Pre-Alpha v.0.3

This week I've done a ton of refactoring of code to provide a more sustainable base moving forward. There are two major sections of refactoring to cover: Crops and Mapping. For reference the game engine being used for the game is Godot.

Gameplay

The main gameplay changes to be aware of are how you get soil bases and seeds. Before there would be static objects that you'd spam click to acquire them. Now they are in the changing world. Seeds can be obtained from breaking the tall grass patches that spawn in the world, Soil bases and materials are now also smaller spawnable rocks that spawn in the quarry section with the other ores. Trees currently spawn in the world as well but do not serve any function yet. This is just prep work for future development.

Crops

With the crops how everything was coded before they were tied to a tilemap and/or tileset. This functionally worked however, it created limitations with what I could or could not do with the game.  What I ended up doing is switching most things away from the tilemap node and making most things their own individual scenes as nodes/classes. What this allows me to do is more creatively modify individual tiles or objects and provide more utility and versatility to everything. You can now place soil bases anywhere on the ground, not just dirt tiles. It enables things like outlining objects when the mouse is hovering it (you can do this with tilesets but there are many more limitations on this). Previously all of the crop system was tied to a specific Tilemap, with them being their own individualized scenes it allows the option for multiple maps or creating a bigger world where you can farm anywhere on the world.

Mapping

The main change with this has to do with tile size and render window. Previously every tile was 16x16 upscaled to  32x32 and zoomed in to create very large looking tiles. I ended up deciding to no longer upscale the tiles and no longer zoom in. This creates a much larger map in the same window that looks a bit better at the cost of slightly smaller objects. The reason behind this is initially I wanted to have a heavy focus on micromanaging just a small number (15-20) farm tiles; however, after some playing I personally felt like this wasn't very rewarding/fun. The mechanics are all still the same in managing a crop; however, they are much less micro-managey in feel. (i.e. You don't have to constantly adjust a tiles water level every second, you have to get it to the level it needs then just check back every minute or so to make sure it's still in the range it needs to be).

Player

Due to the now larger map size I felt it was beneficial to add in an actual player that moves around the map. It currently is only placeholder.  However you use WASD keys to move the player around the map. Most objects have a requirement that the player needs to be within 2 tiles to interact with it, but not every object has been updated with this yet. 

Seasons/Weather

Again the refactoring in the code enables a ton of versatility and customization with the art and world. One of the changes I was able to implement from this was a live season changer. Each season lasts 1 minute and then will progress to the next. Currently this is entirely cosmetic but I am debating if I want to tie crops to specific seasons or not. Let me know what you think in regards to this.

Bugs

It's worth mentioning that this was an incredibly large code refactor if you couldn't tell. As a result I was not able to quash any bugs from last week and in all honesty probably created several more from the refactor itself. If you see anything let me know. I will jump on those as soon as I am able to!