Homegrown 0.5.4 - Vegetable Competition!

This update is all about the town's vegetable competition! Available every market day, the competition allows you to gamble your best vegetables for the chance of winning a variety of prizes, including some collectible medals that increase your farm's reputation!

You can see how I implemented this feature 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.

Premium Vegetables

To enter the competition you'll need some premium quality vegetables. These have already been in the game for a while; they're the blue star vegetables that you very occasionally get while harvesting healthy plants. Make sure your crops are as healthy as possible to have the best chance of getting some. Up until now you've only been able to sell them in the shop (for a lot more than the standard quality vegetables) but now you'll be able to enter them into the competition for a chance to win something better.

Once change that I've made to the premium vegetables is that they each now have a weight value. The competition is judged by weight, so the higher the better! To make things simple, all the weight values go from 1-100. Currently each premium vegetable spawns with a random weight (using a triangular distribution centered on 50) but in the future there will be fertilizers you can use to increase your chances of harvesting larger vegetables.

The Competition

The competition tent can be found in the farmers' market field every market day. The way it works is very simple: just choose which vegetable you want to enter and then the competition will begin. Your vegetable will be joined by four random opponents and they are then all ranked by weight. If you come in the top two then you'll receive some prizes and if you come first you also get a gold medal.

Bear in mind, you won't get your vegetable back, regardless of how you do. The prizes you can win are definitely worth more than the vegetable, but if you lose you'll get nothing. So, based on your vegetable's weight, you'll need to consider whether you think it's worth the risk. You could of course play it safe and instead sell the vegetable at the shop for a nice sum of cash, but you'll be missing out on a chance to win some big prizes!

Collectible Medals

One such prize are the collectible gold medals. There's one for every vegetable type (12 currently in the game) and you get one every time you win a competition. If you want, you can simply convert them to cash by selling them to the store - they fetch quite a high price!

Another thing you can do with them is collect them. At the tool shop you can now purchase a medal display table, which is an object that you can place in your farm. This allows you to display your gold medals for all to see!

Doing so will increase your farm's reputation. The more medals you collect, the higher your reputation! You can click on the medal display with an empty hand to open up the UI to check your current reputation points. As your reputation increases, the shop in town will pay more for your produce, so collecting these medals will help to make your farm even more profitable.

Ideas for the Future

I'm already quite happy with this feature but I'd definitely like to do another iteration on it at some point. I feel like it's currently just a bit too reliant on random chance so I'd like to add a few more things that the player can do to improve their odds.

One obvious addition is to add fertilizers that the player can use to increase the chance of obtaining heavier vegetables or perhaps make it more likely for them to get premium quality veg in the first place. I've also been considering boosts that can affect the competition itself, such as sweet treats that you can earn elsewhere in the game that you can give to the judge to "encourage" him to weigh your opponents' veggies a little less generously. Things like that to give the player a bit more control, while not removing the random aspect completely, so that you can feel like your really earned the medals, rather than just getting lucky.

Coming Next...

Up next I'm going to be doing a quick update about trees. Finally there will be a proper way for you to remove trees from your farm to make more space for planting, but there will also be some new benefits to keeping them around.

That's it for this update! Sorry again that it took a bit longer than usual. The next update should hopefully be much faster. Thanks as always for the support <3

Karl