Programming Weeds! - Homegrown Devlog
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- čas přidán 11. 06. 2024
- Devlog video about "Home Grown", a casual farming game I'm creating using my own engine.
Support the channel on Patreon and get access to the code for this game and the city-builder:
/ thinmatrix
My previous game "Equilinox":
store.steampowered.com/app/85...
You can follow the progress of the game on my social media:
Twitter: / thinmatrix
Instagram: / thinmatrix
Facebook: / thinmatrix
Trello: trello.com/b/W3zkIJTM/farm
Email: thinmatrix@gmail.com
Background music by Jamal Green:
open.spotify.com/artist/50jTM...
Outro music by Dannek Studio:
/ dannekstudio
#devlog #HomeGrown - Hry
Sorry it's been a little while since the last devlog - I took a couple of weeks off to visit my family in the UK, but I'm back developing again now!
Don’t worry it was a nice episode ^^
Why do you even apologize? You don't owe us nothing, so I can only be glad that you're even uploading. And taking some time off now and then is healthy!
It was a pleasure watching and the game looks awesome, already. Can't wait to play it but don't let that rush you. ;-)
Oi! Don't make me tap the "don't apologize for maintaining a healthy work-life balance" sign again Thin!
hi, i am just wondering if you use unreal engine or unity or other game engine. I am learning c# now as a second coding language, and am wondering if i should use unity or unreal engine if i make a game
@@mrhotdogs7623 He uses his own engine. Unity/Unreal are conventional engines but lots of games use them.
I just realized I'm going to spend 13 minutes watching grass grow.
Just like spring in Ohio.
Love the name "Home Grown". Its not only accurate for the game design, but it also represents the development of the game, being home grown itself. Very clever!
One of the best ways to control weeds is actually just to pull them, then lay the pulled weeds down on top of the soil. Over time, this helps smother new weeds, helps retain moisture in the soil, and of course the organic matter breaks down and augments your soil. This way, weeding becomes a benefit, not just a chore.
In other words, removing weeds may give a resource that's used to craft compost with (possibly among others) the above-mentioned effects.
Yo dawg, I heard you like weed...
To do this could be a skill you can develop overtime :O
I did that without even realising but had similar logic.
It would need a negative effect too, otherwise it would be too effective and everyone would use it all of the time.
I weed like that myself at home and it kills my back, so it takes forever. I think Stardew Valley had a stamina bar or something, but maybe just having a delay before you can use the weed tool after each use could work?
If you're going to have weed killer spray in the game, it would be neat also to have the game track whether a crop is organic or not, and have different price tiers when selling your produce, so using weed killer also reduces your longer-term profits.
i know others have mentioned something similar but seeing buildings grow vines/moss with age would be cool to see! especially if linked to weed growth. like the well and stones growing moss kinda thing
I have a game mode idea for the future:
You get an overgrown, messy garden and you need to renovate it and bring it back to life with a certain budget.
weeds i'd say adds an interesting aspect of the game, you could probably include some plants that can act as both weed and crop too
mint for example is an herb that you can grow, but you'll want to keep an eye on it or it'll over take your other gardens
Nice idea!
Oh yeah same with things like pumpkin or sweet potato!
Watching this video with your eyes closed makes it seem like you're adding a drug cultivation update to Home Grown. (In all seriousness the game is coming along great
new "Hash" set
smoke weeds everyday
The weeds should also grow on the grass tiles
That would require mowing to keep them from spreading into your garden. If you don't mow for too long, it could introduce various horrible weeds into your gardens.
Just a note, in my head it's more intuitive for the weed bar to grow bigger rather than smaller when there are more weeds nearby a plant.
This 100%
Yeah I was thinking about this quite a bit and went back and forth on it - but the bars represent the satisfaction with something and so I thought it makes sense that it goes down when they are unhappy. Seeing as all the other bars are going to go down when there's a problem I felt it might be a bit confusing if its the only one that goes up. Perhaps I could change the label of that bar to something that would make more sense (something that means "Weed-Free Factor", although I can't think of a good word for that right now).
@@ThinMatrix or maybe use an indicator with weed logo (a bit like the stars on a google search)
@@ThinMatrix Instead of "weed-free factor" how about something like "soil availability"?
@@ThinMatrix try soil availiability or resource competition maybe?
