This looks awesome, good luck with your MVP!! Thank you for sharing your process with us :D

My goodness, We have the same plan. Inspired by an old Harvest moon (mine is A Wonderfull Life) but don't want that game to stink so me and my brother are gonna practice with other games. Excited to see what you both come up with.

I love this little creature, so cute! Good video too

this is so interesting i love armadillos. could you maybe reorganzie the playlist so that the oldest is at the top and newest is at the bottom so its easier to watch ❤

Never played farming games, not really at least, but immediately intrigued by the notion of being a lil aardvark tending the farm and who can roll about So I think you already have a pretty significant hook!

Your artstyle is killer. Throwback to an earthy aesthetic that I dont see enough on the internet.

Love the lil' armadillo! Another possible solution for the free form tilling that might be worth exploring is having a subdivided grid. So you'd have your main grid for regular placement that the genre is known for and plots can snap to that but then you've got a sub grid of say half the size which, when there's overlap, allows things to also snap to that so there can be variation of placement while also avoiding micromanagement if things are slightly off. Kind of like Animal Crossing New Horizons has with furniture grids.

It's looking good! Keep it up, and good luck with the non-grid approach, I have a feeling it's going to be pretty difficult to manage... but it'd sure make a good novelty for the genre! <3

(2:33) Following how I imagined your game having a 3D world but 2D UI and artwork, those little paintings look to me like they could be roughs for icons displayed within the game's UI if both of you did decide on having the UI be 2D. (4:27) I like that you're doing it freestyle instead of being locked to a grid. (1:17) (5:43) Ah yes! The temporary placeholder main menu! (1:11) (video) In my comment on the previous log you uploaded, I mentioned how the key art reminded me of picture book and illustrated novel illustration, but this time, I realise that the key art gave me ‘Frog and Toad’ and ‘Mouse and Mole’ vibes. I haven't read either of those book series, only saw some illustrations and art from those books, so I can't really identify what specific vibes I'm getting from your game art. (1:38) I didn't think about what the general gameplay loop for my game idea would be, but even though that would have different levels, I noticed one among some of my gameplay mechanic ideas and took note.

If you make movement fun that's half the battle and I saw the ball mode 🤩 I think adding a house customizer it can help with giving satisfaction loops

Love the realistic expectations set! A lot of gamedevs (myself included....) get really caught up in "it's going to have THIS feature and THIS feature and THIS feature" right from the start, which can become really frustrating when you've been working for months and have exactly one feature finished, maybe even one that didn't really need to be implemented until much much later. All that to say, the structure of "this is the bare minimum we need, so we'll focus on that first" is wonderful, while still keeping in fun little attempts at something new and creative like with the tilling mechanic. Excited to see where this goes!

Oh I adore the free-form tilling concept! Not to complicate things as you're so early in the process, but how would watering work? Would it work something like the irrigation trenches in Harvest Moon Tale of Two Towns? In that game, you can make irrigation trenches as long as you like, but it will only water a number of tiles depending on units of water in the watering can. Or would it be more of an area of effect watering, where you water crops but its only from a certain radius around the character. That way, you can water a set x amount of times, since the water in the can would decrease the same amount per input. The first style would tie more into the free-form nature of your tilling and could make it fun to plan out the optimal distance for each row, where the second method is more familiar but might lead to grids if trying to optimize the maximum amount of plants able to be watered. Hopefully this makes some sort of sense, either way, I'm interested in seeing how you tackle watering and planting with the current method of tilling! Looking forward to seeing more updates, its been so fun to see your progress and different farm sim developments over the years on your blog :D

Commenting for the algorithm. Keep it up!

Hi there, I'm Michael. I've been following this series since it started not too long ago, and I think this will turn out to be a cool game! I love that the armadillo does things manually, like digging, and picking up the backpack and watering can. It's a smart difference that makes it stand out just enough from other farming games. SELF-PROMOTION TIME: If you're looking for music for this game, I'm a video game composer. If you're interested, I'd love to chat!

Great stuff! Exciting to see the process and the different approaches to the tilled plots. Have you considered placing a spline where the plots are following the character, then you could just run a check for distance from one spline end to all nearby spline ends to see if they should connect maybe? I'm typically an Unreal developer, so I'm not sure how approachable this would be here!

