Homegrown 0.4.6 - New Inventory!

Getting close to the end of the UI overhaul now! This time it was the turn of the inventory to receive a makeover, with a new design and some improved functionality to make it more user friendly.

You can check out all of the new updates in this week's 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 Design

The look of the inventory has been updated to match the new UI style in the game, giving it a much brighter look. I've also added a scroll-bar for when you have so many items that they don't fit in the panel. Probably not something you'll encounter at this stage, but when there's more content and items in the game this will be more relevant!

Rearranging Items

One of the big changes to the inventory functionality is that you can now rearrange your items. Just left-click and drag an item to the desired slot. If there's already an item in that slot they'll switch places.

Item Inspecting

Right-clicking on an item now brings up a tool-tip displaying the name of the item and any relevant stats. These stats show slightly more info than they used to, and I'll continue improving them as development progresses. For example, you can now inspect a seed packet to see the average growth duration of the plant.

There are still a couple of things I'm undecided about here:

• Should the inspect info show up on right-click, or on mouse-over? My thinking was that you won't need to see the stats that often, so having it appear on right-click saves you from having UI panels popping up all over the place when you're just rearranging your inventory. But let me know what you think.
• Should the item inspect panel also show the item's description? Or are just the stats enough, seeing as you'll have already seen the item description when buying the item from the shop.

Inventory Functionality

There's been a change to the way the extended inventory and the inventory hotbar work to make inventory management a bit easier. Previously, if the inventory bar was full you couldn't receive any more items until you put some of your items into storage.

In this version, the storage is now an extension of your inventory. If your inventory bar is full then you can still receive items, and they'll automatically go into the main inventory. Also, when selling items to the shop it now searches in both the inventory hotbar and the main inventory to find suitable items. So no need to move the items to your hotbar first.

Item Stacks

One final little update - item stacks now do a little bounce animation when items get added to them, and the stack numbers are now abbreviated when they go over 1000 (to make sure the numbers still fit in the UI).

Coming Soon...

Just a couple more UIs to overhaul in the town area now: the shops and the upgrade system. Then I've got an interesting update planned for generating the item icons in the code, and then I'll be getting to work on the final gameplay features that I want to get into the game before launch.

Thanks as always for the support <3