There could always be a chance of foreign seeds getting mixed in with whichever crops you plant. That's actually how my grandparents lost a quarter of their farm to invasive wisteria!
12:21 Acting 10/10, you should consider a career in Hollywood! Seriously though I died at "Quick, someone get the weed killer" :P
I thought the same lol
Someone get this man an oscar
There are so many interacting layers to this game! I love it! I can already imagine weeds that dry out the soil or increase the rate that compost decays. I can't wait to see how all these systems interact with one another.
Whenever I get a notification on my phone from CZcams I hope it is from you uploading. This made my day, thank you.
I know that the speeds at which everything grows at is WIP. But I keep having the exact same thought every time I watch this devlog, which is that it would be more interesting as a turnbased game. Where you have a limited number of actions per a day to cultivate your garden. For example the only reason to upgrade between a 1x1 tool vs a 2x2 tool is the slight time nuisance. However if you only have a certain number of actions a day you would be reducing your actions used. Additionally you could add actual goals "like reach x sales by the end of the month." One game that I keep thinking of is called Reap by Daniel Linssen - it uses a system like this and is a really compelling survival game because of it.
I love this idea. Obviously I keep comparing this to Stardew and worry that this is going to lack much of the depth of Stardew's systems. You don't have a player model, you probably won't be going on big adventures and the overall goals for this project seem very compact. Which is fine, but I'm worried that there's not enough "game" here for people to latch on to. Farmville got away with something similar, but that was because of the social aspect and the wide install base of Facebook. Something like your suggestion will help give this game an identity and move it from a 1 hour and I'm bored game to something complex to master, more like a Into the Breach than farmville
@@RobinClower 100% this it seems like a simulation that I'd enjoy for an hour or so, but it lacks actual goals and a gameplay loop. Restricting what can be achieved in a given time instantly adds a lot of depth to explore.
+1
Heh, I think I'm the opposite, I love the realtime aspect of this. I used to play a game called Colony as a kid (1987) where you'd grow and harvest plants in space, and protect them from bugs, then send them up to ships at the end of the day. It was faster paced than this, and I prefer the slower pace of Home Grown, but the fun was just finding ways to be efficient while keeping busy.
You probably already have this in mind and just haven't implemented it yet, but a small UI element that shows details of the "highlighted" area would be nice!
So for example, what plant is growing, what kind of fertilizer has been applied, etc.
The original and best chill devlog. Bravo!
Suggestion: The weed killer spray could make your soil toxic which will affect how fast the crop will grow and/or the yield of that crop.
Also how healthy the soil would be when you plant your next set of seeds
In general I could imagine this game having some kind of action-point bar, where every action (weeding, planting, fertilizing, watering etc) has an actionpoint cost. The actionpoints trickle in over time. The player must thus decide what actions to prioritize, how large the garden can be etc. Als it allows for a "pause", "normal", "fast" speed selector, without stressing the player, as the actions can be done in a pause mode if required. Over time, the player can gain action points speed, buffer and get tools that are more effizient.
The way the weeds look as shown here are actually kind of pretty, I'd probably shovel a few areas and let the weeds grow as decorations
you earned my respect for making all of that with your own custom assets and also writing everything in pure java
Your devlogs are so well-produced. I really enjoy your narration, pacing, and how you unpack concepts as you work on them!
i saw someone on a previous devlog suggest being able to make your own compost out of plants that have died, and i think this could be used while clearing weeds as well! like, if you have a home compost item, the weeds would automatically start filling it up when you clear them from the tiles, except if you're using the weed killer to remove them. really nice video as always, looking forward to the next one!
One thing that could be nice is if you have the worse weed come from outside the playable area, you can see it coming (then it slowly dies outside the playable area), and it propagates from tile to tile.
Great video as always, and always great to see RufusMatrix! :D
The weed could drain the wather from the soil faster
And the red weed could grow from cheap plants or if you do not get eliminate the less hramful weed.
Excellent update, I'm really enjoying the new game design and seeing how you enjoy actually growing food yourself too! Oh, and thanks for putting my OCD at ease regarding the speed of the weed growth! :D
honestly I'm loving these frequent uploads, keep it up man!
I love how you've shown your progress. It's so cool, and the game is really coming together! You actually inspired me to start my own devlog series for a game that's been in the back of my head for about 8 years now. Thanks!
Suggestion: The red species could spawn if the player has not removed the normal weed in a while.
