The alternative UI style you were showing off looks really good! I’d switch, it looks less flat than the current UI which fits with the art style better
The changes are really coming along. I love the perspective shift for the town menu. When you navigated to the "empty space" and mentioned you had some plans for that later on.... my first thought was a rotating space for community events. Certain seasons could have different events related to the growing season and you could participate with what you've grown in your garden. I'm imagining a harvest festival in the fall or a flower competition in the spring. Anyway, love what you're doing, amazing work! Looking forward to playing the game when it's released.
I am currently working on a Horde survival and the fps dropped quite fast so I implemented Object pooling and ECS and jobs and bursts. It's fun to learn :) fun to see you post man.
The alternative UI style looks really good! Are you going to include animals like cows and chickens? It would be nice to have features where we can produce milk, eggs, and similar items.
The game is all good, but the problem I see is that the colors could be a little bit more vibrant or saturated. The current color palette looks too dull.
One way to add a lot of personality to the shops is to have the shopkeeper visible on the side somewhere, maybe reacting when you buy something, and greeting when the menu is opened. I kinda like the current simple villager designs.
@@ThinMatrix yes sort of how they do it in the Viva Pinata games! I've always found that to be kinda cute. If you haven't played any of the games yourself, you could probably find a video somewhere where someone uses a shop in a playthrough or something :P Bascially, when you unlock a new shop, the shopkeeper kind of announces themselves and when you then visit their shop for the first time they'll tell you a little about themselves and what products/services they offer. After that they'll always be visible on the side of the screen when you're browsing their catalouge and make little facial expressions or just do some silly idle animation when you're buying/scrolling.
maybe back behind the shops you could add some houses for the villagers that obviously serve no purpose to the player, but would be a nice touch to add more life back there.
Nice town! As a suggestion: Wouldn't be nice to see the town evolve with player? I mean, like new shops opening as u progress and the town visually grrowing in npc numbers and infrastructure. Like, the bridge turning from a rusty wooden bridge, to a new good look and fancy bridge!
The new UI does a much better job of presenting the information in a hierarchical format (e.g. big text = more important, same size text = approximately same importance). It looks so good!
New shop layout is cool instead of only moving left to right you could have the layout be like an upside down U. You still only have tow arrows but instead of only going right it does a turn this will make the world feel nice and connected it could even move in a L shape. The map could wrap around and see the back side of the town if you are in one spot.
Love your updates! One suggestion: make the village area arrows closer to the center of the screen horizontally. If I don't remember where a particular shop is, I might want to click e.g. left arrow and then immediately the right one (because I realized the shop in question is not on the left), which requires me to move the mouse all the way to the right and breaks the flow. This is of course a tiny nitpick, though :)
Maybe have them be on the left and right sides of thee inventory button. The part of the screen feel a little empty now that the hotbar is gone. Also, it's more noticeable that the buttons are now on the screen meaning players are more likely see that they can move left and right.
An issue with fixed positions is that the screen aspect ratio comes into play as to what you'll see in those positions. You could automatically adjust the FOV so that no matter the aspect ratio some designated safe zone is guaranteed visible. Not sure what the best solution is, just something to keep in mind with 3D menus !
I've already done some work on this, you can see at 8:55 when I change the window to a wide aspect ratio that the correct shops are still shown. Doesn't work so well with very narrow aspect ratios, but I'm not sure if I need to worry too much about that.
@@ThinMatrix I'd personally just care about aspect ratios down to 1:1 and if it gets any narrower than that the player most likely uses only half their monitor. You could lock the aspect ratio of the town to stay at 1:1, scale the size down from there on and add more sky space vertically to support weird window sizes like split screen or something. Tbh most of the UI will not work with very narrow window/screen sizes but with this at least the correct shops stay visible. Keep up the amazing work!
Changing the camera view in the town was a good move! Someone else mentioned a similar idea, but I think it'd be really nice if the town shops become available slowly as to not overwhelm the player. Personally when playing these types of games I get very overwhelmed with areas like this until I'm more familiar with the ones I currently need. That could look like the town itself expanding, or just some way to guide the player to only the shops they need when starting out
The new UI for the shop looks better IMO. The darker background behind the item icons makes it appear differently than just an inventory of stuff that you already have. this distinction is very important for intuitive UX design
Great job on the town's sky. You should probably implement the parallax effect on it though, it looked weird to move through the town and see sky stay the same
Hm... I'm not sure I understand the purpose of the town vs having a menu from the home farm (where you'd maybe place orders and wait for delivery style). Your 3D art skills have improved a lot recently but the town feels a little disjointed to me for some reason. I'm getting the feeling like maybe you should have a player character that would quickly zip between the areas of the town but that could massively expand scope. Did you ever play AC new leaf? I'm loosely getting that "go to the city" feeling but it's strange that you're not participating in the town as your own character. I guess maybe it's the contrast between animal crossing vs a city management game. If you've got a strong vision for it though don't let me discourage you as that's what matters most!
I liked the old town, but I understand that it probably only maked sense if you had a character to control and move around the town like in Stardew Valley
Great video as always! My only suggestion is to be able to use A and D to move through the town (in addition to arrow keys) as I typically prefer that movement, but overall great work!
