Homegrown Update - The Town!

Hello everyone! Some big updates to Homegrown this month, including a whole new area, some changes to the controls, and more improvements to the particle effect system.

Gamer Tier+ patrons can download and play Homegrown here. 

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

Town Area

The biggest change in this update is the addition of a whole new town area. Here you'll currently find all the in-game shops, but in the future the town will also be home to a lot of other features as well, such as a farmer's market, people you can interact with, and a restaurant which will act as a kind of task system. To access the town, there's a big button in the top-right hand corner. Press it again to go back to your farm area.

I recently made a devlog video about the creation of the new area, which you can watch here. 

The town is admittedly lacking a bit of life and movement at the moment, but that will soon be fixed with a wind effect for the plants and trees, a water shader for the river, some animated models, and at some point even a few little villagers pottering around!

Changes to the Controls

The town update made it clear to me that a few changes needed to be made to the controls, especially relating to interactable objects. Previously you would right-click on some objects to interact with them, but right-clicking on the buildings to access the shops instead of left-clicking was obviously a bit strange.

So I made the change and you now interact with clickable objects by left-clicking on them. This includes things like clicking on the shop building to open the shop, or clicking on your house to access your storage. In addition to this, some objects now have an extra interaction when you left-click on them with no tools equipped. The compost heap for example: left-clicking with an empty hand covers it with the tarp when it has plant matter in it, starting the conversion process.

Previously, clicking on objects with nothing equipped would "examine" the object, and bring up the object's information panel (currently only really useful for plants where it shows their health stats). This is now done by using the extra "examine" option, which is the little magnifying glass button found just underneath the inventory.

Particle System Improvements

Since the particle system devlog I also made a few more improvements to the particle effects. Firstly, I implemented hot-loading for the particle effect files. This means I can edit the settings of a particle effect and instantly see the visible changes without having to restart the game. This real-time feedback allows for a much faster, smoother creation process for new particle effects, making my job a bit easier!

I also made some changes to the particle system code that will make using particle effects more straightforward for the rest of development. A ParticleEffect can now be one of three things:

Particle Emitter - This is basically what all particle effects were before, a load of settings relating to the emission of a single type of particle.

Combination Effect - This comprises of multiple other ParticleEffects, which should be carried out at the together. For example, the digging particle effect is made of two particle emitters, one for the dust effect and one for the rubble effect. These two emitters can now be combined and treated as a single ParticleEffect.

Variant Effect - This carries out one other ParticleEffect, but with added parameters. Basically this allows you to copy an existing ParticleEffect and override some of its settings. For example, I use this for the harvesting particle effect for the plants, where the particle colours need to match the colour of the plant's leaves. Each plant creates a variant of the same base harvesting ParticleEffect, and adds its own colour parameter to match its leaf colour.

One Year of Development

So that's it for the first year of Homegrown's development! In the new year I'll be finishing off the graphical updates with some improvements to the terrain and scenery in the farm area. I'll then be moving on to fleshing out the gameplay a bit more, before giving the UI a makeover and introducing sound and music to the game.

As for a rough timescale for releasing the game, I'm tentatively aiming to have basically finished the game by the end of next year, and I would then spend a few more months preparing for a launch in early/mid 2024. That's a very rough estimate though, so take that with a big pinch of salt!

Thank you all so much for your extremely generous support over this year and for making this all possible. I hope you all have a fantastic time over the holidays, merry Christmas, and have a great start to the new year!