Hello Saeges!

What an eventful couple of months! Where to begin? August was a month full of lots of work and progress for the development of the game, despite starting slow as we still recovered from our flu which was a bit more complicated than expected. It was followed by a September that took off with some personal issues that took some time to solve, a small break for our own mental health afterwards, and then back to work. Still, despite the obstacles and less than ideal circumstances we managed to make important progress towards Demo 2 and what will become the Early Access, so let's dive into the new things coming to Farmwand!

The great outdoors.

A very important part of the experience we want to create is that sense of awe you get when exploring a brand new place, finding its secrets and uncovering deep lore behind it. An encounter with mysterious creatures, a sighting of wild animals, a gorgeous landscape...there are so many things we want you all to see! But they require a lot of work, both technical and art-wise. During the past months we've been working on lots of new models for the different places you will visit. From new trees to fill our forests and new kinds of grasses and weeds, mushrooms and rocks to scatter over the land, to new shaders for water bodies and many improvements to our custom renderer to achieve further viewing distances with the same performance.
[previewyoutube=YHj489f7hGE;full][/previewyoutube] We've been also improving the way plants react to the motion of both the player and the many critters that populate the world: [previewyoutube=7QOTtgi8FHw;full][/previewyoutube] And through all the work we are doing with the landscapes (including adding some really needed verticality to the world) there are already some moments of pure wonder to be had!

Working on those creatures

We've also started working on some new creatures for the many locations you will find, as well as their different homes and "lairs". If you are afraid of spiders, this is your last chance to turn back! Tho, these ones are kind of cute...

Improvements to the Farm

And finally, we've been working on a lot of improvements around the farming part of "Farmwand". The AI for the little animals is being developed, we are adding lots of easy to understand popups and icons to know when they need to sleep, eat or when they have something ready to gather... [previewyoutube=C30Bx94zV5g;full][/previewyoutube] But also little QoL details around the crops so that you can, for example, know exactly what you planted and where:
But these are only the things we can show. A lot more has been going on behind the scenes. The spells system is coming along nicely, crafting has been fully revamped so that its internal code can be used for cooking, brewing potions and a lot more...
And Lunahweld Town is taking shape as we speak, with some of the nicest looking spots we have for the game. Lots of things to be excited about as development moves on :D

Hello Saeges!

Our first demo was released, and now it has finally left the store. So many of you played it and gave us invaluable feedback. We are so very, very thankful! And so many of you truly enjoyed it...which is even better! :D But now that the character creation demo is behind us, we need to talk about what comes next. What are the next steps in the development of Farmwand, and what can you expect in the upcoming months. Let's begin!

The Second Demo

First of all, we've started work on what will be a fully realized gameplay demo. With a little bit of all the game's mechanics and a simple series of quests to teach you how to enjoy Farmwand the best, we are hoping this new demo will be a great way to immerse yourselves into the world we are building. There will be potions, spells, charming characters, lots of decorations to get, things to craft and crops to farm! But because of this, it will take a little bit before it is ready. Remember to hop into our Discord or follow our socials (Reddit, Patreon & Twitter) if you want to stay up to date far more frequently. And as we move towards this second demo and what will be our Early Access next year, there were a few things we had to leave behind. That is, our prototype UIs.

New UI designs

It took a little bit of time and a few tries to go from our early prototype seen here:

To the fully realized version of our UI:

From the beginning we decided that the inventory in Farmwand was going to take the form of a magic purse where you can put all sorts of things. While not an "infinite" inventory (we still want you to do a bit of inventory management and to get the satisfaction of expanding it yourself) it is quite big anyway. And you can even carry some cute critters inside! Did we mention that the inventory is customizable? [previewyoutube=59LIytLLovA;full][/previewyoutube] But the magic purse does not work only as an inventory. If you close it and look at its fold, you will see something else...

Skills in Farmwand

Farmwand is a hybrid of RPG and cozy life-sim. But as any good RPG, you will have a good progression system. You already saw that there are different schools and majors during our first demo. Well, each of those "branches" correspond quite well with the different branches in the skill tree. So many skills! But besides these active skills that you can unlock for new abilities, recipes and more, you can also find special passive skill gems. We're trying to give you several ways to build your character around your playstyle, and of course another good reason to play the game more than once!

