Homegrown Update - Starting the Graphical Overhaul

It’s been another solid month of development on Homegrown and things are really starting to take shape nicely! Earlier this month I completed the final update for version 0.2 of the game and I’m now getting stuck into the big graphical overhaul.

Fruit and Veg Quality

To finish version 0.2 I implemented the concept of “star quality” produce. When you harvest your vegetables there’s now a chance of your produce having this characteristic, with the chance being higher the healthier the plant is. These “star quality” items can be sold for more money and will provide other benefits in the future.

The idea of this change is to provide a reward for looking after your crops better, because previously it didn’t really matter if a plant was perfectly healthy or on the verge of death; you’d still get the same harvest from it. Now, the better you look after your plants the more quality produce you’ll receive and the more money you’ll make! Something to make the extra weeding and watering worth it.

Graphical Overhaul

It’s reaching the point in development where I want to start adding more content into the game. That will require me to make lots of new models and that requires me to know what the art-style of the game is going to be! Up until now I’ve done no work on the graphics at all and have just been using placeholder models, so it’s finally time to change that!

The aim of this graphical update is not to completely finalize the look of the game with perfectly balanced lighting and colours – there will be plenty of time for fine-tuning all of that in the future. For now, I just want to nail down some of the fundamentals. That involves deciding on the art-style of the models (so that I can start adding new content without having to redo all the models in the future), and implementing a few basic graphical features such as lighting, shadows, and particle effects.

Choosing the Art-Style

Since the start of development I’ve been saving screenshots of art from games or artwork that I liked the look of and thought could act as inspiration for the art-style for Homegrown. I ended up with quite a collection to look through, and I started this process by trying to draw inspiration from the images I’d collected.

After getting a few ideas I jumped into Blender and started giving a few of the art-styles a try to see what would suit Homegrown the best, and to see which art-styles I could actually achieve as a non-artist! After a lot of experimenting I came up with something that I thought could work quite well. It’s still a very rough-draft and will need lots of improving, but I think it’s a good starting point:

It's a much more rounded, smoother style that before. No more flat-shaded low-poly look. I’m also aiming for a slightly more cartoony appearance for the models, which I think could complement the casual nature of the gameplay quite well. Let me know what you think!

Engine Work

After getting a better idea of what the art-style is going to be like I got into the engine code and started making some changes and improvements to accommodate for the new look. Firstly, the model format and the model importers got updated to support indexed rendering (which hadn’t been necessary before because the flat shading meant that hardly any vertices were shared between triangles). Since finishing that I’ve been tweaking the rendering process for the entities and improving on the old lighting calculations. Haven’t got very far yet though – this is how things are looking in-game at the moment:

Coming Soon

Next up I’ll be implementing shadows, a wind effect for foliage, and then I’ll need to start the process of remaking all the models that are currently in the game. Looking even further ahead I’ll be adding particle effects, working on making the home area look a bit nicer (more scenery, a path leading up to the house etc.) and creating the town area which is where you’ll go to sell your produce and buy new equipment and seeds for your garden.

That’s all for now! Check out the posts below for download links for the game and the code.

Thanks as always for the support :)

Karl