Just a Chill Week of Game Development

A week of development on "Homegrown", a casual farming game I'm creating using my own engine.
Support the channel on Patreon and get access to the full code for Homegrown, the city-builder, and Equilinox:
/ thinmatrix
My previous game "Equilinox":
store.steampow...
You can follow the progress of Homegrown on my social media:
Twitter: / thinmatrix
Instagram: / thinmatrix
Facebook: / thinmatrix
Trello: trello.com/b/W...
Email: [e-mail]
Background music by Jamal Green:
open.spotify.c...
#devlog #Homegrown

[@klaxoncow]

You've really perfected the "zoom out of the monitor" special effect at 6:06 onwards. It's a nice "attention to detail" trick, that most people probably don't even really notice. But I notice when you do that, and it's appreciated - a very clever smooth transition from video output to camera.

[@ThinMatrix]

Thanks :)

[@RickertBrandsen]

exactly what i was thinking about. Really well done! :)

[@Pontypants]

A chill week of game dev is exactly what i need as well! Love your videos! 🥳

[@BeerfootBandit]

Congrats on the success of your game bro

[@OnlyTheVerse]

I like to watch it in this format a lot, cause it actually gives an overview of a gamedev day. The plots with food and balcony garden are great too!

[@zeztro]

@@Marco_zlb I don't know about that. Taking breaks to cook nutritious meals and to do some chores probably make you more efficient in the long term instead of being a code zombie all day.

[@klaxoncow]

@@Marco_zlb Yeah, you clearly know nothing about coding. Despite Hollywood portrayals, coding is not just typing very quickly. Coding is a mental discipline that occurs in your head... typing is only the necessary means of getting that out of your head and into the machine. Coders do not stop coding when they're away from their keyboards. My best algorithms were all written while taking a 5 minute vape outside. My least productive sessions are when I've sat at the desk all day long, and I've lost perspective, so I'm just pointlessly running around in circles in the code and it's going nowhere - but taking a short break, I come back with different eyes and, ah, it'll probably get solved in 5 minutes, once my head's clear. I mean, he implemented quad-trees and frustum culling, and a debug system, and made the home area pretty in a week. And you think he's not being productive? Ever tried actually doing what he's doing? I have, and I ain't remotely criticising his methodology here.

[@imaybestupid2045]

@@Marco_zlb well thats one way to admit to being the basement goblin

[@dropbit]

That popping off toasts was the most epic cut I've ever seen 😆

[@leoingson]

It was actually tense, not sure if video stopped :)

[@ph03beuwu]

did you see the picture of rufus on his mug!?

[@dropbit]

@@ph03beuwu Now that you mentioned it I noticed rufus. Time ago I didn't see him ahahah. Lovely dog

[@radboudmetselaar3415]

Great to see videos have been fairly consistent again! Really excited for Homegrown, excited to see which direction the game is going in

[@BkSMedia]

These devlogs are such a VIBE man. Also love your workspace, seems like a great place to keep a positive mindset and feel very cosy!

[@TheMateoRoy]

The way you handled frustrum culling was elegant; super cool to see that level of detail in these vlogs.

[@Conquership]

you really helped me alot in the past 6 years with your game development journey keeping me motivated, i dont know where i would be without you

[@paul-e5t]

Ive been watching you since I was a freshmen in high school and now I’m almost done with college with a BS in computer science, thanks for providing the videos you have you’ve been a core part of staying interested and motivated in CS for me. Appreciate ya.

[@EnidDev]

its been so long since i have watched your videos and they were always so relaxing because of you and dani i have picked up game development myself

[@ondrej_markus]

Thank you for making these. I know they are a lot of work to do this well and polished. I appreciate all the extra energy you're putting in to inspire and motivate others. Awesome work!