I have a bit of a fun idea about the cooking menu. In real life, cooking can take anywhere from 15 minutes to 5 hours, so what if you include that as time management? Combined with the ingredients requirement, it could be fun to optimise, something like "Okay, so my strawberries will ripen today, and my wheat will be ready the next day, so today i can spend about 2 hours collecting strawberries, 5 hours watering the wheat and then 3 hours making strawberry jam to go along with the bread i will make tommorow!"

This is something not super important at this stage of development - and I’m sure something you guys have already noticed - but something that sticks out to me immediately is just how pretty the hand-painted textures are in the blender viewport, and how much they are hidden or muddled up by the in-engine materials. It may be a stronger product to let the hand-painted textures stand on their own rather than be hidden under layers of overly reflective light and shadow and materials properties. I’m loving the game process so far!! Keep up the good work!! 😁😁😁

I am SOOOO excited for updates to the game, the concept is so cool and gosh dang it I want to play a little creature! I also am interested in the free hand tilling mechanic, I worry that it might make the accidental placement of crops easier but it’s too early to say.

So as a gardener and game designer this free form gardening system brought a few ideas to mind. Plant spacing could be a fun and nuanced system and simplify the worry about art assets overlapping. When plants are closer together they tend to stunt each others growth preventing them from growing big (so art would never become big enough to overlap) this is esspecially noticable with root crops like carrots or beets. Plants close together also create microclimates that protect the soil from being scortched by the sun allowing for a flourishing microbial ecology, dampen wind that protects the weaker plants before they mature, but they also trap moisture with the lack of wind causing an increased potential for fungal and bacterial diseases. This coupd all create an intreging but freeform system of hpw you design a garden based on which plants you are currently growing and how much output you need from the plants. If seeds are given out based on fetch quests essentially instead of bought in bulk it would also prevent the mundanity of a large field of a single crop that is known and the solution easy by mixing up whats available both in seeds and space based on what plants you pulled up and there for need to fill that part of the soil. Anyways i hope this project goes well :)

An update! :D Looking good so far - and it's really fun to see the game planned out like this! Your plan for your mvp sounds very good imo. If you want it even more minimal, one idea could be to not have a timer to start with, but have the player choose when to sleep and move to the next day? Though, seems like you're well on your way with the timer, so maybe not worth it to not finish it. (Though, could be an option for a speed maybe? Infinity time in a day could be nice for a very relaxed game session). And although the freehand tilling sounds like a really fun idea, I just know I'm gonna line them up in a grid anyway =P I like patterns and clean lines too much haha

I like the Idea of farming tiles being "off the grid" so to speak. Makes it look more natural. You could still treat each of these circles you placed as kind of planting pot. That would mimic the Tile Grid approach, just without the visual / spatial restrictions. Getting rid of the grid also fixes one of my biggest gripes with the GB Harvest Moon games. That is, that you can't water the middle plant of a 3x3 field once the outer plants reach stage 2. Despite that you are only able to plant in a 3x3 pattern, which means either wasting seeds and/or growing time.

Really cool video! I might send this series to some people if they ever get curious what game dev is really like, since this series is (looking) really beginner friendly for game dev concepts like MVPs

i really like the art and color choices for the game, but they get muddy when you actually put it in game :(

I think using some sort of unlit shader to just use the coloring choices of your art would give the game a lot more life!!

The freeform placement is an interesting twist. The idea that you don't always have your inventory fits with the character (nice animation!) but will that be good for gameplay? Perhaps if you are having to make decisions about carrying inventory vs carrying other elements it will create choices. Great to see the progress here and exploration! Kudos!

I like the idea of a more freehand approach to tilling! Looking forward to what you do next.

My unsolicited advice is: don't spend too much time learning python because a lot of what you are going to do is calling godot functions and doing things in its way. It's good that you learn the basics to not be intimidated but after a couple of weeks I'd just practice with godot itself. Btw your armadillo is very cute, keep it up!

This is why I dread moving from Unreal to Godot… I never want to code! Blueprints are way superior for an artist!

This is just soooo CUUUUTEEEEEE

As a programmer my ego has been boosted

I like the storytelling and getting to see your decision making behind the scenes! Subscribed.