Think it's really sad that you've restricted the town to be a side scroller - Loved the idea of a full 3D town that you could fully navigate. I get you see it as a menu, but in my head it's a perfect opp to add some personality into the game and meet NPC's - Perhaps you could haggle etc with grump shop owners! Love the dev updates! Keep it up!
Same. I think the main issue is that the player is just an omni present entity, hence everything is just a menu. Maybe if there was an actual character following around the mouse, doing what we clicked, the 3d town center would be better. I think that is what is missing here
You could add some little sheep on the hills in the background. That would be cute as you could make the hop, walk and interact with each other. That would be lovely, please consider adding that. Love your videos and games❤
So many feature requests for the game in the comments 😅 - You seemed a little stressed this update. Remember to take care of yourself. Don’t worry about the timing - we’ll be here when the game is ready, no matter the time it takes. You’ve got this!
I preferred the town overview as it is much easier to navigate. With my disability, I am much more mindful of the muscle cost of moving hands on and off mouse or keyboard, which also incurs head and eye movements, and repositioning delays. The side view in town might be nice as a scroll-in option. But with a zoomed-out by default town option, I could move arrow no more than 2/3 distance from center to screen edge with a single hand movement, and click once to select a shop. That said, I do appreciate the experience of the side view, and should maybe be mandatory for unlocking shops or using foundations, etc. But the shortcut option as default would be a huge usability bonus for me.
I'd say the new design is better. Also think about maybe doing a dark themed UI instead, with warm grays? It's a cozy game and I really dislike when I'm chilling out and every time I open something my eyes get lasered.
This might be an unpopular opinion, but I actually preferred the old town. I agree it was a little lifeless, but I think that could have been fixed by simply introducing NPCs who walk about the town, and perhaps giving the player an avatar who navigates to the shop on click before showing the menu. That way you could have introduced cute little interactions with the townsfolk, and even a day/night cycle for their routines (perhaps certain shops are only open at certain times?), and weather system to which they could be reactive (raining people head inside or put up umbrellas). Also with the old town, from a UX point of view everything was one only one click away, but with the new town a player would have to make several jumps to find the shop they need. Also the speed and linear motion of the animation is making me feel nauseous 🤢 as I watched you navigate from side to side on the video. But keep chopping away at it, I love watching your progress and I look forward to playing when the game is released.
I always love these videos, you're a big inspiration for me. Just a quick question, will you be adding time (Like nighttime) and weather (like rain) to the game ?
Okay, I haven’t watched this devlog yet, but I just wanna say that every time it comes to your videos, I take my playback speed off of 2x, back to normal speed, I ask my wife if I can have some uninterrupted time to just properly sit down and focus on your videos, I love them so much 🙌🏻🎉 keep up the good work
As I am making my own farming game, this series has been super insightful. Home grown’s success feels like my own and I am so proud to see the project getting all the love. Well deserved ❤❤
in the town, since the mouse is usually at the right and the arrows are there too, wouldn't it be easier for the player to use A and D to move, from WASD?
Have you considered instead of a menu feel, a player character that you can walk left and right along the shops? I think that will help as you can fix the camera to the player and will help maintain immersion.
You don't have a controllable player in the home area though (and I don't plan on adding one because it doesn't fit with the gameplay) so it might feel a bit strange to have one just in the town area.
I like the shop UI, but I'm not sure I like the side scroll. It feels like that in the top down view it takes significantly less clicks to achieve the same goal.
I think it's quite similar, you arrive at the town center so the maximum you would ever need to do is two taps of left or right. Previously to move you had to click and hold and drag which I'd say is a similar amount of effort. And it's definitely faster to get to where you want now.
I like the way you designed the new town. Suggestion: After the empty spots in the shop you could return the player back to the farm. It's like you are leaving the shop and going back home
ThinMatrix I have a question. How are you layouting your scene with out an editor? I assume you might be using blender but how would I get each object imported as its own entity with names and transforms?
It's not very practical the way the I'm doing it, but it's just not quite enough of a problem to justify me programming an editor (yet!). The thing is, almost all the town is static, so I export all the objects from Blender in a single OBJ file and then my importer combines them into a single mesh. That's fine for the static scenery, but when I want individual entities (like I'll want for the villagers) I'll need to position and add them manually, probably in the code. So I might still end up making an editor - if it gets too annoying.
I was wondering if you have plans for an interesting in-game economy . Most games are quite lacklustre in that regard, in the sense that you start poor, first have to scrape by, start to get more money, till you're filthy rich and the game has essentially broken. I don't know about other people, but this turns me off really fast and would be a big concern for me.
This game is all about iterative growth, so I've been putting quite a lot of thought into how the game will remain balanced as you become richer and richer. But I don't really plan to directly change the economy. Mostly it'll work that the cheap items you buy at the beginning of the game are helpful for small farms, but as you expand and grow they will be insufficient to meet the new demands and you'll be naturally forced to invest in more expensive versions. Compost is a good example of this. The cheap tier 1 compost decays after about 5 minutes. Not a problem when you've only got a few small beds, but with a massive farm it would be completely unsustainable, you'd spend your whole time replacing compost. So you have to buy the more expensive composts (that take longer to decay) if you want to be able to continue to grow.
@@ThinMatrix Thanks! That makes a lot of sense. Maybe you could play around with smaller tweaks, like lowering prices for produce you sell a lot of and/or paying rent for farm land. That would require you to do different things, plan and overcome obstacles, instead of an ongoing and escalating push for bigger and better :)
This town looks super cosy! Strech goal to have daynight cycle affect things in the town? 👀 I also think that alternate UI style is super neat, adds some contrast to the icons and the backgrounds, I'm a big fan!
