Homegrown 0.5.6 - Villagers Update

Happy New Year everyone! I hope you all had a lovely time over the holidays and are having a good start to 2025. I've begun the year by wrapping up the villagers update - they've now got a fresh new look, improved behaviours, and even some simple dialogue!

You can see how I implemented the villagers in the latest devlog video.

Gamer Tier+ patrons can download and play Homegrown here.

And for Programmer Tier+ patrons the code is available here.

Gamer Tier+ patrons can also try out some simple mod creation here.

New Villager Design

There are two main functions that the villagers in the town are meant to perform. Firstly, they're essentially "living scenery" for the town area - meant to make the town appear more alive and bustling. Secondly, they’re there to help the player by providing instructions on how to use the town’s features, such as the restaurant task system or the farmers' market.

Starting with their role as scenery, I wanted to come up with a better design than the portly placeholder character that I've been using up until now. It's not that I particularly disliked the old model, but I felt it looked a bit too amateurish because of how simplistic it was.

I don't have much experience with making human characters so creating the new design took me a while, but after a lot of attempts and iterations I finally ended up with a model that I was happy with.

That said, one part of the model that still needs work is the eyes. I tried to make them look like smiling eyes, but after the devlog a lot of people pointed out they looked more like bushy eyebrows! Aside from that though, I'm really pleased with the new design, and I think it fits very well with the art-style of the rest of the game.

Last month I also updated the rendering system to allow for a mesh to have up to four custom colours applied in the shader during rendering. This means I can use the same base mesh for the villagers but give each one unique colours for hair, skin, and clothing. For now, most of the villagers just use this base mesh with randomized colours and a random haircut, but I'll be adding more and more custom-designed villagers (like the chef in the image above) to bring more personality to the game.

Dialogue System

As mentioned earlier, the main reason for having the villagers is to help the player by providing information about how to use the town's features. In order for them to carry out this purpose I've set up a simple dialogue system.

The way it works is pretty straightforward - just click on a villager and they'll start speaking. If they have more to say, a small arrow appears in the bottom-right corner of the speech bubble, letting you know you can click again to continue the conversation.

For now, the dialogue system is very basic, and I’m only using it with a select few villagers. But the plan is that, eventually, every building in town will have a villager standing outside it, ready to explain how that feature works if you ever need a little guidance.

One thing I still need to implement is support for conditional dialogue. For example, in the image above, you can see a villager telling the player about the farmers' market that takes place on Sundays. Ideally, their dialogue would adapt based on whether it’s already Sunday, whether you’ve purchased a stall or not, and whether you’ve put items up for sale.

Behaviours

The villagers in Homegrown don't need particularly complex behaviours, but I did at least want them to do something slightly more interesting than standing completely still staring at the camera.

Thankfully, I'd worked a lot on behaviour trees back when I was developing the city-builder game so I was able to re-purpose much of that code for Homegrown. I also took the movement code from the city-builder and, with a few tweaks, applied it to the villagers so that they can move around town.

One additional feature I had to add was the ability to interrupt one action with another action. This was necessary so that when the player clicks on a villager, they can stop what they're doing and face the camera for the duration of the chat. Once they've finished speaking, they should stop their current speaking action and return to their previous action.

As documented in my latest devlog video, getting this to work was a bit of a challenge and is still in need of some tweaking, but for now, it’s working well enough to do the job!

I haven't really put the behaviour system to full use yet. Most villagers are still just hanging around with a simple idle animation, while a few are strolling through town or moving between market stalls. I’m sure I’ll find the time to make better use of these behaviors down the line, but for now, there are bigger priorities!

The plan for 2025

The town area is very close to completion now. Starting Monday, I'll be doing a bit more work on the shops and then I'll be revisiting some previous features, like the farmers' market, to implement some of the feedback that I received after the devlogs. That will probably take up the next couple of months.

Once the town features are wrapped up, I'll be shifting my focus back to the farm area, to implement the final remaining gameplay features that I have planned, as well as iterating on a few older features.

After that, the core gameplay of Homegrown will be complete! My goal is to have a beta version ready later this year, so I can then organize some more extensive playtesting while polishing up the game in preparation for the main release.

Longest Ever Devlog

In case you missed it, at the start of December I filmed every day for a couple of weeks which turned into my longest video ever! Instead of the highlights that get shown in my usual videos, this one gives a more realistic look at the ups and downs of everyday life as an indie game developer.

You can watch that devlog here.

Thanks as always for your fantastic support, and have a great start to the new year!

Karl