We've been hard at work for about six weeks. The Kalidax Farming Program has slowly started to embody more of the vision that we had for the game. Throughout these weeks I did a lot of the backend programming for the game. Primarily the inventory system and the economy system of our game.

The inventory has been the most technically impressive thing that I think I've ever programmed. It has the ability to save, load, store item data, and move items around in the scene. Despite all that functionality, all it appears to the player is three grey cubes on the top right of their HUD (Figure 1). Those three squares required three scripts to actually function. One script handles the inventory as a universal data collection, the other handles any inventory interactions that are relevant to the player, and the third displays all the calculations of the inventory as they are happening. The reason these need to be split into three is because I don't want a single script to handle all the calculations while at the same time trying to display them. I believe that it would affect performance to try and have a single script handle all these tasks.

Figure 1: The three grey blocks on the top left of this panel are your inventory slots.

Another important part of thee inventory systems is the way that it interacts with objects on the ground. I also programmed these items so that they would enter the inventory and store their data within the slots that appear within the game.

The other notable thing that I programmed was the game's economy system. The way that the system works is that the player can sell all their seeds at an object called "The Provision Drone" (Figure 2). This interacts with the inventory and gets rid of all the seeds within the player's inventory and adds a number to a value stored in the "Player Wallet" script. When the player chooses to "end the day" those values are deposited into the player's wallet. Now the player can use their funds to purchase things.

Figure 2: The Provisions drone within the scene.

Now that we have most of the features programmed in the game. It is time for me to start helping the other members of my team add the sounds and artwork. We want to make sure that the game is polished enough for it to appear as a piece on our portfolio. Tune in next time and hopefully our game will progress past the programmer art stage. Thanks for reading!