Love the idea of side scrolling town. Feels and looks smarter. Really don't think npc are necessary tho. Feels like they are gonna add more work for no good reasons. Also, right shop UI feels a bit more polished, but again, doesn't feel worth the troubles and time investment for something that will change so little of the actual users experience.
That shop UI is amazing, you can also make the inventory UI something like that. Also it would be great to play with a controller and maybe on consoles
Before I forget, those +10 +100 etc buttons in the shops would be entirely useless to me. I'd want to buy things in round increments, but if I just clicked +10 that would get me 11 items, so I'd have to type the exact number anyway. So instead, I think it would almost be better if they were just "quick buy" buttons. If I want 50 seeds, I just click the "Buy 10" button 5 times. To be clear, this is an issue in other games as well (I think Star Citizen has this issue), so it's not just your game.
For the town area, you could take inspiration from AgeOfEmpires3. They have a hometown implementation where you have a main view, and when 'selecting' a specific building (in aoe3 for choosing cosmetic changes), the camera zooms and moves towards that building. By that design, you don't have a 1d (left to right) horizontal town. It might give you more room to create a nice lively town
Since we can now see the sky: Are you planning to include daytime? Such as morning, day, evening, night with a changing sky? Could be based in real time or a 10-20min cycle maybe?
Good solid update ! The far left of Town needs to be a special events are.. if I remember you have seasons planned.. so in Dec Carrots can be sold for Snowmen for Extra profit $$, and you can but Christmas Tree collectables. in Oct Pumpkins for Halloween, special clover Spice for st Patics day and so on :)
Keep up the good work! I'm happy with how far you've come. I have a suggestion: the trees seem a bit boring. Instead of clicking the rows, having the player walk around the city and buy items would be cool.
Hi, love your channel and have been following your devlogs for quite a while! Regarding the inventory around the 12:00 mark, I think you should keep the inventory tab at the bottom. What you are doing now, is removing something, and then adding buttons to bring that thing back up again, which 100% of users will press 100% of the time, because everyone wants to compare inventory vs what to buy at a shop. It makes no sense to remove something and replace it with buttons to bring it back in, when those buttons will be used 100% of the time. I would advise to just keep the thing there.
HUGE TIP: Do all your UI design in Figma... my god is it wayyy better than any photoshop or ps-clone... So easy to group together assets and export all at once
1. All buildings in one screen is much better user experience than scrolling screen 2. Clouds position should respect camera position 3. You should check your monitor settings. Game looks saturated and nice on your screen, but very bland on a phone (in-game footage)
I love the new food shop UI! Just the scroll bar being that bright orange colour I don't like. Especially because it's the same colour as the purchase button, which groups them together and feels odd Perhaps a light neutral colour might work better? Something like the background of the items?
I dont know if you share this opinion, but right now on my screen things look under saturated, but when you use your camera (not screen recorder) the saturation looks perfect. Maybe change your recorder settings or something to match what it actually looks like? idk, other than that, love the UI. Minimal, and really doesn't take away from the gameplay but adds onto it. For someone who doesn't do UI much you've outdone yourself on that! :D
Everybody seems to prefer the new UI, but I find it too packed/closed in. I dont really know how to explain it. While I agree it's feels more cozy, it also gives me the feeling of trying to look through a pinhole for the items. If I had to pin it on something, I would say it's the items list having too much margin to the main window and the dark backgroud.
Brilliant video bud. With the inventory in the shopping area, It may be better to have an inventory box open when you click on the shop. So you don't have to jump between windows to track what you have and need. Less clunky.
Great improvement over the last few months! It would be interesting to add a feature where you actually have to hire “staff” to sell your produce on market day and have actually people coming in a buying.
Check out Minami Lane... you build a cozy town along a cute lane, and it deals with very similar specs. It presents the shop buildings at a bit of an angle, which i thought made it a bit more visually interesting!
I think that you should go back to the former village layout for the shops, because the new "chain of shops" look a littlebit blunt. But you are right in that you should restrict camera movements. You could create a fixed cam position for each shop, where you can see a bit of the village while keeping the corresponding shop at focus. Only when you press the left or right arrow key, the cam should follow a path to switch smoothly between the fixed positions.
Town is looking great! Do you plan to make this game multiplayer or single player? I personally prefer single player but I'm sure a lot of people would like multiplayer. And being able to trade things with friends does sound like a very good idea.
Please keep the town as a more realisticly arranged town. You could use it even further zoomed out like a map, with icons over the buildings of interest, and when you click on a highlighted shop you zoom in to that shop with a nice village corner full of life. when you want to go to another shop, click to zoom out again, zoom in to another part of town with a different shop. I think the graphics are so cute, you could really make nice scenes. This straight road with nothing but the buildings of interest is a bit fake and lifeless. Both Views are completely locked, the only camera movement is the one programmed in for the zoom(can of course be also a screen transition if you choose to make the map more adventure game style for example).
Im noticing you recorded gameplay looks more washed out, compared to the saturated look when recording the monitor. Which look are you actually going for? Because I assume your monitors are Oled or have a different calibration than what most people will have.