[@GamesBySaul]

Cool to have this format back! Always love seeing your life content :) The water is a very nice touch, definitely makes the area look pretty! The frustum stuff was super interesting to hear about too, and easy to understand! Something I wondered though, but I suppose with the chunks it might not matter. If there's an object's shadow which can be seen by the camera but the object itself can't be, would the shadow still get rendered?

[@ThinMatrix]

Thanks! So for an object to cast a shadow it needs to be rendered to the shadow map which happens in a separate render pass. The "frustum" used during that render pass is not the camera's frustum, but a box aligned with the direction of the light. I talked more about this in the video I did a while back about the shadows. I haven't actually implemented culling for the shadow render pass yet (I'll be doing that in the next days) but the way it will work is I'll do a second frustum test on the quad-tree using the "frustum" that's used when rendering the shadow pass, and then during the shadow pass the objects will use the result of that frustum test to determine whether they need to be rendered to the shadow map.

[@GamesBySaul]

@@ThinMatrix Ah! Right this makes sense (I think anyways, mostly!) Thanks for the explanation, never really looked into this side of game development before, and you explain in a clear way so it sounds pretty cool!

[@DevelopAnEngine]

Finish your day's work and go home to look at your devblog, the joy of good days 🔥

[@nathanosorio3319]

Recently found your channel and I have to say, I'm glad I did.

[@lipbalmplease]

Instead of an island, maybe adding a hedgerow or stonewall boarder of a neighbours farm(s) that you could only partially see? Maybe adding a sea boarder or roadway around one edge with a clickable dock or bus stop that brings you to the town? Only suggesting as the island kind of feels quite isolating. Also, love this type of format.

[@ThinMatrix]

Yeah, I agree, I don't actually plan on it being an island for the finished game. I was planning on having sea to the east and the south, a small river to the west (that runs into the sea) and the road/path to the town in the north. That would nicely create some natural borders to the land without it being an island.

[@lipbalmplease]

@@ThinMatrix sounds lovely. Can't wait to see it.

[@realtitedog]

Loving how the game is coming along! I think it would be really neat if you added some sort of modding support to the game when it comes out, maybe you could interpret scripts written in lua which could add new crop types and such. Just an idea!

[@tomkmb4120]

This was a nice video, I'm a big fan of those portion sizes.

[@JohnyLilio]

I'm hyped for HomeGrown! It looks better and better.

[@ALouisae]

4:31 if that isn’t the sweetest thing ever, love the content ❤

[@muffiincodes]

Your voice and this game’s vibe makes me so relaxed

[@andrewlalis]

I can't wait to buy this game when it comes out

[@МаксимАгрызко]

Great! You are ready after this project to create a big city-builder game with huge maps 😉

[@_CJ_]

You make gamedev look so easy :D Thanks for chill video :) I like it

[@Svenne23]

Still just lovely!! Feel :-*, Karl!

[@legiongames2400]

The transitions are really cool :D

[@michaelc5415]

nice videos man. I wish I could be a full-time game dev. I'm currently a Software Developer and do Game Development at night. your videos give me more inspiration man so keep the videos up.

[@sufilevy]

Very nice! This format is a really nice mix-up for the other videos, I absolutely love it! One thought I had - What if instead of water at the edges, there would be a sort of clouds-fog thing that fades out from the ground? I think it would make it seem like the world is bigger thank it seems and as if you're having your own little patch of land (and of course maybe you'd be able buy more space later). Good luck! (PS - your dog looks like such a good boy 🐩😊)

[@Draconicrose]

I really like this format. The game is looking really good! I'm surprised you are allowed to take Rufus into the garden center.

[@mcnulty3081]

Your food looks amazing!

[@tarck333333rrrr]

This days it's actually faster not to have visibility tree, maybe just flat grid of chunks. If you store input data (bounding and position) and output data(visibility flag) in flat arrays it will be faster than going over a tree in most cases.

[@ThinMatrix]

Ah interesting, good to know!