New Systems, objects and Locations

And finally, something else we've been working on are the many internal systems that will handle the world of Farmwand. One of them is a fully featured Weather System that can generate different events like soft rains, foggy mornings, blizzards and more depending on the season, biome and time of day. This weather system is paired with our Time of Day system and a bunch of graphical features that allow us to simulate snow accumulating over objects, and vegetation changing as the seasons pass.
[previewyoutube=70FFTbnwqfI;full][/previewyoutube] And as you saw in the video above, we've also been working on lots of little houses for what will become Lunahweld town:
And even a brand new Sleepy Dragoppotamus Forge, ready for all your smelting needs!

This update took a little bit to release. During this past month, both of us got really sick with the flu and, just a few days before, our family dog passed away. July has been...eventful. But we hope August will be a much better and happier month, and are already looking forward to sharing with you all the progress we make as we build Demo 2. Thank you for reading, and thank you once again SO MUCH for playing our first lil' demo, and for all the support you've shown us during all this time. Until the next dev log!

Hello Saeges!

Finally, the very first demo for Farmwand is ready. It is a small one, focused on character creation and clocking at around 20 minutes (more if you LOVE to take your time making your character as much as we do), but it works as an introduction to the game and a way to tease the possibilities, the scope and the ways in which Farmwand is aiming to be different from other cozy games out there :)
*And it was the perfect slightly contained experience we needed to learn the many important steps when releasing something on Steam. But more importantly, in this world of trailers, teaser trailers and endless teasers for the teaser trailer...our "teaser" demo is not going to be the last one. Our plan is to release another small demo followed by a more complete and "traditional" one, building up to our Early Access.
We hope you will have a TON of fun playing this demo, creating your characters and sharing them either in our community or through your favorite social media. Please tag us or use the #Farmwand hashtag! And if you like the amount of options we included (spoiler alert: we have a LOT), just remember that there will be barbershops, tailor shops and more in the game where you will be able to acquire even MORE outfits and hairstyles! Enjoy the demo, let us know your thoughts here, on Discord or through the feedback button in the demo itself, but once again just have a lot of fun. And thank you, sincerely, for all your support. For us as newbie indie devs, it has meant so much J & D

Hello Saeges!

Work on our first demo has been going quite well, and its release is coming closer and closer. While it is focused on Character Creation, there is a lot more to it than just customizing your avatar's looks. In this small devlog we will talk about some of the other things we are preparing for the demo, the systems we are building and how they will affect the full game, as well as some other interesting tidbits of what we've been doing in the past month.

The upcoming demo

In Farmwand, you take the role of a young Saege, freshly graduated from Magic School and about to venture into the world. The very first step before your adventure, however, is to define who you are. This is what our upcoming demo will be all about, and it is split into two parts: defining your identity and background, and defining your looks. The "looks" part is now essentially finished. We've been working on a fully featured Character Creator, ensuring that it is compatible and easy to use with a gamepad, and adding tons of content for it. [previewyoutube=Zd7JKPqEqPQ;full][/previewyoutube] By the time the demo is available, you will have at your disposal over 40 hairstyles, more than 30 pieces of clothing, dozens of accessories, facial hairstyles, tattoo options, skin marks...over a hundred customization parts for endless combinations! But that is only part of it. Your character is much, much more than their looks. Who you are is super important too!
So, the upcoming demo will also take you through a small interview to define who your character is. And this will actually have some impact in the way you interact with people! But for it to work, we needed a dialog system. The pre-made ones we could find were simply not cutting it for what we had in mind, nor were easy to integrate with what has become an efficient, but very specific pipeline. It was evident we had to make our own. But what do we have in mind, exactly? What do we need in our dialog system?