I hate to back seat game design and I know it would require a lot of work but from a UX perspective I feel like you should have the town in a different way. It feels more natural to have it be one street that you can dolly up and down by pulling, hovering at the top or bottom of the screen or scrolling the mouse wheel. That way you can keep the angled camera and zoom capability (although there's colliding inputs) from the home area so there's still cohesion between the two (also won't need to bother with the sky, if you don't have plans for it in other areas). If the shops are on both sides it saves a bit of space and feels a bit more natural (you managed to make it look very natural even with houses on just one side though). If you go for an old European town feeling where the buildings are all connected you could have non-interactable buildings to fill in the space between the shops, with the Homegrown UI for the titles of the interactable shops in sort of a list format (providing an easily discernable clicking area but perhaps with the option to hide the UI titles). Really do enjoy the videos, hope I gave you something to think about but you know best the direction you want to take the game and the direction seems very promising.
You could also keep the original layout, and have predefined camera positions along the town, and pressing left/right cycles through all the buildings, but that might not be intuitive.
What if you arranged the shop buildings along the circumference of a town circle? Then the camera can be placed in the middle and rotate to view different portions of the town. It would allow the player to loop through their shop options instead of moving all the way to the left and then realizing you need to go to the restaurant. It was just a thought. I'm impressed by what you're making, keep up the good work!
The new town system is really nice, I like it! For the town center, maybe it would look even better if the buildings were row houses? Or have the gaps between buildings look more like alleyways leeding to more of the town. Right now the free standing buildings look a bit odd so perfectly lined up like that, but that might just be me.
Hmmmm. Another idea for scrolling mechanic on the town screen, maybe add farms you can scroll to and sell some crops to other farmers for livestock, etc. Also, yea the back of the town needs some decorating if you're going to stick with the side-scrolling idea.
the town looked so good as a town. I would have just locked the camera rather than removing the town and turning it into a scrolling menu. At that point why even have the buildings? Might as well just be a context menu. All of the towns' character was stripped away.
For me, the villagers kind of break the immersion somehow. For some reason not having people there was more chill, relaxing That might just be me though, or the fact that they're not very polished could just feel like a style clash for now
First of all I would like to say that I really enjoy your content and have been for a couple of years at this point. I had a thought about a possible later gameplay adition I would like to share. I could imagine this is already on your trello board but anyway. I know this is a bit ahead of the progress you've achieved so far, but have you considered adding weather effects in the future? I thought about it when you were modeling the clouds. It would not only add to the visuals but could also have effects on your crops beeing watered by rain for example. Or stroms and heavy winds might damage plants and decrease their health. This could then affect larger crops more than smaller ones.
When you were showing camera restriction on the town, i imediately though you would go with a different approach, something like : the camera slide to and zoom in on the shop you click (with no control for the player on the mouvement on that iteration of the menu) and zoom out and recenter on town when closing the shop But this was just my first though coming to mind, yours is good too ! :D (Sorry for my english, not native .-. )
Just throwing it out there; if you're considering future plans for home grown, perhaps a restaurant as a minigame or a expansion later that would allow you to convert your farmed things into dishes for a different money making method. Just to give a little different vibe to the flow. Farm and Feed if you will.
re: menu UI ... I find the newly explored UI to be better. It's different enough from the onscreen UI elements but fits in nicely. It's also more playful to me with some added depth vs being more flat like the old/current one which fits better with the overall style of the game.
You should consider customer "quests" and maybe town challenges or rare vegetables / seasonal vegetables to add some external influence to the gameplay loop 😁
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The alternative UI style you were showing off looks really good! I’d switch, it looks less flat than the current UI which fits with the art style better
you got me in the first half, i seriously thought the spiffing brit commented x)
Agreed. The darker accent UI colours really help prioritize what's what in the UI and make it stand out a bit more. I recommend switching!
Agreed
+1 on switching to the new style.
Totally agree! I think it better fits the art style of the other parts of the game!
The changes are really coming along. I love the perspective shift for the town menu. When you navigated to the "empty space" and mentioned you had some plans for that later on.... my first thought was a rotating space for community events. Certain seasons could have different events related to the growing season and you could participate with what you've grown in your garden. I'm imagining a harvest festival in the fall or a flower competition in the spring. Anyway, love what you're doing, amazing work! Looking forward to playing the game when it's released.
That new town looks amazing! You're so good at this
I am currently working on a Horde survival and the fps dropped quite fast so I implemented Object pooling and ECS and jobs and bursts. It's fun to learn :) fun to see you post man.
, ur videos are awesome brother.
The alternative UI style looks really good! Are you going to include animals like cows and chickens? It would be nice to have features where we can produce milk, eggs, and similar items.
The game is all good, but the problem I see is that the colors could be a little bit more vibrant or saturated. The current color palette looks too dull.
One way to add a lot of personality to the shops is to have the shopkeeper visible on the side somewhere, maybe reacting when you buy something, and greeting when the menu is opened.
I kinda like the current simple villager designs.
I'm planning on making it possible to talk to the villagers soon! Mostly to give you tips about how to use the town features if you're unsure.
