Undergrowthan open-ended farming sim with a survival/craft heart!(check out our 
Patreon
for even more info!)
For: Cross-Platform PC - requires OpenGL 3.xHi, I'm Dmetri! I'm a self-taught programmer who has been coding for around ~11 years and I'm a nobody in the game industry (for now!) I'm currently the sole member of Hyper Salt Interactive, the studio behind Undergrowth. I'm doing the programming and art for Undergrowth - I have a lot of experience in art and design and I'm confident in producing some high quality art at the polishing phase (for now it's just 2 minute placeholder stuff). Fortunately, even though I'm a solo dev, I have a thick skin, very sharp listening skills, and a strong dedication doing what needs to be done to make this the best game it can be.
I'm also quite friendly so if you want to comment or ask a question, go for it!
I've been told I give useful feedback and advice to other devs, so don't be shy if you need a hand.
On an engine built from scratch...Undergrowth is built on a custom engine that's been developed with the D Programming Language over the past several months. I use SDL2 for input and the client window, Fmod for sound, and I'm working with OpenGL directly for rendering.
I've chosen this route for several reasons:
I wanted tight control over my graphics pipeline and needed direct access to OpenGL
I wanted to put in a lot of support for modders
I didn't want to learn the ins and outs of a 3rd party product just so I'd understand how to circumvent half of its features
I enjoy building game engines
About Undergrowth
What's the gameplay like?Fun! But to be more specific...
At the beginning of the game you have nothing, you'll need to explore your map for resources. Chop trees for wood, mine rock for stone, harvest wild plants for food and seeds, etc. During the day you need to eat, you'll need to defend yourself from enemies, and you'll need to keep your morale up to remain productive and to fuel your nighttime adventures. You have limited energy and when you're tired you'll need to sleep - in a safe place! As your body rests you gain access to your spiritual form where you can hone a wide range of magical abilities from healing small wounds to raising continents up from the depths! Over time you'll craft better tools and more impressive structures and draw together other lost souls into a community that both rely on your resources and will help you with your work. Although getting the basics done is simple, you'll have to strategically cultivate new crops, discover the keys to your crush's heart, and forge the finest armor to stand a chance against the ultimate challenge!
Why does this game need to exist?Undergrowth is the scratching of an itch. For a long time I've wanted to play a game that combines farming sims like
Harvest Moon and
Stardew Valley with survival games like
Don't Starve and for it to have sandbox/world-building and procedural generation along the lines of
Minecraft and
Terraria. I want to play games that have the charm of the SNES era of gaming, but I also want it to be much more sophisticated than those games could ever become with their limitations. The genres these games belong to have so much overlap, but many of their conventions would outright break a game that tried to merge them all naively.
I've worked very hard to design fun and creative solutions for where these genres intersect at bad angles and turned each into very cool features.
Status!?I'm aiming for a playable alpha by the end of the year (2018)!
Most of the core map and core UI pieces are done, a lot of art and content needs to be translated from my design notes to be playable, so it might take another year or two thereafter for the full release.
Core Features:- A story of mystery, humour, and intrigue
- Destructible 3D voxel terrain with dynamic lighting/shadows and a 2D pixel art aesthetic
- Expandable landmass, 16+ biomes
- Gather resources and manage items
- Deep crafting/cross-breeding/cooking options
- Changing seasons and day/night cycle
- Eccentric communities of potential helpers that rely on you
- Progression via crafting tools, using magic, building structures, and consuming food
- Survive by producing enough to eat, building a safe haven, and fighting enemies for you and your community
- Play solo or with friends
- Equip items and customize your character
- Intuitive mod API (Lua & YAML/JSON) an official mod creation wizard/resource mod is planned for release
Early Development Screenshots:Here are some screens to show how the terrain functions. Shadows and textures will go up in quality in the coming months
I'm hoping to put up the lifecycle of a plant and some characters walking around soon!
Thanks for your support!Even just viewing this topic you've ticked up the view count and given me a little piece of motivation to keep going strong! If you've told a friend about this project, or dropped me a line, or left a comment, you're helping more than you know, and I appreciate it so much!
And if you're truly an angel, you may have checked out the additional info over at Patreon and considered, maybe, possibly, donating a dollar or two to give me the option to spend more time on completing Undergrowth - even the consideration warrants a big thank you from the bottom of my heart. If you do decide to donate, that kind of support for a game in pre-alpha is something I plan to repay many times over - helping someone start from nothing deserves big rewards down the line.
Community
