Homegrown 0.3.2 - Fruit Bushes, Fences, Supports!

Quite a bit of new content in this release! The main aim of this update was to add support for a few new object types, to allow for more variety in the game in the future. I implemented three new object types in total and added some examples of each to test them out.

Gamer Tier+ patrons can download and play Homegrown here.

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

Fruit Bushes

The first new addition is multi-tile plants - plants that take up more than one tile in the world. This will allow for larger plants like fruit bushes, fruit trees, pumpkins, etc.

There's one example of this in the game currently, which is the blueberry bush. These are the most expensive plant in the game at the moment, and the slowest growing. You plant the saplings on the grass (not in soil) and wait for them to grow! For now they don't need any watering or care. You can harvest the berries using the secateurs tool.

Fences

There are a few objects that I have planned that will need to be able to connect up with neighboring objects, so that was another thing implemented in this update. To test this I added a new place-able fence item, allowing you to place fences around your farm. Currently they're just for decoration, but they should soon have some practical benefits as well.

Tomato Canes

One limitation that the game had up until now was that there could only be one object or plant per tile. I wanted to remove that limitation to allow for "helper objects", objects that you can place in the same tile as a plant to help it grow in some way.

The example that I implemented for this was support canes for the tomatoes. Without the canes the tomatoes can still grow, but only to half the maximum height and they produce less tomatoes. There is however a chance that the canes will break and need replacing when you remove the tomato plant (although there's no gameplay reason for you to do that currently as the tomatoes can be harvested without removing the plant).

One other example of helper objects that I plan to implement soon are nets that you can place over certain crops to protect them from pest damage.

New Collectible

The collectible trophy available to unlock in this version is a little Equilinox sheep statue. It can be bought from the tool shop in the town for 9,999 coins. Don't forget to copy across your achievements.dat file if you want to keep any previously unlocked trophies. All unlocked trophies will spawn in your house storage when you start a new game.

Option to Change UI Size

A couple of people mentioned that the UI is a bit small on their display. I'll be doing a full overhaul of the UI for version 0.5 of Homegrown, but for now you can  manually change the UI size with + and - on the num pad.

Coming Soon...

Big changes coming to the tool and item system next! I'm hoping to make the tools more intuitive to use plus there's going to be a new way to customize and upgrade your tools. 

You can see all new features in action in the latest devlog video. 

Thanks as always for the support!