@@ThinMatrix yes sort of how they do it in the Viva Pinata games! I've always found that to be kinda cute. If you haven't played any of the games yourself, you could probably find a video somewhere where someone uses a shop in a playthrough or something :P Bascially, when you unlock a new shop, the shopkeeper kind of announces themselves and when you then visit their shop for the first time they'll tell you a little about themselves and what products/services they offer. After that they'll always be visible on the side of the screen when you're browsing their catalouge and make little facial expressions or just do some silly idle animation when you're buying/scrolling.
maybe back behind the shops you could add some houses for the villagers that obviously serve no purpose to the player, but would be a nice touch to add more life back there.
Yup and also farmers farming❤
Looks great! Maybe add the possiblity to scroll through the town with scroll button aswell? Still with the fixed camera positions.
Thanks, good idea :)
Nice town! As a suggestion: Wouldn't be nice to see the town evolve with player? I mean, like new shops opening as u progress and the town visually grrowing in npc numbers and infrastructure. Like, the bridge turning from a rusty wooden bridge, to a new good look and fancy bridge!
Thanks! And yes, I have a few plans for things like that :)
You can add multi layer of mountain range in the background, I think that may look better as a back drop for the market place
The new UI does a much better job of presenting the information in a hierarchical format (e.g. big text = more important, same size text = approximately same importance). It looks so good!
New shop layout is cool instead of only moving left to right you could have the layout be like an upside down U. You still only have tow arrows but instead of only going right it does a turn this will make the world feel nice and connected it could even move in a L shape. The map could wrap around and see the back side of the town if you are in one spot.
Interesting idea, thanks for the suggestion!
Love your updates! One suggestion: make the village area arrows closer to the center of the screen horizontally. If I don't remember where a particular shop is, I might want to click e.g. left arrow and then immediately the right one (because I realized the shop in question is not on the left), which requires me to move the mouse all the way to the right and breaks the flow. This is of course a tiny nitpick, though :)
Maybe have them be on the left and right sides of thee inventory button. The part of the screen feel a little empty now that the hotbar is gone. Also, it's more noticeable that the buttons are now on the screen meaning players are more likely see that they can move left and right.
An issue with fixed positions is that the screen aspect ratio comes into play as to what you'll see in those positions. You could automatically adjust the FOV so that no matter the aspect ratio some designated safe zone is guaranteed visible. Not sure what the best solution is, just something to keep in mind with 3D menus !
I've already done some work on this, you can see at 8:55 when I change the window to a wide aspect ratio that the correct shops are still shown. Doesn't work so well with very narrow aspect ratios, but I'm not sure if I need to worry too much about that.
@@ThinMatrix I'd personally just care about aspect ratios down to 1:1 and if it gets any narrower than that the player most likely uses only half their monitor. You could lock the aspect ratio of the town to stay at 1:1, scale the size down from there on and add more sky space vertically to support weird window sizes like split screen or something. Tbh most of the UI will not work with very narrow window/screen sizes but with this at least the correct shops stay visible. Keep up the amazing work!
Changing the camera view in the town was a good move! Someone else mentioned a similar idea, but I think it'd be really nice if the town shops become available slowly as to not overwhelm the player. Personally when playing these types of games I get very overwhelmed with areas like this until I'm more familiar with the ones I currently need. That could look like the town itself expanding, or just some way to guide the player to only the shops they need when starting out
The new UI for the shop looks better IMO. The darker background behind the item icons makes it appear differently than just an inventory of stuff that you already have. this distinction is very important for intuitive UX design
For the villagers - I think a style similar to the game 'Untitled Goose Game' could work, as it has a similar art style to Homegrown! 😄
Great job on the town's sky. You should probably implement the parallax effect on it though, it looked weird to move through the town and see sky stay the same
Hm... I'm not sure I understand the purpose of the town vs having a menu from the home farm (where you'd maybe place orders and wait for delivery style). Your 3D art skills have improved a lot recently but the town feels a little disjointed to me for some reason. I'm getting the feeling like maybe you should have a player character that would quickly zip between the areas of the town but that could massively expand scope. Did you ever play AC new leaf? I'm loosely getting that "go to the city" feeling but it's strange that you're not participating in the town as your own character. I guess maybe it's the contrast between animal crossing vs a city management game. If you've got a strong vision for it though don't let me discourage you as that's what matters most!
Yes, a character keeping up with your clicks and performing the tasks instead of an omnipresent entity watering the crops would be the best.
I liked the old town, but I understand that it probably only maked sense if you had a character to control and move around the town like in Stardew Valley
The new design no doubt! Looks much more cozy and I feel really represents the game! Keep up the good work!
Babe wake up, thinmatrix uploaded
Great video as always! My only suggestion is to be able to use A and D to move through the town (in addition to arrow keys) as I typically prefer that movement, but overall great work!
Thanks! And that is already possible :)
@@ThinMatrix Might I also suggest being able to move through the town with the scroll wheel. It would improve mouse-only gameplay.
Think it's really sad that you've restricted the town to be a side scroller - Loved the idea of a full 3D town that you could fully navigate. I get you see it as a menu, but in my head it's a perfect opp to add some personality into the game and meet NPC's - Perhaps you could haggle etc with grump shop owners!
Love the dev updates! Keep it up!
I disagree, I think it's much more interesting this way
Same. I think the main issue is that the player is just an omni present entity, hence everything is just a menu. Maybe if there was an actual character following around the mouse, doing what we clicked, the 3d town center would be better.
