Cultivation Jam First Week

This is my development log for the first week of the Cultivation Jam 2022 10-29June.

*** Day 1-7 ***

So I started by sketching up one of my ideas for what game to make in this Jam and this is what I ended up with.

So my initial thought was that you have this land area in the desert which is getting flooded by sand dunes from all sides and your task is to grow plants to counter the effect of the sand. I was thinking the sand occupies tiles and once every minute or so they evolve and try to attack tiles next to them and the plants would have more like HP and Resistance stats to withstand it. In the area there would be a shop for buying seeds, plants tools etc along with a farm area to grow plants. My art skills have never been that good so I usually just do my best and hope that it ends up decent and try to put more effort into the game play.

I started making some simple 3D-tiles in a grid and just gave them different colors to indicate type and a sand stat for amount of sand occupying the spot.

I made a timer that at each tick spreads the sand depending on the surrounding squares sand amount. I also spend some time here to make the movement of the camera work. At this point it was locked to view in this direction but you could move left/right and forward/back with WASD keys as well as zoom with mouse scroll wheel.

From here I wanted to occupy the tiles with items and I created Bushes and Trees from simple shapes and put some colors on them. I Also made some water tiles also the sand dunes had change in color depending on sand amount. I added some texture to water,  grass and sand.

At this point it felt like the Trees and Bushes made more depth to the game and I thought that making the tiles elevated as well would make it even better. So I spent some time making the sand change its height from the amount of sand as well as making water and the new tile soil different heights as well.

I was fairly satisfied with the algorithm for growing of the sand. I made it so sand deletes any objects placed on the tiles it conquers which is lost to the player. I Also made the  GIF sped up alot to show the mechanic.


To place the objects the player can change between different tools by using 0-9 on keyboard. And these tools need to be selected to use a certain skill. I also changed the initial generation to include some predefined stuff like soil farm. At this point the sand moved without the plants being able to counteract it, so this had to be added. I also made it so when placing a plant it is first placed as a miniature plant and after a set time it grows to its final form. At this point this is only a visual thing. I felt like placing of stuff felt a bit odd because game only notice clicks on tiles and since they is shown seem-less its hard to know exactly where the mouse pointer is. I wanted to add some highlight of the selection and made a simple square and made it purple. I rewamped the movement again since I wanted to include the possibility to turn camera as well. I firstly made the turns in small steps as the player held down Q/E but it felt odd and I ended up changing it to only 90° turns that is tweened per button press. Also had to spend some time to change the logic for determine when player/camera was hitting the boundaries.

Player had to click the tile a tree was standing on using the axe to cut it down, but nothing happened when clicking the tree holding the axe at this point so I had to fix this. Each item gets a stat for what tile they are placed at when created and a click on them now register the same as clicking the tile itself.

I now wanted to include some drops from cutting down trees etc so I created stats in the UI for coins and wood and made some basic 3D-models for it and a system for generating them when destroying the item. I put in several Coins as placeholders for future resources.

From here I decided to add stones as well not knowing exact what to use them for later, maybe used to create a kiln or other items. Some production tools would be nice so I thought of making an oven to burn clay in to perhaps making  vases to plant tree seeds in so they can be planted outside at any point later. Thought was to make trees and bushes not re-plantable but only destroyable and maybe have smaller plants like flowers be weaker but movable at any time. I also added it so ovens are placed facing  the player and also rotatable using R.

I'm fairly satisfied with the first week of the Jam, but I haven't worked that hard on this just taking it slow paced when I felt for it. Some decisions I have let mature before implementing it and I feel that the outcome has probably benefited from doing so. I do have alot to do on my To-Do list and I'm not sure in what order or when to do it.

TODO:

              Add Main Menu, Play Game/Settings/Credits/Exit

              Add sound effects to entire game

              Add Music background theme, soft music

              Add animation to certain motions

              Make selectable toolbar with plants to paint them

                Add cost for planting

                Add some other inventory?

                Add fire hazard? Spreading fire water resist?