[@corriedotdev]

The sun's back 🙌

[@mirtorande]

I think the path to the house would make more sense if it connected to the front of the house instead of the back. I could form a T-junction with a short path connecting the house to the field. I get that some houses have back doors, but the one facing the field looks like the main entrance, and having the main entrance face away from the viewer would feel weird, almost unwelcoming. Pretty random observation, I know, but I think you can feel the difference.

[@LCStudiosMC]

You are very talented.

[@Whatthetrash]

So cool! Love your vids, mate. informative and relaxing! :D

[@SamerAlhasweh]

you always inspire me to start programming

[@jmac217x]

that's how you transition to a monitor shot

[@caioribeiro3609]

I'm studying English just to watch your videos!

[@cauadev6955]

congrats sfc

[@alskidan]

@ThinMatrix I want to thank you for the series, it is very interesting to follow your progress on this game! I wonder how you structured the game loop? Do you update entities that are not visible?

[@danielslavkovsky1670]

Love your devlog videos and your explanation of low-level stuff is fantastic and super interesting 🙂 keep up the good work! BTW what chair do you have? Looks comfy 😄

[@brentryczak]

These videos are amazing quality.

[@breadrug3709]

I feel like the Village should be connected to the home area as it makes it more, well, connected

[@chaoscifer1483]

love these videos.

[@NinjarioPicmin]

The biggest question to this partial rendering i have is - what to do in the worst case scenarios? Like for sure it is awesome that we can reduce the needed rendering when the camera is focused on small areas by a ton. Definitive win! But... when you are fully zoomed out you still have to render everything. So the performance in that case will obviously be worse, especially once there are MANY things going on. I'm curious what your solution to this is.

[@ThinMatrix]

Currently I just don't plan on letting the player zoom out to the extent where you can see the entire world. The maximum zoom out level at the moment shows probably around 1/8th of the world. If I did end up deciding on allowing the player to see the entire world then I'd have to introduce some LOD optimizations, like not rendering the smallest objects after a certain distance.

[@Rallion1]

I notice the number of frustum tests grew a lot when you zoom out, which to some extent is expected, but just to check if you notice a node is inside the frustum _completely_ do you still split it up and test each of the subnodes?

[@ThinMatrix]

If a node is completely visible then it isn't split up (I showed this happening in the diagram if you look very carefully at 3:58). So if the entire world is showing, there's only one frustum test.

[@rubciu2220]

Love the toaster moment

[@its_meeeet]

While explaining frustum cutting you mentioned we cut them till we get desired level of accuracy, how do set that and how do you know what is desired level ? Thanks

[@ThinMatrix]

The amount of accuracy depends on how many "levels" I set the quad tree to have i.e. how many times it should split up. That's just an arbitrary number that I can set in the code (in the game right now it's 6). I can increase it for more thorough culling if I want, but that will also significantly increase the number of frustum tests each frame. Or if I set it to 1 then there would only be those initial 4 frustum tests, but loads of off-camera objects will unnecessarily be rendered. So it's a trade-off between rendering extra off-camera objects and the number of frustum tests.

[@its_meeeet]

@@ThinMatrix Understood, Thanks for explaining 🌟. That's a very nice way of optimisation. Great devlog 👌🏻 btw , looking forward to more content , Cheers 🙌🏻.

[@NitramiuZ]

Have you done any performance comparisons? What is the difference in fps if you turn of the frustrum culling in the big world now? It would be interesting to know!

[@richeekb]

you're too chill for to me watch.. (I mean that in a good way)..like I've got my exams tomorrow and instead of stu(dying) I'm here. although thank you I feel better tho (being anxious all day idk why)♥ *subs*

[@LogiOriginalGames]

Wow man I love your videos!! It's so inspirational to see you work on your own project and your own passion! Btw, the assets look amazing! Do you make those yourself in Blender?