I think that is what is missing here
You could add some little sheep on the hills in the background. That would be cute as you could make the hop, walk and interact with each other. That would be lovely, please consider adding that. Love your videos and games❤
So many feature requests for the game in the comments 😅 - You seemed a little stressed this update. Remember to take care of yourself. Don’t worry about the timing - we’ll be here when the game is ready, no matter the time it takes. You’ve got this!
What better way to end the day than watching this! Love the videos!
I preferred the town overview as it is much easier to navigate. With my disability, I am much more mindful of the muscle cost of moving hands on and off mouse or keyboard, which also incurs head and eye movements, and repositioning delays. The side view in town might be nice as a scroll-in option. But with a zoomed-out by default town option, I could move arrow no more than 2/3 distance from center to screen edge with a single hand movement, and click once to select a shop. That said, I do appreciate the experience of the side view, and should maybe be mandatory for unlocking shops or using foundations, etc. But the shortcut option as default would be a huge usability bonus for me.
I'd say the new design is better. Also think about maybe doing a dark themed UI instead, with warm grays? It's a cozy game and I really dislike when I'm chilling out and every time I open something my eyes get lasered.
This might be an unpopular opinion, but I actually preferred the old town.
I agree it was a little lifeless, but I think that could have been fixed by simply introducing NPCs who walk about the town, and perhaps giving the player an avatar who navigates to the shop on click before showing the menu. That way you could have introduced cute little interactions with the townsfolk, and even a day/night cycle for their routines (perhaps certain shops are only open at certain times?), and weather system to which they could be reactive (raining people head inside or put up umbrellas).
Also with the old town, from a UX point of view everything was one only one click away, but with the new town a player would have to make several jumps to find the shop they need.
Also the speed and linear motion of the animation is making me feel nauseous 🤢 as I watched you navigate from side to side on the video.
But keep chopping away at it, I love watching your progress and I look forward to playing when the game is released.
Your videos feel so cozy always, they are very enjoyable to watch.
I always love these videos, you're a big inspiration for me.
Just a quick question, will you be adding time (Like nighttime) and weather (like rain) to the game ?
Your clouds should be big and fluffy. That would better match the art style
Okay, I haven’t watched this devlog yet, but I just wanna say that every time it comes to your videos, I take my playback speed off of 2x, back to normal speed, I ask my wife if I can have some uninterrupted time to just properly sit down and focus on your videos, I love them so much 🙌🏻🎉 keep up the good work
01:10 AKA Classic 1900's industrial capitalism 😂😂😂
As I am making my own farming game, this series has been super insightful. Home grown’s success feels like my own and I am so proud to see the project getting all the love. Well deserved ❤❤
You show show a navigation for the town, Icon what part of the village your are at and all the parts you can click on to move about as well.
The new UI is better. It looks more complete.
I think that the new Ui is better cause it adds a more cozy feel to the game
The new shop UI design looks great!
in the town, since the mouse is usually at the right and the arrows are there too, wouldn't it be easier for the player to use A and D to move, from WASD?
A and D also already works :)
I am going to watch the video, but I already know it's going to be Awesome!💕💕
It was awesome!
New UI looks better to me
Have you considered instead of a menu feel, a player character that you can walk left and right along the shops? I think that will help as you can fix the camera to the player and will help maintain immersion.
You don't have a controllable player in the home area though (and I don't plan on adding one because it doesn't fit with the gameplay) so it might feel a bit strange to have one just in the town area.
I like the shop UI, but I'm not sure I like the side scroll. It feels like that in the top down view it takes significantly less clicks to achieve the same goal.
I think it's quite similar, you arrive at the town center so the maximum you would ever need to do is two taps of left or right. Previously to move you had to click and hold and drag which I'd say is a similar amount of effort. And it's definitely faster to get to where you want now.
the second UI shop looked better
I like the way you designed the new town. Suggestion: After the empty spots in the shop you could return the player back to the farm. It's like you are leaving the shop and going back home
I am so happy when you make these vids. Love to see your progress. Keep up the good work dude!
ThinMatrix I have a question. How are you layouting your scene with out an editor? I assume you might be using blender but how would I get each object imported as its own entity with names and transforms?
It's not very practical the way the I'm doing it, but it's just not quite enough of a problem to justify me programming an editor (yet!). The thing is, almost all the town is static, so I export all the objects from Blender in a single OBJ file and then my importer combines them into a single mesh. That's fine for the static scenery, but when I want individual entities (like I'll want for the villagers) I'll need to position and add them manually, probably in the code. So I might still end up making an editor - if it gets too annoying.
@@ThinMatrix thanks this really helped.
I was wondering if you have plans for an interesting in-game economy . Most games are quite lacklustre in that regard, in the sense that you start poor, first have to scrape by, start to get more money, till you're filthy rich and the game has essentially broken. I don't know about other people, but this turns me off really fast and would be a big concern for me.
This game is all about iterative growth, so I've been putting quite a lot of thought into how the game will remain balanced as you become richer and richer. But I don't really plan to directly change the economy. Mostly it'll work that the cheap items you buy at the beginning of the game are helpful for small farms, but as you expand and grow they will be insufficient to meet the new demands and you'll be naturally forced to invest in more expensive versions. Compost is a good example of this. The cheap tier 1 compost decays after about 5 minutes. Not a problem when you've only got a few small beds, but with a massive farm it would be completely unsustainable, you'd spend your whole time replacing compost. So you have to buy the more expensive composts (that take longer to decay) if you want to be able to continue to grow.
