Plow and Hoe

Sometimes I'm thankful that I don't have any followers. Looking at my last post I have to say its been a while.

Alright, so I've been slowly working on the MVP for the “farming simulator” I mentioned last post or so. I still have a very long way to go needless to say.

So far I managed to work out the issue I was having with isometric tiles. Although I haven't made anything but the grass tiles, but I don't think there will be any problem with more ridged designs like bricks or cobblestones.

As you can see in the picture above I have a basic UI layout. The upper left will be a status window. I've decided to rework it so it can show followers and pets (ie:party members). Not sure if I'll condense it in the corner or have a more on the side layout, I'm trying to keep the UI generally out of the players field of view. Sizing can come later I guess. Nothing is functional on it yet.

The upper right has the clock. Its just a prototype right now, I defiantly want to polish it later. I have it animated and the idea looks decent. I've also been practicing with a color filter that goes over the screen space to show light gradients. I think I'm going to make the days 15 real world minuets and may have to break up the animation for the clock in parts as Godot only supports animations only so long. At least that was v3.0, I just upgraded to v3.1 so I'll have to check if it supports longer animations. Even if it doesn't I don't see a problem breaking up the animation cycle and linking it in code.

And on the lower left is the quick slot bar (well I kind of made it look like gears). I plan to make this game primarily focused on using a hand held controller. I thought about giving it mouse support like in Stardew Valley, but ultimately decided that I wanted this game to play more like the old Harvest Moon. I don't have any programming done on the “bar” yet but what I'm trying to achieve is a place to allocate items that are not equip-able but will be used in certain areas (ie:having seeds in the active slot will allow you to sow seeds on tilled soil or have an option to give gifts to NPC's). The default button layout will use the L or R buttons to rotate the gear and set an item on the wheel to the active position.

The lower Right has nothing so far, but I may put an active equipment (like tools or weapons) Icon there.

I'd also like to make a ring menu system like in Secret of Mana. That will be an interesting challenge.

Getting back to the tiles, I had to work out a solution to show soil when the tile is “tilled”. Godot's auto tile system doesn't really work well with isometric tiles (at least from what I could tell) and I don't think I can have complex data in a tile manager. Thankfully I managed to devised a walk-around using raycast and area collides. It took me 3-4 days but now the tiles transition properly from grass to soil.

Anyway that's it for now.