Devlog #16 - Months and More Crops
New crops? Months? Seasons? I’ve mostly been working on some big changes to how the NPCs are introduced to your town. Although, its not really at a stage I want to show yet. So I’ll just give you a sneak peak for now.
Mysterious, right? Hopefully I can elaborate a little more in the next post.
So what can I show? How about some of the new crops?
More crops have been on the to-do list for a while. I finally buckled down and added 6 new crops. So in addition to sugarcane, cabbages, carrots and corn, there are now kale, potatoes, wheat, watermelons, pumpkins, and onions.
Some of these new plants have new behaviours. The pumpkins and watermelons require empty space around them to spread out and are connected by vines. Each plant has a chance to spawn up to 4 fruits around them. Oh, and the sugarcane and wheat plants require a scythe to harvest. These actually took a little longer to implement than originally expected, but these behaviours can be used on other plants (I’m thinking bamboo? Maybe Ivy? Maybe some kind of invasive plant or weed?)
But why add more crops? Well, now there are weekdays and seasons. For now, there are 28 days in a season and 4 seasons a year. So what changes in a season? Not much yet. Right now the only change is that temperature gauge in the to left corner of the screen.
The temperature shifts depending on where you are on the map. There is an average temperature each day depending on the season, but the temperature shifts depending on where you are on the map.
So, the northern areas are always hotter and down south it's always cooler. Each of the crops now has a temperature requirement. So, if you don’t plant them in the right climate, they will die.
My intention is to encourage players to think about where they are going to plant certain crops. Maybe they will grow their summer loving crops up north in Autumn? Maybe they will move their cold-loving crops to the middle of the map in winter, so they are closer to their town?
Hopefully, this will also encourage more map exploration on a day to day basis in the game. Another short post this time, but I’m looking forward to showing off the big NPC changes in the next post.
Thanks for reading.