weather is warm enough for them to move outside.

Next Up...

Next week, it's back to the farm for some more farming gameplay! Coming up soon we've got the pest system and fruit trees, but I'll be starting off next week with the feature I've been most looking forward to: automation! Think sprinklers to cut down on watering, auto-planters, and auto-harvesters to make farm life easier. I can't wait to get started!

Thank you all so much for your continued support <3

Karl