[@ThinMatrix]

Thanks you! Yes, I made them all in Blender :)

[@iris4547]

lovely view out the window, but does that not get both distracting and strain your eyes? it is convenient you can glance away and have your eyes focus on something in the distance as often as you want, but i dont know if i could have that right in front of me, id rather glance off to the side.

[@Dardasha_Studios]

You motivate me :DD!!!!! Best of luck mate...salam!! :D

[@jonas2560]

I love this format ! And always like some Rufus representation :)

[@MrOmega-cz9yo]

👍Nice video as always! Just out of curiosity, did you do any frustum testing for Equilinox? I also like the background music for your videos and games.

[@ThinMatrix]

Thanks! I was indeed using frustum culling in Equilinox, but I wasn't using it together with a quad-tree. That was something I thought about at the time but never got round to implementing, so I thought I'd give it a go this time :)

[@ЕвгенийВоробъёв-у8т]

Hey man, nice video! What’s model of your chair? Looks cool

[@offlinemoe]

Hope you finish your project 🙃

[@ThinMatrix]

I hope so too!

[@mutater7578]

We have the same keyboard, do you have a keyboard cover you use to keep yours clean?

[@l3gacyb3ta21]

Hi! I'm a big fan, but I want to know how you are able to do this full time, as it seems so nice.

[@ThinMatrix]

I'm able to do it full-time thanks to the income I get via Patreon, KZbin, and the sales of my previous game :)

[@falcowinkler2429]

very interesting video as always! does the frustum-only rendering optimization take into account shadows? or in other words, does an object e.g. above/behind the camera still throw a shadow into the view of the camera?

[@KestrelQ]

I have a question about quad-trees, they are something I really needed to implement into my game but I never quite understood how the "chunks" you mention are made up. Let's say you have 4 chunks and a sphere. The sphere moves around so it can belong to different chunks depending on where it is. How can you then say "the sphere is in this chunk, so we need to test the sphere"? And what if it's in 2 chunks? I think I'm not really understanding the concept well. Do you perhaps have a good piece of documentation you used for this process that I can learn from?

[@ThinMatrix]

Here's the code for the quad-tree if you're interested: pastebin.com/K6Jr0RwQ So there are two ways you could handle the issue that you mentioned. What I've done is to surround each chunk with an AABB which is slightly bigger than the chunk itself. So there's actually some overlap between the AABBs of neighbouring chunks. It's these AABBs that I use during the frustum calculations. I've used a padding of 2 in my game, so that will work as long as no objects are larger than 4 tiles in diameter. Even if a sphere of diameter 4 is right on the edge of a chunk, it will still fully fit within that chunk's AABB. The alternative is to allow an object to be in multiple chunks. Then to check whether an object is visible you find all the chunks that that object is in, and return true if any of those chunks are visible.

[@KestrelQ]

@@ThinMatrix Thanks a lot for the explanation and the code sample! I appreciate you taking the time to help me. It's making a bit more sense, an explanation along with some code really helps me see things clearer :) I'll give it a go!

[@dkcas11]

I'm curious to know why you went to a Quad Tree and not a KD-tree?

[@ukyo6195]

What about your first game? Will you share some infos about bug fixes, sells updates and so one?

[@JimiCanRead]

What camera do you use?

[@MrZhootSe]

I love your videos mate. Makes me want to do more game development.. But I'm slowly moving away from programming since I just keep loosing the jobs I do get..

[@sp1cypepper]

What mouse do you use? Just curious

[@CJDaBomb69]

I have a question. Will you ever make a tutorial for this sort of game(3D game in Java?) I know you have before, but that playlist is 8 years old, so almost everything is probably very outdated by now.

[@onepieceworld121]

Hello, Im new in ur channel & wanna know how u started game development, what were ur first programming languages learned ever, what will u suggest a rookie who wishes to learn Game Dev. Please...

[@MrTomateSalat]

Can we create a conspiracy theory based of the jump-scare at 9:11?

[@vast634]

How can you work with a window directly behind the monitors? Isnt that blinding?

