Homegrown 0.4.7 - New Shop UI!

A big update for the shops in this version! They've got a new brighter design, more options for choosing how many of an item you want to buy, and some satisfying visual effects when you sell your vegetables.

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.

See how I implemented the new updates in the latest devlog video.

Shop Updates

Aside from the new look, there are also a few functionality changes to the shops. The main one is the way that you choose the number of items to purchase (for stackable items). You can use the text field to type in the exact number, or use the buttons below it to choose the amount without using the keyboard. Scrolling the mouse-wheel also increases/decreases the number. The "x" button next to the text field can be used to reset the amount to 0 and the total value of the purchase is shown on the buy-button.

When selling your vegetables it's a bit different. I decided a slider would make the most sense for choosing how many of the item you want to sell. You can also just type the number into the text field if you prefer. It's a bit useless right now as there's no reason not to just sell them all, but in the future there will be other things you can do with you veg.

You can also shift+left-click on items in the left panel to quickly buy/sell them, without having to choose the amount in the right-hand panel. This instantly buys one of the item or, if you're selling, it sells the full stack of items.

Fancy Effects!

My favourite new feature in this version is the new visual effect that happens when you sell your vegetables to the grocery shop! The items now explode into coins which get then pulled into the coin pouch in the top left. The higher the value of the sale the more coins are emitted so selling you produce gets more and more satisfying as you progress in the game!

Implementing the sound effects for the coins going into the coin pouch posed an interesting problem. I wanted each individual coin to emit a "ting" sound effect when it reached the target, but with potentially hundreds of coins flying into the pouch the game was unable to play that many sound effects at once (there's a limit to how many individual sounds can be playing at a time).

So I instead created multiple sound effects containing the sound of various numbers of coins. For example, I made a sound effect of one coin, another of two coins, another of four coins, another of 8, and so on. Then, when the coin effect is carried out, every 0.2 seconds it plays the most fitting sound effect depending on how many coins reached the coin pouch during that period. You end up hearing roughly the right number of tings, with only five (or less) sound effects being played a second. The sound effects are all very short (around 0.3 seconds) so it means there are never too many overlapping sounds and the game can handle it without a problem.

Land-Buying Panel

The panel that pops up when you're buying more land has also been updated to the new UI style. That's officially all of the UI panels in the home area redone now!

UI Scaling

I've had a go at improving the automatic scaling of the UI, so that it fits better on different display sizes. I've only been able to test it on a couple of computers so far though, so let me know if the UI looks too big/small on your display and I'll do a bit more tweaking. You can still manually change the UI size using the + and - keys on the num-pad.

Auto-Saving

The game now auto-saves your farm every few minutes, so if the game crashes (which it hopefully won't!) you won't lose much progress.

Coming Soon...

Just one final UI panel to redo now: the upgrade shop. Before I do this though I'm going to do a bit of work on the item icons. I'm hoping to create a system that can generate the icons on the fly while the game is running. The main reason for this is that I'd like tool icons to change visually when you upgrade the tool's stats, but there are far too many stat combinations to manually make an icon for each one. So I'm hoping to solve this with an icon creation system and a little bit of procedural generation. Should be fun!

Thanks as always for your support!

Karl