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!
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