[@ThinMatrix]

I have blinds on each of the three windows, so I often close the necessary one if it gets too bad. But in the Summer the sun is too high in the sky to come directly in the window, and in winter it's mostly cloudy, so a lot of the time it's not too much of an issue.

[@jcvb1393]

Noticed the Obi shopping cart: Where in Germany do you live?

[@ThinMatrix]

Hamburg (I'm from the UK though)

[@jcvb1393]

@@ThinMatrix whoa I would have guessed that too, I think I recognized some place outdoors in another video but couldn't tell what it was. I live in Hamburg, too.

[@Noobieswede]

What language are you writing in?

[@Danuxsy]

It's crazy how inefficient and slow game dev is. Hopefully next-gen AI systems can replace devs and generate games by itself from user input, this also democratize the game creation process and allow the large majority to be creative and have their visions come to life. I predict that by the 2030s we'll have AI capable of reproducing games like World of Warcraft or Diablo! We are finally moving towards the personalized content era.

[@hengstus8411]

Am I wrong in thinking that you're the one who single-handedly popularized the whole 'Indie Game Devlogs' concept? This format has only become popular a few years ago whereas you've been doing this for (almost?) a decade now!

[@ThinMatrix]

I think it was actually Dani who did most of the popularizing a few years ago when he started getting millions of views on his devlogs. But I think I've probably been doing this the longest!

[@hengstus8411]

@@ThinMatrix Oh yeah, that is probably true. However, I do think you've been very influental in this space -- I've certainly seen many KZbin creators who have clearly been inspired by your style in particular!

[@peterprins862]

Doesn't unity have it's own spatial subdivision?

[@ThinMatrix]

Maybe! I'm not using Unity though, I'm making my own engine for this game.

[@Arkogelul]

You had fun with those screen transitions, didn't you 😀 It's nice to see this format back for a bit.

[@ThinMatrix]

When I'm filming it always seems like such a good idea to transition from screen to camera, but when I get round to actually editing the video I end up wishing I hadn't added so many because they're quite annoying to edit haha :P

[@Arkogelul]

@@ThinMatrix I likes it a lot. It felt like a good way to show what you do in detail in a creative manner. It felt nice. And it showed you had fun filming it.

[@MrVectrexUK]

Absolutely LOVE your devlogs, it's amazing to watch the game get built before our eyes! Also, am always so jealous of your food - you need to start adding your recipes to the video descriptions 😀

[@ArmanNobari]

As a fellow game dev, your dev logs have been incredibly motivating and reassuring. You capture an aspect of game dev that is hard to describe; something between persistence, and the willingness to reevaluate past choices. Anyway, it always makes my day when you upload something, and I appreciate how you produce these a ton. Can't wait to play Homegrown!

[@MohammedPlaysMC]

Followed you for years man, Its so amazing to always see the progress and I love you explaining stuff and why it makes it feels so much better to be involved I am excited to buy this game!

[@TheRealThatOneCookie]

I need this game, no matter the cost I WILL get it

[@skiesquiggles7319]

I always learn something new from your videos! I have so much respect for the work you do and the knowledge you have.

[@PainfullyMintE]

Just realised I've been watching your videos for over 6 years now! Thank you for making such relaxing, refreshing videos for so long man, I'll keep on enjoying them for many years to come :)

[@lemlihoussama2905]

Great progress ! You can also ignore rendering small entities as they are not that visible when the camera is far away (Zoomed out), maybe you can add a minimum camera zoom to be rendred to the meta data of the entities, also I think it will look cool to have an opacity transition with that.

[@pritamdavis]

Your dev log videos are a must watch. I would say they are not just videos but experiences that you share. Absolutely love it... Great Job!

[@VictorTryingToBeGameDev]

You know, for a long time your devlogs have been an inspiration for me to start my own journey of becoming a full time game dev. Excellent work with devlog as always. Keep it going! BTW. much respect for writing your own engine. I was working for some time with libGDX and was very happy with it, but decided to switch to Unity just to be able to prototype fast.