The progress looks awesome. I really like the idea of weeds in the game. This gives the player to be careful in what type of compost they use. Also the way the weed grows looks really kool. Keep it up! :)
Watching you work is so inspiring. Also I absolutely adore Rufus!
11:26 - Made me think about how weeds actually spread. It could be a rare random event where a 'spore' or in the case of my timestamp, a dandelion seed blows in on the wind - if you're vigilant, maybe you could even catch it before it landed, otherwise, whatever farming tile it lands on becomes the start point for a new weed spread.
Loving the progress Thin, keep it up, you're an inspiration!
As a professional game dev its really refreshing to see you include design documents and project management tools in these videos. That shows an attitude of maturity towards the game development process that I rarely see on youtube.
Also, the weed mechanics look great! It's like you're creating a little ecosystem toy, and the weeds really help to make it feel alive. This might be out of scope/too hardcore for your intended audience, but you could try making tools that have non-square areas of effect. This creates a very light puzzle solving layer of "how do plan my clicks/organize my garden to use these tools best".
This is a very subtle change, but you might consider making it so the red weeds only spread once they hit a certain threshold of growth. Along with that, the weed growth process would look really slick if you slowed the growth animation down as it neared completion. Something like an EaseOut or an EaseInOut curve.
love your game engine, your devlogs and the sweet transitions from camera shot of screen to actual screen capture! super slick man.
Thanks!
You know how you can give your low poly art the extra pop: Add some bevels and look up the "Weighted Normal" modifier (Object Data Properties: Normals to Autosmooth), alternatively the normal Bevel modifier, setting in Shading: Harden Normals.
Using a thin bevel in those weighted normals will give the objects a more realistic look, while still keeping them flat shaded.
This is the trick Star Citizen used to make their artwork of hard surfaces look so nice.
Hope you are doing good. I cannot wait to watch you upcoming video :)
Love these dev logs always awesome! We need a day in the life again!
This is looking great! A little sad I didn't get to see another one of your amazing dishes this video. Look forward to that part each time :)
You may have already thought about this, but something that would make _me_ more interested in the game would be some aspect of automation. Sprinklers/irrigation to keep plants watered, but maybe the sprinklers have a chance to break sometimes so you have to fix them. Workers that can take care of weeding/harvesting but at a much slower pace and for pay. Things like that would make the game a lot more fun for me, but I don't know about other people, so these are just some basic ideas if you want to take them into consideration. Also Rufus is super cute :)
First time I've seen one of your videos and I really enjoy the combination of programming and slices of life!
You could try making an option to add the killed weeds to the compost. The weedspray won't leave any nutrients in the weed, but the small fork will.
Absolutely love all of your work! Have been following your development since Socuwan!
Wow, man, your devlogs are so good and calming! Love them
I like the idea of a random event bringing the the red root species into the ecosystem. Possibly by bird/animal? Small squirrel buried a root to eat later, disaster ensues on the vegetables.
I like the maybe-removal of weeds mechanic. Feels good.
I love this update! The weeds add so much to the game.
I CAN'T GET OVER HOW ADORABLE RUFFUS IS
At the same token as you @ThinMatrix, I've just come back from my first holiday abroad with my family in 13 years, and after the stress of the journey back seeing your next devlog vid pop up has put a smile on my face! :) Please keep em up!
Just a suggestion for the weed killer item: It could reduce the maximum health of a plant. So the player has to choose between the plant maybe dying due to the aggressive weeds, or killing the weed outright but reducing the plants maximum health permanently.
This is looking amazing. You're such a good dev and I can't wait to see how this game turns out.
these videos are allways somewhat therapeutical
good job man, love your videos 👍
Great watch! Loving the progress, keep up with it and can't wait to play it.
Thanks!
EVENTS.yes that'll make the game even more fun. Like seasonal events (better quality for spring, faster growth for summer etc), withering events ( chance of plants dying or just get invefcted by the red type of weeds). Yknow what i mean? Ah I'm hyped now
2:49 hey look, you made it look like my garden at home
I love the content of this vlog. It would be nice to have more variety with the background music for those of us that have been watching for a few years.
I like the idea of a fertilizer making the weeds grow faster, it means the player has to do some 😎compost-benefit analysis😎
love this devlog man!! looks great!
Thanks!
