Welcome back to Development Log Number 3!

Once again I welcome all of you back to the new devlog for our little farm game. Sadly I had to skip last week’s devlog due to features not being ready and time being crunched.

Week 3

Last week we started think about the implementation details of the animal features. For this, we actually noticed that the screen the player is seeing is far too small, so we implemented a zoom feature. This, in turn, led to Dundel actually redoing the tiles, as the black bordered tiles are looking especially bad when zooming in and out.

Due to this change I also had to refactor a bit of the world objects. Here I encountered my first engine bug with Godot Engine… I wasn’t able to receive any mouse events inside my ViewportContainer and Viewport anymore (technically: I placed the gameworld in it’s own viewport “world” so I can easily resize and move it without affecting any UI elements). Sounds like a heavy dealbreaker, no? Well, I managed to open my first issue with the godot engine team and actually fix the issue at hand. This is why I can only recommend working with open source game engines, as you can always go around and fix issues yourself instead of being at the mercy of a development team.

Week 4

After fixing the Viewport Issue and having Dundel do the new tiles I took the time to hook up all the data in the background. So we now have items, an inventary, a quick select bar, rotating items in the shop, actual conditions for the farm upgrades and many more things. Additionally I broke those things out into JSON files so they can easily be edited by non-programmers - this should also help Dundel to fine-tune some things like prices and drop tables for plants and other objects.

Future

After fixing all those other issues and basically rewriting loading and saving including the data into the JSON files we can finally continue on and try to implement animals this week. Let’s see if we can this time deliver :-)

– Join the Discord server over here - if you got any questions let us know. ;-)

Until next time, Chris