Space Farm devlog 10

This update is all about plants!  I've been neglecting them since I felt like I got so much done last time I touched them, so here's a few much-needed features.

When I added seed bags, I had them default to a turnip plant, which felt like an appropriate first crop to add to the game.  Unfortunately, I simply hard-coded it to plant a turnip when used, so in this work session I changed the code to actually create the type of plant defined in the inspector window.  For some reason this changed the collision relationship between plants and their parent dirt block, so I had to redo a little bit of my code for detecting which block is being hit when the player clicks.  The end result is I can now more easily create a seed bag for each unique plant I add to the game.  Nifty!

In the process of working on seed bags, I went ahead and added plant prefabs to the Resources folder alongside the tools, blocks, etc I moved earlier.  I'm not entirely sure I needed to do this, however, as the seed bag is currently taking a drag-n-drop prefab input for which plant to grow.  I'm imagining at some point I'll rework this to remove the drag-n-drop requirements by converting the name of the seed bag into the corresponding plant name and attempting to load based on that new name, but that also seems a little unnecessary right now.  I'm putting it on the back-burner and will come back to it later.

Last but not least, I added some more functionality to the existing plant growth stages code.  Previously, after harvest every plant would just revert to the "just been planted" seedling state and regrow.  Now I can choose which growth stage a plant can return to after being harvested, if any.  This ended up being difficult mostly because I had forgotten how my old code worked.  I'm using four different variables to decide if a plant can move on to its next growth state: current game time (Time.time), growth stage time, growth start time, and elapsed plant growth time.  It's a little fuzzy in my head still, but the equation comes out to be as follows:

If current time > the starting timestamp + how long the plant's been growing + how long it should stay in this stage, then move on to next stage

When I tried to have a plant start in a new stage after harvest, the elapsed time variable threw me off.  When a growth stage is complete, the elapsed time variable is incremented by that stage's growth stage time variable.  For a while there, I had it programmed so plants were taking as long to grow from any stage as they would have from a seedling because I was using that elapsed time variable wrong.  It no longer needed to care about how much time should have elapsed to reach this stage, just how much time had actually gone by relative to the growth start time, which I was already resetting to Time.time after harvest.  As I'm trying to write this out, I'm realizing I can make this a little cleaner by combining the start time with the elapsed time to make one variable that's the timestamp of last growth:

Timestamp of last growth + how long it stays in this stage = timestamp at which it moves to next stage

Wish I had thought of this while I was working the other day!  I'll put a new task in my Trello board.  Thanks for being my rubber ducky, internet friend!

Speaking of my Trello board, I've made a new category I can drop cards into called "things missing art" so I can better see which tasks are pending which type of work.  A couple of my categories got pretty empty when I made this change, which helped me see what actually needs to be started next in a few places.  As a result, I've groomed a couple more features that I'll likely work on next time-- one for item and inventory management, and one for farming.  Yay!

Space Farm devlog 9

I've got some fancy gif progress shots for you this time!  For the past week, I've been working mostly on the GUI and inventory functions, and I think I've gotten a lot done.

First, the hotbar:

Woo, hotbar!  Now I can kinda sorta see what item I have selected for use.  Well, once I get more icons in, at least.  The code for this is a little hairy.  Specifically for the player's inventory, any time the inventory is updated I split it into two arrays-- one for the hotbar, and one for the rest of the inventory.  These two arrays are used solely for updating the GUI, so I don't have to do any weird swapping around when it's time to let the player move things between them.  And as the gif shows, everything gets visually updated correctly when you place down or pick up an item.

I've also started on functionality to let the player pick up blocks again once they've placed them.  Right now, the player can pick them up by hitting them with the mattock three times.  This one I'm kinda proud of-- I added a little "decay" timer for the counter that tracks how many hits a block has received, so they'll have to hit it three times in a 10-second window to actually pick it up.  This is in case the player just hits it by accident every now and then, like I am prone to doing in these sorts of games.

My future goals for item dropping involve an intermediary step, where the object is dropped into the world as a floating item the player can choose to pick up by either clicking or walking over it instead of just automatically cramming it into their inventory.  I haven't picked which method to use yet, but I'm leaning towards walking over to avoid adding too-specific of controls to the interface.  I'll have to sit down and map this feature out before I can really get started on it, regardless.

In addition to these features, I've done some light refactoring and code clean-up during the times when I want to work but can't really get anything big done.  I reworked my inventory manager class to hold an array of inventory items instead of just game objects, which improves readability by getting rid of lots and lots of "get component" calls everywhere.  I also did a little code review with a good friend who reminded me that lambda expressions are scary but also beautiful, so a few of my functions have been reduced in length by a good 75% or more.  There's still a few messy spots left to clean up, but they'll also be affected by the item dropping feature, so I'll wait and scoop them up with the rest of the carnage that will likely leave behind.

In the meantime, my "tech debt and bugs" list on Trello has had a few more cards added to it in the past few days, so I should probably get the more urgent of those knocked out before I really get going on any "big" features.