Wasn't gonna say anything.. but yeah, they did kinda look like red squares. The change is much better!
I'm growing avocados and had red squares everywhere, didn't think much of it until now.
Love seeing your progress! Not sure if your engine supports blendspaces but those could be used to change the shape of a mesh using an alpha value so you could make the weeds "sprout" if you smush the verts horizontally at the beginning and spread them out with maybe 2-3 blendspaces :) Might be useful for plants in general too!
Would be really neat if you would encode an sdf into the alpha channel of your leaf textures so that you could actually simulate plant growth 🍂
Love these devlogs
I think a good idea would be weather. So if it rains water will go up. If it is very sunny, water will faster go down.
Love the aggressive weeds. It would be cool if they were also able to spread across grass (though slower maybe). This also gives an effect to using pavement, as that would likely block (or significantly slow) weed growth between plant beds.
Ahhh! Rufus is adorable!!! Love him! And welcome back!
A useful application of the pavers could be to have them reduce the weed growth rate in completely surrounded plots. That way there's a purpose to them, not just for looks.
This looks awesome. Looking forward to playing the game when it's finished! One possible idea I'd like to contribute is that it would be nice with some visual feedback when clearing weeds. Perhaps there could be a small particle system that spawns on the tile where the weeds have been cleared that makes it look like the weeds sort of splatter or fan out from the tile and then fade away (kind of like weed confetti). I think that would make the weed-clearing process a lot more interactive and feel more lively :)
Thanks! And yes, I definitely agree - I'll be adding plenty of visual fx/particle fx/sound fx to all of the actions in the game to make sure they feel "juicy"!
Hey! I love your devlog videos. I like the weed growing effect by making the model grow slowly. But what about instead of instantly removing the weeds and make it suddenly disappear, you can try to shrink the models fast so it seems a bit more animated/seamless. That way it seems like the weeds are not teleporting into death, but shrinking and dying.😄
I have some garden beds that look like your weedy ones right now! Busy time of year for gardeners.
I was inspired by your game to start work on a Godot-based garden planner to replace one I've been using in Excel. Keep up the good work.
King is back guys!
Crop rotation as an alternative to compost would be pretty cool
I really enjoyed playing Equilinox! I look forward to playing this game!
You could make the percentages for the compost buffs a green and red color to see if it's a positive or negative effect on the plant
I used one of those weed killers once, and the thing I disliked most about it was that the weeds are now dead, but still very much there. The ground is also a lot less usable for growing anything else either. Maybe having dead (greyish?) weeds around for a while and making the soil less fertile would be nice.
If you had a separate market where you sold the vegetables you grow besides your inventory then you could have it where you brought home a plant or some thing from the market that you bought yourself which could intern bring the infectious weed to your garden
Looks amazing! :D
I just love this series it’s so peaceful do you have another video soon?
Add a damage bar and wear and tear for all the tools,
like the shovel will catch rust over time depending upon the level of inventory/or storage place you got
Good storage place = less natural wear and tear, and vice versa
And the more you use the tools ,the faster they will break and lose their efficiency
If used in rust state it breaks even faster.
This way player will have to constantly replacing the farming items, if not then the player would never really have a need to buy a shovel again once it is already bought.
I plan on adding durability to the tools soon, but I hadn't considered the storage idea - that's a nice thought! Thanks!
@@ThinMatrix your most welcome, the small house next to the farm could become the storage space, and the different level of storage spaces could have different models, same could be done with the vegetables.
Like if you have a good storage space you can store your vegetables for a longer time before they get rotten up and you have to bear a lost.
You can introduce a transport system,
Where you intially will have a small trolley which could only transport the vegetables to near by villages (on a small profit) later you can buy a truck which could go to major cities and lead bigger profits, and they will take time to return from the delivery.(And will have there own transport quantity i.e. how much of vegetable they can transport)
This could be done by giving every vegetable a certain amount of weight and if the weight is more than the transport weight then you got to unload some vegies)
You could also make an asking system depending on the time of the game.
Such as its winters and cities need x vegetable , so the x vegetable which is in demand will pay more, but if you send the y vegetables for trade they might get returned or get sold for very cheap or even get rotten up, if the time for them to transport and return to base becomes more than their sustainable time.
(This will give us a reason to grow differnet types of vegetables)
And the price you will get will depend on the vegetable health you have implemented, the vegetables which are at good health will give you full price whereas vegetables which are at a little less health will fetch you a deduction in revenue.
