Hi 👋

we are working on a garden resurrection game.

Day 1

MVP

•  messy garden at the start
•  clean it up
•  dig new fields
•  buy seeds
•  plant plants
•  sell plants -> profit 💰

After that I created a new Godot Project and procrastinated for the rest of the day 👌

Day 2

Had a bit of a break since I started learning Godot - definitely feeling a bit rusty.

Had to search for lot of basic stuff 🥔

Still managed to add the tool shack and some basic UI to grabe one 👍

Maybe the glove design needs some work 😅

Also some first ever pixelart 🥺:

After Day 2:

• ✔️ messy garden at the start 
• 🛠️ clean it up 

Love this! Honestly it's great seeing it with the placeholder art already--I can totally see how this will turn out. Best of luck!

I really like the idea for the game, seeing your structured notes and plans (even though I can't read them) makes me think that I should take a little more time in planning what I want my game to be like :D  I also love the idea of using placeholder art as it allows you to quickly see how the game mechanics will work, it looks like it is going to be fun. 

Good luck for the rest of the jam!!

Day 3

• Tools can interact with tiles now
• Some background work on the building UI
  • Grid Items are added when new Tool Instance is created
  • So I can add as much tools as I want and put it in the Shop or Shack 👍
  • Still not quiet happy with my implementation but I will figure something out 😅
• Added more tools
• Added Shop Building
• Added Seed / Fruits

Day 4

• Added time and a day / night cycle!

  • With this great video:
  
  

• Crops are growing now based on this global day and night cycle

  • now I have to build the interaction to actually plant something
  • also I’m building a tile map that allows to plant seed in the editor

Day 5

• Confused - stumbled through the mess of code I created so far

• Struggled a lot with structuring my nodes and corresponding code

  

• After some time I manged to add the money system to buy stuff from the store:

• And I finally got the plants to change there texture after they reached a new grow stage

• Next is letting the player actually plant plants 👍

Day 6

• Didn’t managed to do anything on the game
• But went on a nice bike tour 👍

Day 7

• Implemented the planting on mouse click
• So you can now buy seed in the shop
• Select them in the shack
• Click on an empty dirt tile
• And a new Plant will grow there

Day 8

• I managed to make it quite easy to add new tools and plants

  • There is still some redundancy that I have to get ritt of I don’t think its necessary to ad the tools in the tool node and to the Items in the Store Node

• Got my head around parent and inherited scenes

• So I currently have a Plant Scene that holds all the default data

  • for example the seed stage texture is currently the same for all

  • Then I inherit a grass scene from it and select all the grass textures modify the days for the different grow stages

    
    

  • and at that one to the PlantLayer tile map

    
    

• I also have a building scene that is used to get the basic UI for the shack and store working

  • I’m not really happy with how this is setup, because it is a bit of a signal mess - but it works 😶 for now.
  • I should have realized earlier that I’m actually building an inventory system 😅

• So the steps to add a tool currently are:

1. Create some beautiful temp art in Aseprite

   
   

2. Duplicate a tool node

   
   

3. Change name / texture / location

   
   

   
   

4. Duplicate a item node under Store

   
   

5. Change name / item name / type / item ref / amount / price That’s enough to be able to buy the tool and select it in the shack

   
   

   
   

6. I add the functionality for what ever the tool is

   
   

• So to finish the first MVP ( actually more a prototype ) I only have left

  • Selling the fruits

  But to do that I first have to implement the harvesting, so that is the plan for the rest of Day 8

End of the day now

• Scissors are now able to harvest fully grown plants

• For that I rewrote some of the Plant Scene to be more flexible with how many grow stages a plant can have

  
  

• The day count and the textures are now an Array

• I keep track of the current_stage index so I can just check if the plant is on the last index of the array before harvesting

• One issue I know have is that I don’t instance a plant for every grass tile I added on the GroundLayer - but that is something i fix tomorrow 😄

Day 9

• I fixed the non existing plants on grass tiles

• Just added this little function the the GroundLayer

  
  

  It just loops through and checks if the tile is long grass - If so it instances grass on the PlantLayer with the grow stage 4 👍

• After that I implemented the the selling of the fruits from the shack

• So I’m done with all the basic’s I had plant to add at the beginning 🎉

  • Garden with weeds and dead plants add the beginning ✅
  • Remove weeds / dead plants ✅
  • inventory system for buildings ✅
  • maw the lawn ✅
  • Add new fields ✅
  • Buy Seeds ✅
  • Plant new plants ✅
  • Harvest fruits ✅
  • Sell them ✅

  
  

• But there is still some important bits missing

  • Watering 💧
  • Plant / Garden health ❤
  • parasites
  • fertilizer

• Not sure -but I think I leave this for later and concentrate on polishing what I have now

Day 10

• Made stack able items
• And made them sell with the correct price 😅
• Added 6 more plants

We did it 🎉 Project submitted -> Garden Rescue.
Will get some sleep now and write the last devlog day tomorrow 💤

Day 11 / 12

• I pulled an all nighter to get the game in a some what presentable state 😅

• I overhauled the inventory system of the buildings

  • I actually just wanted to make them less ugly, but in the process I revamped the whole thing

  • I used this tutorial to get the UI kind of right:

    
    

  • So this is what I ended up with

  
  

  Better then before I would say 😄

  • That took pretty much the whole day 11

• After that I added all the new art that was created at the same day:

  
  

  Looks so much better now 👍 Just for reference here is the before:

• 
  

• Then I had to make it an actual game to get all the plants and build up your garden

  • I tried to balance the plant prices and grow stages so it progresses nicely, but I think to get it right I need to playtest a lot more.

• I realized the day and money counter UI is still pretty ugly - so fixed that:

  
  

• And then I added a time multiplier last minute- so its easier to try out the game without spending much time

  
  

• Now it was time to submit and create the project page

  • Exported the game to HTML - that was a breace - thanks godot 😃
  • Just reused some of the game assets to create a Banner
  • And a Background
  • Fighted with the formatting of the description for way to long
  • Aaaand Published!

• Here it is —>

🌱 Garden Rescue

Thanks a lot for creating this Game Jam and the community around it. I had a great time participating and cant wait for the winter version 😃