Homegrown 0.5.2 - The Farmers' Market!

It's the farmers' market update! It took a little longer than expected but there was a lot to do - it's probably the biggest feature I've added to the game so far. You can read all about the new feature below.

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.

Market Day

First up, there's now the concept of time in the game. The day of the week is now shown in the top-left of the screen along with a clock/dial that shows you how far through the day it is. Currently each day lasts around 4 minutes, but I'll be experimenting with different day lengths to make sure the balancing is just right.

At the end of every week is market day! The town gets all nicely decorated and various gameplay features will be available to the player, for one day only. I've only implemented one of those features so far, and that is of course the farmers' market.

Farmers' Market

The farmers' market is held once a week in the field to the right of the town. Here you can purchase a stall which will then allow you to put your fruit and vegetables up for sale. Choose which items you want to sell and choose the price you want to sell them at, and then leave them to sell throughout the day.

You can go and collect your earnings at any time during market day. After market day you can collect any left-overs from the "collection box" which is left behind in the market field.

For now, time is paused when you're in the town area, so items will only sell while you're in your farm.

You can see a full demonstration of the farmers' market in the latest devlog video.

Trending Items

Every week a few items will be trending at the market. These items sell 50% faster than usual. If an item is trending one week then there's a 75% chance it will be trending the week after too, so you'll have a rough idea of which vegetables may be trending. Prioritizing the sale of trending vegetables will definitely help you squeeze more profit out of market day.

Upgrading your Stall

You're able to sell your vegetables at the market for a higher price than you would usually get by selling them to the store. However, at the market your items take time to sell and you only have a limited time before the farmers' market closes for the week, so you might not be able to sell everything.

As you farm grows you'll be producing more and more vegetables and you'll need to upgrade your market stall in order to match your increasing supply. You can find a "Stall Accessories" shop in the town field where you can buy some useful upgrades for your stall.

In the future this shop will sell all sorts of items that will allow you to improve your stall in different ways, but for now it sell just two. There's the "Produce Box" which you can place on your stall to add more selling slots, and the "Stall Upgrade Kit" which increases the demand for your items by making your stall more impressive (right now it just changes the colour, but it will apply more significant visual changes in the future).

What's Left to Do

This was only the first iteration of the market feature, to implement the basic functionality. There's a second iteration already planned where I'll flesh out the feature and spend time on the little details and balancing.

There are a couple of visual improvements that I plan to make in the next iteration. The main one is that the upgrades should have more of a visual impact on your stall, so you can really see it becoming more impressive as you upgrade it. I'd also like you to be able to see the vegetables that you're selling on the 3D model of your stall. Currently it does display some vegetable-like objects when you put items up for sale, but they don't actually match the specific vegetables that you're selling.

There are also going to be lots more upgrades and boosts that you'll be able to apply to your stall. I especially like the idea of purchasable boosts that only last for a single market day. That could add a lot more strategy and also a bit of risk to your decision making. You'd need to decide whether it's worth it to get a boost that week, depending on the situation. For example, there could be a one-day berry marketing boost that would increase your berry sales for one day. It may or may not be worth investing in that, depending on how many berries you have to sell that week, the quality of berries that you've harvested, and whether the berries are trending or not.

Coming up next...

Up next, more gameplay features for the town! I'll be starting work on the restaurant task system tomorrow, then after that will be the vegetable competition, and then I'll properly implement the villagers.

Thanks a lot for your continued support and sorry that this update took so long!

Karl