Previous Devlog: Itch, GameJolt

Welcome back to the Home Grown devlog! This is yet another pre-release with several changes, and I'll discuss some of them here.

Also, I didn't mean to take this long on the devlog without much more content, I just haven't been working on it much due to life (mostly distractions and demotivation). Future devlogs shouldn't take as long for me to publish.

So, if you've seen videos of the Beta, you probably noticed that the player character had no animations. This pre-release changes that, because not only does the player now have animations, but they also have so many more finished design elements, which I'll discuss below.

Another thing I'd like to mention is that I am trying to decide whether I want this game to be open-source or not and how I want to do that. My current plan is to have the game structure (all the system and base classes) be fully open-source, putting the open-source in an unplayable state without any game content.

All the content, however, will not be included with the free, open-source files. The purpose of making it open-source is modding capabilities. Home Grown will have built-in mod systems. So it's just an easily moddable engine that will be open-source.

Again, this is undecided and a lot may change in the future.

– — DESIGN — – -

Player Animations

Before this pre-release, the player was pretty much just a basic ass, sliding creature with no animations. If this were a 3D project, he'd have been t-posing or a-posing.

But now, he schmoovin'!

Not only have I implemented a fully functioning animation tree, but I've already added nearly a dozen unique animations.

Wait... "What's an animation tree?" In Godot, it allows smooth transitions and easily automated animations. I can also combine animations. So I can, for example, have the land animation mix with the walk animation. It makes it all look very dynamic and smooth, as you can see below.

The player has walking animations for both directions, an idle animation, a jump, an attack, and a landing bounce. It also transitions smoothly between all the different animations.

It's not perfect and I still need to finish the character redesign, but I'm happy with it so far!

– — GAMEPLAY — – -

Now, although the focus of Pre-Release 6 is the Player, it's not the first thing I did.

First, I finished an important component I started in the previous Pre-Release; the World Generator.

You can skip over the World Generation section, or look at only the images, read some interesting paragraphs, or whatnot. But, if you're interested in Godot or are an advanced programmer who might be able to give suggestions, give it a read.

After World Generation and the Tile Layer System, I will discuss the improvements to the UI (including the inventory).

World Generation

Most of the framework for world generation is done, but it is still far from finished. The main thing I left unfinished was the biome system—or, more accurately, the lack thereof.

There is also another system I need to add; a major one (more important than the biome system). And the first thing I needed to do was clean up the runtime node hierarchy.

Above is the old hierarchy during runtime (this is what the tree of nodes looks like when the game is running). The first World Section is Section 0, the second is Section -1, and the third is Section 1. The order of them doesn't matter as I use an array of references to them, so just ignore the names.

The order of the tiles, items, and player is important, though, as it controls the order in which they appear on screen. Right now, this is fine because each type is within its own "grouping," so the player appears in front of all items, and items appear in front of all tiles.

But, if the player were to drop an item...

There is now a single item drawn in front of the player.

(there are other issues this would cause later down the line, but this is the easiest one to explain)

I could fix this by programmatically reordering all the nodes based on their type, but that's inefficient and can slow down the game. Instead, I give each section a Player, Item, and Tile Container.

Every node type in the World now has a container, keeping a consistent draw order.

With this taken care of, it's time to discuss probably the most important system for this game...

Tile Layer System

Home Grown will have many building types, and there will even be some that need to be unlocked or that need to be broken into. To avoid blocking the player's path with a locked house or large grocery store full of high-level enemies, the 'Buildings' will be contained separately from 'Terrains', and you can move between the Building Layer and the Terrain Layer.

How will this work in-game? If you see a building you don't want to enter you keep walking. If it's one you do want to, hold the W key (or the 'Enter Building' key) and walk into it, which will enable collision for Buildings, and then disable collision with Terrain once you're fully entered (you only collide with the building, therefore you can have buildings include, for example, a basement or lead into a mountain). This will also cause several other things like the outer wall of the building disappearing so you can see inside, the outside darkening, a heavy vignette around the player, the camera forced to zoom in, etc.

The flexibility of this system is really exciting to me and I can't wait to play with it—but I actually have to get it working.

I'm still in the planning stage because I want it actually to work and be as flexible as possible. Between now and the next devlog, I'll primarily be reworking some of the world generation (not a lot, just enough to fix some of the documentation and make it easier to understand), organizing it more properly, and then creating the multi-layer generation. Overall, it shouldn't be too difficult.

UI Design

Another thing I've been putting a lot more thought into for this pre-release is the UI. Right now it's not very well designed, but it's getting to something I like!

The main improvement is the Inventory. It now moves more dynamically and has full functionality. The slots are more colorful and the items can be moved and swapped around easily.

Now that I have it fully functioning, I can focus on the design of it in the future. There will still be tweaking to its functionality, but I think it's solid for now.

Also, unlike most game inventories, I do not plan for traditional item stacking. There will be stacking of items, but it's limited and, instead of a number in a corner, you will visibly see the items in the slot.

I don't exactly know how this will work, but imagine each slot having a storage value of 4. Items like Limbs and Scrap will take up 1 storage value, while the Spade, Hoe, and Axe will take up 2. I'm unsure if this will work well once implemented, so I'll just focus on other features, for now.

– — Closing Notes — – -

With all of that, I'd again like to apologize for taking so long on this devlog. Future devlogs shouldn't take as long, I'll be shooting for 2-3 months between each one with more content.

I'm also still expecting to release Beta 1.0 by the end of this year, there were just a few bumps along the way.

So I'll see you all in the next devlog!