The Dialog System

A big and common complaint with life-sims in general is that the dialogs are simple, repetitive and, in the worst cases, lifeless. We do not want that to be the case with Farmwand, and despite our very limited resources we want to do our very best with this part of the game as well. So, our dialog system is being built in a way that each character can have many databases of dialogs, some related to the plot, some to their own stories, some general greetings
Some for the player, some for other NPCs so that they can talk to each other spontaneously...and every dialog and conversation needs a bunch of conditions so that our NPCs can comment more or less accurately to what happens in the world. The goal is that you may come across some random NPC and greet them, and they'll say something like "Hi! What a nice morning, right?" if it is indeed a morning. But some other time, they can say "Sorry, no time to talk! It is mighty cold tonight! Better hurry home" if the situation demands so. Of course we cannot have unlimited dialogs. Well...maybe we could if we went the trendy AI / ChatGPT route, but we want Farmwand to be 100% human made, with love
So hopefully this will be a good step in the right direction towards a more believable and enjoyable life-sim. But boy oh boy, is it a lot of work. This first demo will feature the skeleton of the system, and we will build upon it all the way into the full release, whenever that happens. And in the meantime we've been working on several other things! Like a fully functional on-screen keyboard for gamepad users:
Our goblin bandits, which received a revamp and are now in the engine, being animated and implemented into the game:
And a few general improvements to the way farming works, so that you can more easily tell which crops have been planted where, before they sprout:
Thank you for reading this devlog, and for all the support you've given us so far. The release of the demo is near, and we are super excited to let you try this very first bit of Farmwand. We truly hope you'll love playing it as much as we've loved making it. Till next time!

Hello Saeges!

It has been a bit since our last devlog but we come to you with great news: the first demo for Farmwand, this time all about customization, is coming soon. What are we working on, what are our plans and what can you expect? Read along and find out!

The roadmap

As you may know, we are a very small team. Farmwand is being developed by only the two of us with no help from publishers or any other sources of revenue besides our main jobs and the amount that our Patreons donate. As such, while tackling a game as complex as ours, we need to have a good plan and a good balance between how much content we can make, how fast, and how we get it to you in the best possible way. First impressions matter, and making sure that every part of Farmwand is as polished as it can be is very important. Because of that, we have decided that instead of releasing one big demo close to the release of the Early Access, we will build up to it with several smaller demos scattered in between. The first demo to be released will be focused on Character Creation, as you will see it when you start a new game (with some differences of course, as the game is still in development). There will be more demos, some focused on other mechanics like decoration or potion making, before a last demo that will act as a more complete vertical slice of what you can expect from the game. With your feedback on every demo we will be able to make adjustments, tweak mechanics and polish the experience as we move towards the Early Access, which will grow with more content over time. Once the story is fully playable from beginning to end, the gameplay is all there and there are as few bugs as possible, we will have a version 1.0.
At least that is our plan, and while it has and will take us a while to meet all our goals (again, a tiny team!), we believe this will be the best way to meet them all. It is better to have a good game that took a bit longer than expected, than a rushed and incomplete one. But now, the juicy details. What can you expect from this first demo?

The Character Creation Demo

In Farmwand you are a Saege that has just graduated from one of the four Academies. Which one? Well, that's the fun of it! Our game is half RPG, half life-sim, and as such you will not only choose your appearance but also parts of your background, your skills and more. You will decide who you are at the start of your adventure, in more ways than one. [previewyoutube=JZy9g0XfFQY;full][/previewyoutube] This is Augustus Mysticus Turnip. the Saege that will receive your paperwork and send you off into the wide world. He will be your guide through this small demo. Then you will get to the main portion of the demo, the Character Creation screen. [previewyoutube=Q-zJrmsNlMM;full][/previewyoutube] We have put many, many hours into designing our Character Creation system. From an UI that was simple and easy to understand to the dozens and dozens of items that will be available to you to design your avatar. All sorts of outfits, over 25 diverse hairstyles that were sculpted, painted and set up with physics individually, more than a dozen beards and mustaches, accessories, tops, bottoms, hats, shoes... All sorts of body types, tattoos, skin marks, custom shaders to let you color things to your heart's desire. [previewyoutube=NdVmA02ESHs;full][/previewyoutube]

