Mar 2024 Update

I got to work on the farming tile logic next. For the time being I’m just going to have potato plants until I get all the growing and harvesting mechanics working. Currently the water in the watering can and the seeds don’t run out. These constraints will be worked on in a later update, the goal right now is to get a working game loop.

There is a rudimentary day night cycle now. But it only updates the plants growth and the ‘trash’ that spawns in the field. I’ll likely polish this up quite a bit before the next release.

Next I went back to all the layer sorting. I had to go back into the animations and remove reference to the z index changes as they don’t seem compatible with the y sort, which I need when the player interacts with objects and NPC’s.

There were problems with the node layout in regards to sorting, so I had to play around with how I implemented the crops as the y sort needed to be a child of another y sort node. My solution was to spawn the crop outside of the tile node and into a general ‘item box’, then just connect signals back to the crop tiles which act as managers for their own resources.

Since I now had farming tiles I wanted to move the basic resource node to the field, as typical of these kind of games. The stone node gave me a bit of trouble as I realized there were bugs in the last project I did pertaining to random generators. It took me a while, but I did manage to sort out the issues and now the resource nodes have a chance to spawn each day on a non-occupied tile. I’ll be polishing up how much ‘trash’ spawns in the field per day, but may leave as is for now and let the players give me feedback on how little or more is needed to have a comfortable balance.

In a couple of days (about 4 hours of work) later I made the art assets for the wood harvest node. Most of the code was laid out during the stone node creation, so it was relatively easy to implement the mechanics once the art assets were made. I’ll probably need to polish this asset up more later on, but that should go without saying by now.

With the potatoes potatoing, the stumps stumping and the rocks rockn I began work on one of the biggest art assets that I’ll need for the next update, the new area tileset. Originally I was going to call this area The Planes, but ultimately decided that it sounded more like a barren hot area or an area with just grass and no trees. So I’m changing the name to The Field, because it sounds more like an RPG starting area,…. To me at least.

Anyway, that is all for this months dev log. Same as last moth, I feel that my progress has been a bit slowed due to a variety of factors like shitty weather, personal matters and just a need for some R&R. I’m still finishing up the tile set for the field area. Having done the walls and now working on the ‘floor’ tiles and their respective transition tiles (being as there are two lengths of grass to work with), then there will be the props like trees and rocks… I still have a fair bit of work before I finish it.

That’s all for this month, see you next.