@@ThinMatrix Thanks! That makes a lot of sense. Maybe you could play around with smaller tweaks, like lowering prices for produce you sell a lot of and/or paying rent for farm land. That would require you to do different things, plan and overcome obstacles, instead of an ongoing and escalating push for bigger and better :)
This town looks super cosy! Strech goal to have daynight cycle affect things in the town? 👀
I also think that alternate UI style is super neat, adds some contrast to the icons and the backgrounds, I'm a big fan!
Love the idea of side scrolling town. Feels and looks smarter.
Really don't think npc are necessary tho. Feels like they are gonna add more work for no good reasons.
Also, right shop UI feels a bit more polished, but again, doesn't feel worth the troubles and time investment for something that will change so little of the actual users experience.
The amount of progress since I last watched one of the devlogs, I wish I would make as much progress xp
That shop UI is amazing, you can also make the inventory UI something like that. Also it would be great to play with a controller and maybe on consoles
i love your work!💓, i also think the game could use some color grading, like it looks much better when you bump up the contrast.
* Blacksmith to repair tools
* Carpenter to for some upgrades
* Seasons
* Farming fish
* Animals
* Apples
* Berries
I had idea about the cloud I feel "steven universe sky"fit ur game idk if thats help
Add a small waterfall to the right side, maybe some mountains and pine trees too
Great idee!
I think Sebastian Lague's clouds from this video would fit perfectly in the style of the game
th-cam.com/video/sLqXFF8mlEU/w-d-xo.html
Before I forget, those +10 +100 etc buttons in the shops would be entirely useless to me. I'd want to buy things in round increments, but if I just clicked +10 that would get me 11 items, so I'd have to type the exact number anyway. So instead, I think it would almost be better if they were just "quick buy" buttons. If I want 50 seeds, I just click the "Buy 10" button 5 times.
To be clear, this is an issue in other games as well (I think Star Citizen has this issue), so it's not just your game.
For the town area, you could take inspiration from AgeOfEmpires3. They have a hometown implementation where you have a main view, and when 'selecting' a specific building (in aoe3 for choosing cosmetic changes), the camera zooms and moves towards that building. By that design, you don't have a 1d (left to right) horizontal town. It might give you more room to create a nice lively town
Since we can now see the sky: Are you planning to include daytime? Such as morning, day, evening, night with a changing sky? Could be based in real time or a 10-20min cycle maybe?
Good solid update ! The far left of Town needs to be a special events are.. if I remember you have seasons planned.. so in Dec Carrots can be sold for Snowmen for Extra profit $$, and you can but Christmas Tree collectables. in Oct Pumpkins for Halloween, special clover Spice for st Patics day and so on :)
Keep up the good work! I'm happy with how far you've come. I have a suggestion: the trees seem a bit boring. Instead of clicking the rows, having the player walk around the city and buy items would be cool.
Hi, love your channel and have been following your devlogs for quite a while!
Regarding the inventory around the 12:00 mark, I think you should keep the inventory tab at the bottom.
What you are doing now, is removing something, and then adding buttons to bring that thing back up again, which 100% of users will press 100% of the time, because everyone wants to compare inventory vs what to buy at a shop.
It makes no sense to remove something and replace it with buttons to bring it back in, when those buttons will be used 100% of the time. I would advise to just keep the thing there.
HUGE TIP: Do all your UI design in Figma... my god is it wayyy better than any photoshop or ps-clone... So easy to group together assets and export all at once
1. All buildings in one screen is much better user experience than scrolling screen
2. Clouds position should respect camera position
3. You should check your monitor settings. Game looks saturated and nice on your screen, but very bland on a phone (in-game footage)
I love the new food shop UI!
Just the scroll bar being that bright orange colour I don't like.
Especially because it's the same colour as the purchase button, which groups them together and feels odd
Perhaps a light neutral colour might work better? Something like the background of the items?
I dont know if you share this opinion, but right now on my screen things look under saturated, but when you use your camera (not screen recorder) the saturation looks perfect. Maybe change your recorder settings or something to match what it actually looks like? idk, other than that, love the UI. Minimal, and really doesn't take away from the gameplay but adds onto it. For someone who doesn't do UI much you've outdone yourself on that! :D
That second UI looks amazing, I think it's worth switching because it looks so much more unified and complete.
Everybody seems to prefer the new UI, but I find it too packed/closed in. I dont really know how to explain it. While I agree it's feels more cozy, it also gives me the feeling of trying to look through a pinhole for the items. If I had to pin it on something, I would say it's the items list having too much margin to the main window and the dark backgroud.
Feels like a odd style break going from an orthographic(ish) camera angle to a pov(ish) angle. but looks amazing both ways!
The alternative UI design look pretty good.
Are there any plans to add quests in the future?
For example, some townspeople have special tasks.
Brilliant video bud. With the inventory in the shopping area, It may be better to have an inventory box open when you click on the shop. So you don't have to jump between windows to track what you have and need. Less clunky.
Great improvement over the last few months! It would be interesting to add a feature where you actually have to hire “staff” to sell your produce on market day and have actually people coming in a buying.
Check out Minami Lane... you build a cozy town along a cute lane, and it deals with very similar specs. It presents the shop buildings at a bit of an angle, which i thought made it a bit more visually interesting!
