Devlog Day 8: Life at Pixel Farm

Fine-tune & Polish ✨

Hello fellow devs! 🌱 Today, I’ll share my progress on Day 8 of developing a casual VR farming game for the GameDev․tv Game Jam . The game is built with Unity and has a 2D aesthetic despite being in VR to follow the theme of the jam, “Life in 2 dimensions”. There’s just one problem - I miscalculated the duration of the jam! I initially thought it was running for 10 days, but the first day was only a few hours because it started in the evening. So, my planning was one day off. Fortunately, I had the main game loop done already, but I might not be able to implement all features I had planned. We’ll see.

Beautifying the World 🌳

I worked a lot on making the world look better today. The farming areas have been expanded from 3 to 9, and I added teleportation places for each area. To make teleportation easier, I also added a path between them. A farmhouse is now present, surrounded by more trees to give it that cozy farm feel. Oh, and let’s not forget the rooster’s morning call – my daughter suggested that! 🐓

Watering and Harvesting Animations 💦

I created an animation for when you water the plants using SpriteMancer to create a particle effect and rendered that as a pixel art animation to fit the game’s aesthetic. I also added an animation for when you harvest the crops. For both animations, I created a small script that automatically destroys a game object when an animation is complete – pretty handy!

Tool Selection Improvements 🔧

I tweaked how tools are shown in your right hand so it’s more visible which tool is selected. This should help make gameplay smoother and more intuitive.

What’s Next? ⏭️

With just one day left (Monday 5/29), all that remains is testing, bug fixing, and releasing the game! It’s been quite the journey creating this casual VR farming experience, and I hope you enjoyed following along. Stay tuned for the final product! And make sure to watch the Itch.io page of the game and try out the game soon.

Happy coding! 🚀