Homegrown 0.3.0 - Graphics Update Finished!

After quite a few months of working on the render engine the graphics overhaul for Homegrown is done (for now!) It's a big improvement from how the game looked back in version 0.2 and there are still many more visual improvements to come before the game is released. But for now, it's back to gameplay!

Gamer Tier+ patrons can download and play Homegrown here.

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

Home area

One change that I made recently was to give the home area a bit of an upgrade and prepare it for an upcoming feature where you'll be able to purchase land and expand your farm (coming very soon!) The full home area is now much bigger than before and surrounded by water, and there are a few little extra bits of scenery to make it look more scenic.

Grass and Flowers

Small wild plants will now spawn in your farm area when you start a new game. These plant will get destroyed when you build/dig in that tile. It's just a small addition but it makes the garden feel slightly less bare when you're starting out. Perhaps in the future I'll have them respawning over time and allow the player to cut the grass to get compostable plant matter.

Beetroots

From now on I'm going to be periodically adding in new crops to the game to slowly build up the amount of content in the game. My modelling skills are in need of a bit of practice, plus I find it quite a nice break from programming from time to time. First new plant in the game: beetroots!

Render Engine changes

I've spent most of the past month working on changes to the render engine, which I talked about more in this devlog video. I implemented frustum culling so only the visible entities in the scene get rendered and spent a lot of time trying to reorganize the render engine code to make it easier to work with and build on in the future. I also added a debug panel into the game to provide feedback about how the game's running (which you can see by pressing tab in the game, if you're interested).

Coming up...

That's it for the rendering updates for now! Tomorrow I'll begin planning for the upcoming gameplay improvements. I'm pretty sure that the first new feature is going to be the ability to purchase more land for your farm, so you'll be seeing a devlog video about that soon!

As always, thank you all very much for your support!

Karl