Devlog #10 - Dogs and Mangroves
I’m back in the swing of adding new features, would have been more if Rockstar wasn’t so selfish as to release a certain cowboy game that is like a sponge for my time. But I still managed to add a new animal, a new biome and new farming options.
The first thing I want to show off is the dog (Dingo?) These good puppers will hang out in bush land areas and will hunt kangaroos. They will normally run away from humans unless you befriend.
I actually broke all the animal AI a bit while adding these guys. Now none of the animals run away from the player at all. I’ll hopefully have this fixed by the next update, but I’m starting to think that the animal AI needs a complete overhaul in general. What started out as kangaroo AI is now used for fish, bugs, prey, predator and birds.
Speaking of kangaroos, if they have eaten enough they will now drop “Roo Poo”. Why would you want to collect roo poo?
Well, you can combine the manure with some other easy to find items to craft fertilizer. Fertilizer can be placed on tilled soil, before you plant any seeds. Crops grown with fertilizer will grow twice as quickly, so you can make that dosh twice as quickly.
I think this will require me to have another look at the balance of farming again. I’m thinking either the plants should grow slower overall or maybe fertilizer should be more difficult to make. Something I’m still feeling out. Right now it’s just too easy to make loads of money.
Tending to crops. Half grown with fertilizer, half not.
One thing I played around with was field deterioration. I decided the fertilizer will stay on the ground after the plant is harvested, but if nothing is planted there the fertilizer will disappear over a few days, so you’re going to want to plant something there again pretty quickly. As a result non fertilized tilled soil now disappears too, just a lot slower than the fertilizer tiles.
One last thing! I started working on a new biome. Originally, the rivers close to the ocean just had sand instead of dirt. This always looked a bit strange. I was reminded of the beaches I went to as a kid, sure there was sand, but if you wanted to catch fish you would head down a river towards the smelly, muddy, mosquito-filled mangroves. So they are in the game now!
For now the mangrove area act as a river where salt water fish spawn. I have plans for unique fish, bugs and animals to appear here, but we’ll see how we go.
That’s all for this time, now I have to go be a cowboy for a few more hours, then I’ll start working on Dinkum again. Thanks for reading.