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[TyNorman]

Cursed Seasons (Tentative title) is a Rogue-lite farming sim game where you must break your cursed fate while surviving the harsh wilderness using what little inheritance you've gained.













ABOUT THE PROJECT:
I've been working on this project outside of work over the past 7 months, with the farming prototype done a year ago. Since I work alone and don't have any professional game development experience, I've stuck with using Unity and C# for simplicity's sake. All art and animations are done by myself, although I'm not a professional artist either.

I started this project with the dumb idea of "could you make a Rogue-lite game out of any genre?", which then made me get really attached to the idea of doing a Harvest Moon-inspired farming sim. I consider the game to be two halves that connect with each other. One half of the project is a Harvest Moon-inspired farming system to provide yourself with resources to assist with the combat half of the game, which draws heavy inspiration from Link to the Past and The Binding of Isaac.

Currently I'm not very far with the project, but the current major milestone is to have a playable demo slice of the overall game sometime next year, featuring one of the default playable characters. Lately I've been working on required systems for the game, specifically the complete farming mechanics, inventory management, and NPC interaction.

I often tweet about what I'm working on @TyNorman

[Pixel Noise]

Like the idea! Though not sure I 100% like the font you've got right now - sometimes it's just a bit squirrely/tough to read.

[NoLocality]

I dig the idea as well.


I've only played a handful of rogue-type games but they mostly seem to add up to how far one gets or how powerful/developed one manages to get their character.

It's kinda refreshing to imagine progress measured in how developed the ol' farm was instead.  I imagine people speaking of their experiences with this one like "...and I had the biggest corn-maze and level 4 carrots, level 4 dude!  It was crazy, I was almost to year 7 for the first time but those slimes caught me off guard while fertilizing the radishes.  Not gonna fall for that next time..."

Gonna follow and see where you're going with this.



Also I see a smiling cat face in the leaves of your tree character...intentional?

[TyNorman]

Like the idea! Though not sure I 100% like the font you've got right now - sometimes it's just a bit squirrely/tough to read.

Hey, thanks for the feedback! I've felt the same way about the font, it's been in a rough first pass state for a couple months now. Definitely keeping that in mind when I get around to the next shot at it.

Also I see a smiling cat face in the leaves of your tree character...intentional?

Totally! The Nyamph is a cat-like tree spirit, her design first started as a simple tree with a cat face and paw-shaped roots. I was showing it around to some friends and got suggestions to add leaf ears and the face design in the top leaves.

[TyNorman]

Now that the holidays are over and I'm back into my work schedule, I've been chipping away at the crop system in time for #screenshotsaturday. Most of that time was spent learning how to save and load tile data and parsing it using JSON. Most likely I'll end up improving these assets and making sure they reflect the amount of crops that are added to the player's inventory when harvested, but for now I'll stick with them.

Currently there's two crops:
Blastbeans - Bomb items, along the lines of bombs in The Legend of Zelda series and The Binding of Isaac.
Kamimame - A small bean imbued with great power. Won't be as common as the test above.

Aside from that, I spent a good amount of time refactoring my old crop system from the farming prototype I made a year ago. Mainly I wanted to make sure I set up my classes in a way that'll make it easier for me to implement new items and crops as the project goes on.

I'm aiming to work on crop harvesting next, minus the animations until I'm up for it. I also want to work on layer sorting next since there's some major overlapping going on in that first image. Still lots of bugs to fix too, along with other tasks I've been putting off for a while.

[TyNorman]

It's been a slow couple of weeks between work, Screensaver Jam, and everything else. Finished a couple of simple animations for harvesting crops and adding them to the player's inventory, so now the crop system is nearly complete. I'm hoping to move onto a bit of location work next, then eventually some NPC implementation along with related tasks (improving my not-too-great dialogue system, implementing shops). Finally, in the coming weeks I'm also hoping to do more work on combat and eventually start working on dungeons within the next few months.

For now, I've laid out a nearly 100% complete map of the player's home area. Things might get added to it as development progresses, but for now I'm pretty much done with the first (and probably most important) area of the game. Also laid out the overall game world layout on paper to give myself a good idea of how everything should connect.

[TyNorman]

Finally got around to making an animation for a race of NPCs I've wanted to make since summer. I kept putting the task off until I had the start of a dialogue system going, but that ended up transitioning into working on swapping locations, object interaction, the item system, map boundaries, crops, and various other things. Now that those are all pretty much done, I've made my first Erosian NPC to be used to debug NPC interaction and dialogue improvements for the next little while.

Erosians are a peaceful race comprised of rocks. Humans see them as monsters, hence to avoid any conflict they inhabit their own village deep in the wilderness. Erosians are seen as master craftsmen and blacksmiths, capable of carving rock and shaping metals into structures, tools, and art. However, there exists rogue bandits and thieves known to attack humans.

When I first made the Erosians' front-facing sprite, I cut out shapes from the boulder sprite I made on the same day. This ended up making it easier to make a believable transforming animation, since all of the main shapes except the feet fit within the boulder sprite. Using flat-coloured segments, I made 7 frames of animation to see how it'd look before moving onto shading. When laid on top of each other they formed a solid movement trail that already gave me a good idea of how it'd turn out.

From there I brought the spritesheet into Unity to do an animated test. Once I was happy with it, I did outlines, flat colours, and once I was happy with how it was turning out I did the last bit of shading. I'm very pleased with how it turned out, I was sorta dreading making this for a while but it ended up taking way less time than I thought.

Lately I've started working on the second pass at the typeface I made back in August. This time I increased the size limits I set on myself (from 5px tall/4px wide to 7px tall/5px wide).

Link's Awakening has been a major source of inspiration for this project, and since I loved its dialogue typeface I went with making an italic version of mine since I wasn't really into the initial second pass. I'll probably end up using both, I prefer the italic version for larger blocks of text like item descriptions and dialogue. The standard version looks neat and concise for small UI portions like the HUD and other numerical displays.

After I finish adjusting everything to the new typefaces, I plan on improving the awful dialogue system I wrote back in summer to accommodate for proper dialogue chains. From there, I'll probably start pushing out from the player's home area to work on new locations.

[TyNorman]

I've slipped on keeping Cursed Seasons' devlog updated, there's been lots added to the game since January!



The base resolution has been doubled, which also led to creating improved assets for the UI. There's still a few odds and ends in the inventory screen that require new art, but for the most part it's pretty much complete.



I dove into my first serious bit of procedural generation and it's been thoroughly enjoyable. I've got lots more to do on the dungeon side of things, but I've put it on hold to fix a ton of bugs that've been floating around for months and have a live demo build prepped.

There's loads more I'm probably forgetting about, but to make up for lost time here's a batch of gifs of several aspects of Cursed Seasons.

If inconsistent devlogs aren't your thing, I'm always posting about my development process on Twitter!