(Thus will add more meaning to the plant health system)
And this must depend uopn the store you are sending your supply to, some store will be good at judging the vegetables therefore catching the bad quality, whereas some will be ok to take whatever is in the truck.
Offcoure this would need to be balanced like the former store will give you high margins wheres as the latter will give you very less margins and transport time is very high coz they are in remote places.
This will give a goal to the game, i.e. you need to build and sustain a farm, with time the demands and availability will keep on changing some times hard sometimes easy, thus will give it a little management genre tooo....
@@ThinMatrix you can even add a surprise factor like for some reason all the gralic seeds the farm got were toxicated or alergic against some fertilizer that the user has used, therefore how he will have to rip off the whole garlic plants.
If you can , then you can add a reputation bar too, suppose we decided to go on and sell the toxicated garlic and somehow the store got to know about it, and now no wanta to deal with us ans the ones who want to deal are taking advantage of our situation and offer very low prices.
And then we will have to regain the reputation in the market.
I am more of a management genre game player, thats why i love games where you need to build and grow something, and your game is all about it.
that guy is now definitely more self-confident to show himself in videos more, which is super nice thing considering he is a super crush now
Glad to see your putting enemies in the game, good stuff
Maybe you could also consider symbiotic plant relationships. I am not sure which plants exactly work together, but if you for example (im making this up) plant squash and tomatoes together, they help fend weeds off of each other and thus help each other grow.
Be cool to see a minigame where you have to deal with buts in the garden, however you have to remove the bad ones and keep the good ones (spiders are good bugs)
I just found this channel ima binge watch the tutorial
You could add birds that have a chance of spreading the weeds and the birds could also damage the crops
If you implemented some little birds that would come and go you could have them sometimes drop the seeds of aggressive weeds.
Just brainstorming and throwing some ideas out there. To make things look even more real I thought the garden yard could have trees, which drop leaves needing to be swept up. The leaves could affect how fast the plants grow due to the amount of light. Seasons could be an addition once the base game works. So the colours of the environment could change + or - a set amount. A watercourse with some gentle ambient sound. Or a pond for decoration with frogs and things jumping out of it, water flies buzzing around. Those things can add to the ambient sound of the game. Maybe not all of those things but they're just brainstorming ideas and mainly visual.
Thanks for all the suggestions! A few of those are already on my "Future Possibilities" list, so hopefully you'll see some (or all!) of them in the game at some point :)
@@ThinMatrix Thanks - the best ideas.. are always... home grown!
I think it could be fun to have a fast mode where everything spreads really quick and it gets really chaotic
Love the game. I think weeds are just plants in the wrong place. Perhaps you could extend the random weed growing to also encompass random plants like potatoes (maybe it was from a previous season) or wild strawberry. It's one of the things I like about gardening is random plants plopping up unexpectedly and making the most of it.
Managing weeds looks like a great update to the game!
When the game is finished it would be cool if the player could walk into the house and almost feel like they’re the person living in the house and is going outside to plant their vegetables and sell them to the market
Maybe a good idea for the weed would be birds. From time to time a single bird would sit on top of your plants and poop to spread the weed. Thus, players would need to scare off birds when they see one and keep an eye on the garden! (+ players could buy a scarecrow to lower the number of birds coming to your garden)
Very nice devlog.
It'd be cool if the weeds shrink then disappear when you spray them with weed killer.
Love the addition of a more virulent weed variety. Feels like an excellent feature to drop in.
Wondering if the code system for that allows you to implement cohabitation with plants. Like a clover that you deliberately spread (like a weed) under certain types of plants that stops other weeds growing, but limits your max growth rate. A trade off/deliberate choice.
I love the wet soil effect, but not so sure about the composted soil effect
Btw seeing Rufus with that ball made my day
Add an "organic" tag to anything grown without weed killer. Maybe have compost over-use remove the tag too? This could increase the price of them.
You have those paver blocks surrounding a patch of the garden. I wonder if you could add that or something else that creates a barrier to help prevent weeds from entering/jumping into/out of nearby patches.
Maybe when you remove the weeds, make them fly out of the ground in a random direction and fade away, that might look cool!
Just an idea, this looks like a game that would be even more beautiful with some tasteful particle effects. I know everything is very early from a graphical standpoint.