Homegrown Update - Basic Mod Support & UI Work

Happy new year! Hope you're all having a good start to 2024. I've been getting back to work on the UI overhaul with some new pop-up info UIs for the entities. I also spent a bit of time during the Christmas break looking into adding mod support to Homegrown!

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.

Entity Info UI

When you have nothing equipped (right-click to unequip current tools) you can mouse over objects in the world to see extra information about them. Previously this has always come in the form of a very dull brown box in the bottom right corner containing stats about the object. With this update the info is now shown above the entity, and is hopefully somewhat more pleasing to the eye!

Previously almost every object in the world could be examined, with most just giving an empty info panel with the name of the entity. As my aim is for the game to have a rather more minimalistic UI, I decided that only objects with something interesting to say will have an info panel and will then only provide essential information.

New Health Panel

In the spirit of making the UI a bit more minimalistic, I had a go at trying to make the health UI a bit less congested. It used to be full of little health bars, one for every environmental factor affecting the plant. Here's what it looked like:

After thinking about it, I realized that I only used these extra stat bars when there's a problem with the plant, to find out what the issue is. So in the new UI I decided to take a more direct approach. If the plant has a health issue, warning messages will now be shown in the health panel, telling you exactly what's wrong. Once you've fixed the issue, the warning goes away. Hopefully this makes the health panel less cluttered and easier to read at a glance.

The warning messages are also colour coded and ordered by severity, so that you know what to prioritize.

Very Basic Mod Support

When Homegrown gets released (one day!) I'd love for it to have full support for modding. Unfortunately, this isn't a topic I have much experience with. So over Christmas I spent some time learning a bit about it and began making the game code a little bit more mod friendly.

Admittedly, I haven't got very far yet! But it is at least now possible to add custom plants and objects to the game without having to edit any of the game files. It's just assets for now, you can't write any custom code for the game just yet, but that will be the next step.

If you want to give it a try, check out this post here which explains how! You can also try out Homegrown's first mod, made by Patreon supporter "LeBogo", which adds pumpkins and strawberries to the game.

Coming soon...

More UI work! I need to redo the terrain tile info panels next, which shouldn't take long as they're very similar to the entity info panels. After that the inventory and hotbar will be getting an overhaul before I move on to the town area and start work on the shops.

Thanks as always for your wonderful support!