Homegrown 0.5.1 - New Town!

Over the next couple of months I'll be adding a lot of gameplay features to the town area. In preparation for this, I've been overhauling the town scene to get it ready for the upcoming updates.

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.

Check out the new changes in the latest devlog video.

Why change?

I've always had a bit of an issue about the way that you navigate around the town. It uses the same camera controls as in the farm area and that always felt slightly off to me. Right from the start I removed the ability to rotate and zoom the camera in the town - I realized that these were unnecessary complications when browsing the shops, but I don't think I went far enough in restricting camera movement to the bare necessities. Having so much freedom with the camera movement has always felt iffy to me.

I think this is probably because of what the town's function is. Essentially, it's a menu where you choose which shop/service to use. And a 3D camera is a weird way to navigate a menu. This hasn't been much of an issue up until now as the town was small enough to fit onto a single screen - no moving required. But with the upcoming expansion to the town area I decided it was finally time to make the change

The Solution

I came up with this solution about a year ago and I've been waiting to work on the town again to implement it. I decided I needed to lean into the whole menu thing and restrict movement to just one axis, so that you can easily scroll through the shop options.

The way this works is that you now look at the shops from the front. The camera movement is essentially side scrolling, with arrows on either side of the screen allowing you to go left or right (arrow keys on the keyboard also works). You don't have to hold them down and scroll - there are fixed viewpoints in the town and clicking left or right will move you to the next viewpoint, where you'll see a whole new set of shops.

I personally think this makes a lot more sense for navigating the town in a game without a movable character. It gets right to the point of showing your shopping options directly to you, allowing you to easily browse through them like a menu, while also hopefully still feeling immersive. I also like that you can clearly see the shops from the front now, whereas before you saw a lot of roof when viewing them from above.

The actual scene still needs a lot of work. I haven't spent much time on it yet; I plan to do that when I next work on graphics (after all the gameplay updates). It's also going to evolve a lot in the coming weeks as more and more features get added to the town. But it's a decent starting point and hopefully it gives you a taste of what I'm aiming for.

Sky Rendering

Another bonus of this new town system is that the sky is visible in the game for the first time! Currently the sky is rendered onto a simple full-screen quad, which is sufficient seeing as the camera can't rotate in the town (so no need for a sky box/sphere).

Nevertheless, I convert the quad 's vertex positions to world space before using them to generate a simple gradient and apply the cloud textures in the shader. This is so that the sky doesn't get squashed or stretched when you change the size of the display (which changes the size of the full-screen quad).

I also added a bit of noise to the gradient to fix some slight colour banding that I noticed. This dithering helps to make the transition between individual colour values in the gradient less noticeable.

Inventory

Seeing as you can't use your tools in the town area, I decided to remove the inventory hotbar from the UI when in the town. I do think you should still be able to check your inventory while you're out shopping though, so there's a button at the bottom of the screen which opens up your entire inventory.

Coming soon

The next updates are going to be all about market day! At the end of each in-game week (about every half hour) there will be a market in town. This will include a farmers' market where you can sell your produce, and a vegetable competition that you can enter, among other things. This will take place in the currently empty field on the far right of the town.

The town restaurant will also be opening up soon! This is the building you can see just to the right of the town center. Every week it will have a new menu and will have orders for specific vegetables that you can choose to fulfill.

You'll notice that there are a few villagers in town already, but they don't seem to be very friendly! In fact, I'm not even sure if they're currently alive. But I'll be breathing some life into them soon and they'll move around a bit, making the town seem more lively. I might also use them for giving helpful tips about how to use the town features, e.g. you'll be able to talk to the chef outside the restaurant for a quick explanation of how the restaurant order system works.

That's it for this update! Do give it a go and let me know what you think. Thanks as always for the support!!

~Karl