[@brutalbunny]

@4:56 obviously does not impact me whatsoever but the absolute Fullness of that plate/bowl is killing me. you can't even remove one noodle without risking everything spilling overboard. that is such a load bearing fork. the structural integrity... my god

[@juiced9432]

Why is every single solo game dev working on a farming game?

[@mrnameless-666]

If you still do tutorials you should make a lwjgl 3 tutorial because the tutorial you made is for lwjgl 2

[@Voix1000x]

Would be cool if there was a Garden Gnome guy living in the house, and walking in the garden

[@unbossedgames9820]

7:51 hopefully we will see this in the game too, seasons, specific plants and planning for the year :D

[@larsfroelich]

Do you eat your lunch while coding?

[@phodaOG]

This might be one of best episodes. I like more technical stuff and data so it was awesome. Actually also like the genre of game so will also enjoy playing it. As before, your videos are great motivation for me too.

[@HarperJenna]

I always feel a little joy when i see a new ThinMatrix video popping up on my Subscriber feed :)

[@awarts3415]

Fantastic transition! @6:07

[@DevelopAnEngine]

You right, a pro dev blog move 🤩

[@gibz_]

Maybe you could make a dock by the water which could act as a transport to the town or shop area so the player has the entire island to grow their crops, maybe you could make mutated crops that are variants of others with slightly different features that the player could discover and sell for more, it’s a bit far out but could be fun and intriguing for the player to have a sense of exploration and discovery.

[@360McCarthy]

Awesome as always! Would love to see a technical episode going over the high level architecture you have as it's a custom engine

[@NeilRoy]

Very nice! I played around with Frustum culling in C and man, does it ever make a HUGE difference in speed! Another, fairly simple method is Backface culling which deals with objects that are in your view, you just test to see if they are facing the camera or not and if not, you do not render them either. That's probably one of the easiest to implement. Another is Occlusion culling where you can use your depth filter to see if one object blocks another from view... but for a project like this, that's all probably a tad overboard. The quad tree is a great idea as well.

[@selgesel]

Mad props for using Java AND sticking with Eclipse! As a professional web dev of 12+ years I've never really liked any of its competitors but I finally accepted IntelliJ for its extensive support for the JDK ecosystem as well as the built-in database tools, so it's been a refreshing sight to see my beloved IDE still rocking it!

[@matejbutkovic9001]

Your week of development videos are my favorite KZbin videos. Been watching since equinox, thank you for continuing to make these. They’re a true inspiration!

[@hambonetunes1988]

Gosh man, this is looking so good! Are you just using a directional light for the GI? The models are looking quite smooth, is that just hardware aliasing?

[@simonbaxter8001]

How do you handle shadows for items just outside the culling area, but which cast shadows into the view? Is your doggo a Cockapoo?

[@ThinMatrix]

I haven't actually implemented culling for the shadow pass yet, but what I'll do is carry out an extra frustum culling test on the quad tree using the "frustum" (for the shadow pass it's actually just a box, because ortho-projection) that's used for rendering objects to the shadow map during the shadow pass. And no, he's a Havanese :)

[@simonbaxter8001]

@@ThinMatrix Thanks. Am I right in thinking that the fustrum culling approach can also be used for loading/unloading map tiles in larger game play areas???

[@ThinMatrix]

@@simonbaxter8001 For that I'd probably just load chunks that are within a certain range of the camera/player, and unload chunks when they go out of range. I think you probably wouldn't want chunks that are right behind the camera to be unloaded just because the camera is looking in the other direction, which would happen if you based it on frustum culling.

[@simonbaxter8001]

@@ThinMatrix Thanks for the reply.

[@BeerfootBandit]

These devlogs always inspire me to work more on my game, and the food you cook inspires me to get hungry