Devlog #4 | Clearing the Fields

Where Have We Been?

The past two months we’ve been working on a new farm and tile system! Now you’ll be able to place structures, till the farmland, and clear it with your tools! Although right now, I only did the art for a hoe, so you’re just clearing everything with a hoe…

Here’s an example of placing structures! This took recursive and I a long time to not only figure out the logic behind it, but also which pieces we needed. I ended up using a spread sheet with the file names so I didn’t confuse myself…

The fence wasn’t so bad to figure out, art wise. The tiles, on the other hand…At first, I had separate meshes for every possible kind of tile with modified UVs on a sprite sheet. After looking at it, we realized it was probably easier in the long run to make a material inside the engine to manipulate it.

This was how we ended up laying everything out:

The numbers on the side are how much % the texture needs to pan to be a certain piece. recursive came up with the formula that would allow him to rotate the texture for different corners without skewing the texture, since the default centre point is 0,0. Watered tiles at the moment are handled through the material as well, with a mask and multiply value driving how dark it gets. This way, we can implement a system where you can water your crops twice, and it will dry slower. It still needs polish to have more of a blend later on, but for now, it’s a good indication!

New Additions

We also added a new crop! Corn was our third and last choice for demo veggies. It’s interesting to look at, and gives a bit of variety with vertical heights among our existing crops.

That’s all that we’re going to showcase for December! For now, we’re going to relax a bit for the holiday season, then get right to finishing up our big lists of to-do’s. Did I mention our weeks are named after cat breeds…?