Devlog Day 5: Life at Pixel Farm

A difference of Day 🌞 and Night 🌜

Hello fellow devs! 🌱 Today, I’m thrilled to share my fifth day of progress on my casual VR farming game, “Life at Pixel Farm.” This project is for the GameDev․tv Game Jam , and it’s shaping up quite nicely. As a quick refresher, “Life at Pixel Farm” is a VR game built with Unity, featuring a 2D pixel art aesthetic.

I had a blast today as I hosted a live stream again on my YouTube channel . It’s great to get some real-time feedback and interaction while working on the game. Thanks to everyone who joined me! Make sure to subscribe and join the next!

Seed Selection and Display 🌱

Today’s focus was on showing the selected seed in the player’s right hand. Since I had already set everything up with UniRX for seed selection, implementing this feature was a breeze. I added a MonoBehavior that sets the sprite based on what is selected. I made sure that the sprite of the selected seed would hide when no crop is seleced. It started out with a screen filling giant seed bag, but after some tweaking and scaling this down it looked good enough.

Adding Tools to the Menu 🎮

I’ve also added some essential farming tools to the menu attached to the left controller. You’ll now find pixel art versions of a hoe, rake, and watering can. I created a simple enum to keep track of what’s selected and added this to the GameState class as a ReactiveProperty. This way, handling changes will be just as easy as crop selection. To wrap things up, I added the selected tool to the right controller as well. Tomorrow, I plan on implementing these tools so they actually work.

I disabled some default features on the VR controllers like poke interaction since we don’t need it for this game. However, it was showing some geometry that wasn’t necessary.

Working on Day/Night Cycle 🌞🌚

The last significant task during today’s live stream was refining our day/night cycle. With Rosie’s help, we quickly created a script to rotate the main light source over time. This change also affected the sky texture, causing the sun to move across the sky realistically throughout the day. We spent some time tinkering with nighttime settings to ensure it doesn’t get too dark.

Looking Forward

There’s still plenty of polish needed to make “Life at Pixel Farm” look its best, but we’re approaching that exciting point where our creation can truly be called a game! Stay tuned for more updates as we continue building this immersive and entertaining VR farming experience. Make sure to follow the Itch.io page of the game to say up to date.

Happy coding! 🚀