Intro
Welcome to Moondrop Dale! A tattered beat up little garden house has been left to you by the city by an unknown donor that had recently passed away. Your goal is to tidy up the property and revive the once flourishing garden to its proper glory.
Inspiration
I love farming games, and I thought doing a demake of Stardew Valley mixed with Plants vs. Zombies Zen Garden would be a fun entry! Especially since I’m always talking about my plans for a game called Tor’s Garden.
Scope
Since it is for a jam, I have to try and focus on keeping the scope quite trim (at least for the jam ) so here is what I have planned so far:
- Grid based movement. (almost like Awaken but you’ll be able to “face” the 4 directions)
- No more than a dozen or so plant items (flowers, veggies, fruits, just random totally inaccurate items). These will grow based on their time to day cycles and how much water treatment they get.
- Only 2 “map” views (static screens really) one for the garden and one for the shop.
- The player will be able to select between two characters (just affects the skin) Tor, and Lol.
- Player will have a handheld device for interacting with settings, buying/selling items and seeds, saving.
- I’d like to add a “fishing” spot, because come on, the game wouldn’t be complete without it
- Day/Night cycles.
So lets see if I can cram all that in! I am super excited about this.
log
Checklist:
- Character select screen
- Right now this just changes the sprite.
- Saving mechanic
- Use handheld to open menu.
- Go to save option and use action to save.
- Field data should be written to the
field
file. - Money should be saved as cookie.
- Seed inventory and unlock status will be written to file
items
- Field data should be written to the
- Purchase/Selling mechanics
- Purchase
- Use handheld to open menu
- Go to purchase view (pop up menu)
- Select seed and use action button to purchase.
- Selling
- Crops auto sell at harvest
- Purchase
- Purchase items
- Seeds (for crops)
- other?
- Planting mechanics
- Equipping planter
- select crop seed
- Activate planter on empty plot
- Equipping planter
- Tool selections
- Grid based player movement
- Field design
- 6x6 grid of plots for crops to be planted.
- Save/Load field data from file
- Crop selections :
- 0 Empty unplanted.
- 1 Turnip turnip;
- 2 Radish radish;
- 3 Daisy daisy;
- 4 Coffee coffee;
- 5 Tea tea;
- 6 GreenBean greenBean;
- 7 Tomato tomato;
- 8 Blueberry blueberry;
- 9 MagicFruit magicFruit;
etc?
[Edit 1]
I quickly threw together a palette, started a Javitto project in FemtoIDE, and threw together a really quick concept page of where I’m going to be heading with this.
Behold, in all the programmer art glory:
Shown are some basic ideas that will be present:
- Fishing/Water gathering spot.
- House (entering the hut will end the day and save progress)
- Player intro design (Thinking Rayman style)
- Tool and targeting mechanism.
- Basic planting.
- Pathway to “village” (just for selling/buying items)
[Edit 2]
Not too much to report except that I finally initialized a github repository for the code
[Edit 3]
Alright, new stuff added today!
- Added sprite for Tor (unfinished)
- Character select screen! (Tor or Lol, Lol is not yet started really)
- Added initial Garden field view. No sprites or assets for the property yet.
- Added some initial code structure for save manager, inventory manager, etc…
- Worked on the grid based movement system I want to use, including the cursor to identify the action zone. This will eventually only appear when an actionable item is equipped from the inventory view.
Bonus:
- Been tinkering with how to save data. Since this game will have lots of things to save, I quickly learned that Javitto’s cookie was not going to cut it. So now the idea of a more custom File read/write in Javitto is in the works. Looks like I could do some nice inline_cpp in javitto to interface with SDFileSystem! So let’s see where this goes many thanks to @FManga as always for being patient with my constant rambling, and to @carbonacat and @HomineLudens and everyone else that helped out today in the chat.
# Demo 2!
Here be the bin:
Moondrop Dale.bin (127.3 KB)
Source for the curious: GitHub - Torbuntu/MoondropDale_Pokitto: Pokitto farming/garden sim game
This also requires the following:
- drop this into the
music
folder: mddal.raw (459.6 KB)
Details
- Many bugs, might just crash out of nowhere. Demo at your own risk
- Gameplay is mostly just turnip planting at this point. But you should be able to save up to buy the Fishing Rod only $100!
- “Talk” to the door to immediately end the current day.
- Unlock new crops in the shop! (Some are quite spendy)
- Now with “Continue” and “New Garden” options in the Title screen. (This should work, might be buggy, let me know )
Some directions
- Player moves in a grid. The Cursor will show up in the field where farming can happen.
- Watering can is refilled by “using” the can on the river.
- The action to plant is: Hoe → Plant → Water → [grow] → Harvest
- Fishing is simply smashing A until you catch something at this point. I need to tweak it. I’d love to hear some suggestions here
- The day/night cycle is pretty harsh and will just happen. The red meter at the bottom will show you when a day is over, but it ends at “200”, so seems to cut short.
Release Demo!
Here is a pre-release demo version! Hopefully there aren’t any show stopping bugs someone can find
The Bin: Moondrop Dale.bin (142.5 KB)
The Data: MDDaleData.zip (1007.4 KB)
Instructions on Data
- Decompress the archive
- Put the
mddale
folder into/data/
on your SD Card. - Put the .raw music files in
/music/
on your SD Card. - Drop the bin in whichever category you’d like For testing I put mine in
7Demo
Other
I couldn’t get the POP tool to work https://felipemanga.github.io/mkpop/
I uploaded my BIN, but I could not for the life of me upload any screenshots, and it wouldn’t let me take a screenshot from the game either. It just stayed black Hopefully I can figure that out before dropping a real release on itch.io.