@ThinMatrix Maybe just mesh, stylized clouds props will fit in this style?
I think that you should go back to the former village layout for the shops, because the new "chain of shops" look a littlebit blunt.
But you are right in that you should restrict camera movements.
You could create a fixed cam position for each shop, where you can see a bit of the village while keeping the corresponding shop at focus.
Only when you press the left or right arrow key, the cam should follow a path to switch smoothly between the fixed positions.
Town is looking great!
Do you plan to make this game multiplayer or single player?
I personally prefer single player but I'm sure a lot of people would like multiplayer. And being able to trade things with friends does sound like a very good idea.
Please keep the town as a more realisticly arranged town. You could use it even further zoomed out like a map, with icons over the buildings of interest, and when you click on a highlighted shop you zoom in to that shop with a nice village corner full of life. when you want to go to another shop, click to zoom out again, zoom in to another part of town with a different shop. I think the graphics are so cute, you could really make nice scenes. This straight road with nothing but the buildings of interest is a bit fake and lifeless. Both Views are completely locked, the only camera movement is the one programmed in for the zoom(can of course be also a screen transition if you choose to make the map more adventure game style for example).
Im noticing you recorded gameplay looks more washed out, compared to the saturated look when recording the monitor. Which look are you actually going for? Because I assume your monitors are Oled or have a different calibration than what most people will have.
The Artstyle and the new town reminds me of the cartoon "Bob the builder" from the 90s and early 2000's
I hate to back seat game design and I know it would require a lot of work but from a UX perspective I feel like you should have the town in a different way. It feels more natural to have it be one street that you can dolly up and down by pulling, hovering at the top or bottom of the screen or scrolling the mouse wheel. That way you can keep the angled camera and zoom capability (although there's colliding inputs) from the home area so there's still cohesion between the two (also won't need to bother with the sky, if you don't have plans for it in other areas). If the shops are on both sides it saves a bit of space and feels a bit more natural (you managed to make it look very natural even with houses on just one side though). If you go for an old European town feeling where the buildings are all connected you could have non-interactable buildings to fill in the space between the shops, with the Homegrown UI for the titles of the interactable shops in sort of a list format (providing an easily discernable clicking area but perhaps with the option to hide the UI titles).
Really do enjoy the videos, hope I gave you something to think about but you know best the direction you want to take the game and the direction seems very promising.
You could also keep the original layout, and have predefined camera positions along the town, and pressing left/right cycles through all the buildings, but that might not be intuitive.
What if you arranged the shop buildings along the circumference of a town circle? Then the camera can be placed in the middle and rotate to view different portions of the town. It would allow the player to loop through their shop options instead of moving all the way to the left and then realizing you need to go to the restaurant. It was just a thought. I'm impressed by what you're making, keep up the good work!
The new town system is really nice, I like it!
For the town center, maybe it would look even better if the buildings were row houses? Or have the gaps between buildings look more like alleyways leeding to more of the town. Right now the free standing buildings look a bit odd so perfectly lined up like that, but that might just be me.
Hmmmm. Another idea for scrolling mechanic on the town screen, maybe add farms you can scroll to and sell some crops to other farmers for livestock, etc.
Also, yea the back of the town needs some decorating if you're going to stick with the side-scrolling idea.
the town looked so good as a town. I would have just locked the camera rather than removing the town and turning it into a scrolling menu. At that point why even have the buildings? Might as well just be a context menu. All of the towns' character was stripped away.
For me, the villagers kind of break the immersion somehow.
For some reason not having people there was more chill, relaxing
That might just be me though, or the fact that they're not very polished could just feel like a style clash for now
First of all I would like to say that I really enjoy your content and have been for a couple of years at this point. I had a thought about a possible later gameplay adition I would like to share. I could imagine this is already on your trello board but anyway. I know this is a bit ahead of the progress you've achieved so far, but have you considered adding weather effects in the future? I thought about it when you were modeling the clouds. It would not only add to the visuals but could also have effects on your crops beeing watered by rain for example. Or stroms and heavy winds might damage plants and decrease their health. This could then affect larger crops more than smaller ones.
I think you can place town navigation arrows between inventory button. Because it could be difficult to hovering them on wide displays and so on ☺️
Great Progress Buddy!
What about farmers farming in the background of town market area behind the shops near and in distant??
When you were showing camera restriction on the town, i imediately though you would go with a different approach, something like : the camera slide to and zoom in on the shop you click (with no control for the player on the mouvement on that iteration of the menu) and zoom out and recenter on town when closing the shop
But this was just my first though coming to mind, yours is good too ! :D
(Sorry for my english, not native .-. )
Just throwing it out there; if you're considering future plans for home grown, perhaps a restaurant as a minigame or a expansion later that would allow you to convert your farmed things into dishes for a different money making method. Just to give a little different vibe to the flow. Farm and Feed if you will.
re: menu UI ... I find the newly explored UI to be better. It's different enough from the onscreen UI elements but fits in nicely. It's also more playful to me with some added depth vs being more flat like the old/current one which fits better with the overall style of the game.
What have you studied for having all this knowledge? Nice video btw ^^
Don't love the 2D town - I know it is probably faster but feels less alive. Could you maybe make fake streets and building behind it so it feels real?
You should consider customer "quests" and maybe town challenges or rare vegetables / seasonal vegetables to add some external influence to the gameplay loop 😁