I feel good watching this. The exact same things have happened to me. Nothing is more demoralizing than a video called "how to start a game for non-programmers" say "programming is the fun and easy part anyways." 🥲 I wish you luck!

Love to see a fellow artist-turned-programmer! This project looks adorable, iIcan't wait to see what comes of it. Taking the python course was the right move; I spent far too many sleepless nights trying to muscle Godot into obedience, to no avail. Through that I developed a hatred for programming that I just have to get over if I want to continue haha. Cool to see that I'm not the only guy who drew a cute character and decided 'Oh! I want to turn this into a game!'

I just came here from a recommendation on my KZbin homepage and I'm already impressed! (0:00) I like that 2D art style as it reminds me of some book illustrators who'd illustrate picture books ("children's books") and/or illustrated novels. I imagine that art style would be used for game artwork (e.g. Steam and Nintendo eShop pages, game icon, etc). I did also imagine the art style being used for UI elements, but only because I imagined doing the same thing with an art style I pictured for a game idea I'm working on as a side project. (0:08) The game world would be 3D. That's understandable. (0:22) That reminds me of the game idea I mentioned further up in my comment. I came up with the that after experiencing a daydream in which I saw myself playing the game and some of the in-game elements including a vague representation of what one of the main protagonists looked like. That daydream lingered in my mind and, after tracing what influenced the daydream, I decided to just develop the game as a side project so I had somewhere to pour in the inspiration and ideas I'd get as the idea displaced a fanfiction idea that previously lingered in the same space in my mind. As such, I'm the only one working on it. (0:41) That reminded me of a challenge I ended up with for my game idea, which is that in order to stay true to the daydream, I needed to have the game world be 3D and the UI be 2D. (The artwork would use a mix of 3D and 2D art) As much as I wanted to imitate the art style of the game that indirectly influenced the daydream and other games with similar art styles, I recently came up with the idea of sneaking my own planned art style, which would be a 2D art style I'm developing with book illustrations and comics in mind, into the game. I think I came up with the idea after drawing inspiration from an Aardman behind-the-scenes video which showed a character design on paper before being creating various sculpts of the character and making a cast to create multiple puppets. (0:56) That's understandable, especially for a first game. I did think of another game that did its menu differently, but that game was made by a large internal studio at a major publisher so it'd be unfair to compare your game with that. (1:15) I agree. Some of the games I drew inspiration from were in 2D, but as far as I could tell, that was just due to limitations of early '90s 16-bit (4th console gen) graphics hardware, leading the designers to build clay puppets, pose them, and capture video stills using camcorders with clean video outputs through Targa cards in their development PCs. (3:26) One of the reasons why my game idea is a side project is that my interests are more in books (including comics) and animation aimed at children, not so much video games. Following that and wanting to be an artist, that answers the question of why most of my planning work for the game have been with visuals. (7:00) I can somehow relate!

I’m so playing this game when it comes out

You could try using Unity instead of Godot, there are many more tutorials available

Your voice is gorgeous ♥ And that Armadillo is the cutest f*cl I've seen in months ♥

I respect it! ❤

Wait this looks so cute 😭😭😭

Godot Lets GO

i want to learn programming but I'm an artist completely

I'm a technical artist and programmer. Having experienced several engines and programming languages, honestly, I think Godot's scripting isn't a great place to start/learn programming. An experienced programmer may have the necessary architecture vocabulary to know how to work around its limitations or just be ok with not having basic things an artist wants to do. Don't blame yourself if you're struggling with it. I'm not hating on Godot. I say this as someone who wants Godot to be a decent alternative to things like Unity and Unreal.

I love cute and cozy games I can't wait to see how it goes :3

And developers struggle a lot with art... That respect is surely mutual 🔥😅 Nice video!

Suggestion, what if the Armadillo uses a push plow instead of digging and walking, this will give the player a sense of progression due to the fact they're digging faster than normal. Edit: and it might be easier to animate

as a huge Godot fan, this video is the perfect example of why Godot being "the linux of game engines" can be a bad thing. it's very much "by programmers for programmers" which is one area I hope it changes down the line. that said, it's great you're able to make the engine work! very excited for more devlogs! :D

This looks great! Can't wait to see where this goes

Just go unreal As in right now, there is NO reason to NOT use unreal, so just go for unreal

This looks adorable!