A few more words about other things

But we haven't been idle on the other fronts. We have now a redesigned, fully functional Inventory UI that is...CUSTOMIZABLE! (yes, we love custom things, yes, we may have a problem). [previewyoutube=GrG8koZ7JQE;full][/previewyoutube] We've also finished adding all planned "normal" crops to the game (around 25) plus a bunch of magical ones. We've kept designing more magical creatures and the larger locations you'll visit:

And all in all, we've kept quite busy. But now, we have a small favor to ask of you. We are inching closer to a thousand wishlists (YAY!), 400 members on reddit and 300 on Twitter. We are so very happy to see so many people liking our work and excited about playing our game, but with your help we can do better. With the demo coming up and us pushing as much work as we can, it is very important to make sure that Farmwand reaches as many people as possible. If you want to help us, please spread the word about our game. Share this article, our other posts, or invite your friends if you think they may like it. Follow us on Twitter (X?), on reddit, Discord and in our other social media. Having more followers also gives our content a push with the different algorithms. You can also take part in the discussions and polls we post regularly over on Discord and reddit, as they are a great way for us to get your feedback and to decide what makes it into the game next. And if you want to support the development even more, we have a Patreon where you can donate a few dollars. Any amount you can give is deeply appreciated, as it helps us directly to cover the development costs of the game (website, tool & service fees, some parts of the game we have to commission, like the music). And of course, once it comes out, play the demo. Tell us what you think, what you like and what could be better. We are still adding some last few things. And testing, doing lots and lots of testing. But it is our hope that you will enjoy this demo a LOT and that it will give you an idea of the level of care and depth that you can expect from the other mechanics and the game itself. It is being made with a lot of love, and we can't wait to hear what you think about it.

Hello Saeges!

It has been a little while. It is 2024 now, and lots of things are happening with the game. It took us a while longer to put together this devlog since, as luck would have it, we started the new year sick.
Nasty stomach flus and regular flus aside, we have managed to get back on track and have started working on lots of new content for the game and have tons of plans for what we want to get done this year. But there is something else we want to talk about, something very important to us and that we believe will make Farmwand a quite unique experience in the cozy sphere: Worldbuilding. Buckle up, it's a long one!

The world of Farmwand

We LOVE fantasy worlds. The idea of a unique land where things can be familiar yet fully magical, places and creatures that would be impossible in our world...it's just great to simply let our imagination run wild. When designing Farmwand we wanted to create a world that felt alive and fully realized, one that was fun to explore and where the fantasy elements were more than just a coat of paint applied over familiar tropes. That's why this whole time, from before the first model was made, we've been carefully writing the stories that make the world of Farmwand work. From the legends its people tell as part of their history and the spirits and deities different groups believe in (and how they shape their festivals and traditions), to the many creatures that you see roaming around, we want you to feel truly immersed in a brand-new place from the moment you step in.
The world of Farmwand is a land where elves, fairies, dwarves, goblins, forest trolls, humans and saeges coexist alongside many other unique creatures and spirits. Each faction has its own particular history, culture and place in the world, and you can see it through your interactions with them and the many locations and items you will discover through your adventure.
Because while the game will start and revolve mainly around Lunahweld town, there are many other locations we are developing and hoping to add over time. Even if you may not be able to visit them early on, you will still learn about them, and even meet some of their inhabitants as they make their way into the Ocean Mare Inn for a couple of drinks and to share their stories.

Adding life to the world

While you can find many common plants and animals in the game (all the standard crops and farm animals, bears, deer and many others) you can also find plenty of unique magical creatures and vegetation. How do we come up with them? We have a small list of requirements that every new creation for the game has to meet before it is added:

• Make the story better and/or the game more fun.
• Have a cozy aesthetic or, if it is spooky, fit the rest of the style and have a point to it.
• Fit the general themes of the story we are telling.

When we want to add a new creature to the game we can divide them mostly into groups: functional creatures (creatures that fill a specific gameplay purpose, like magical farming animals or some of the aggressive and challenging creatures like spiders) and lore creatures (which enrich the world and story, like the blinkatts or the nomnoms). If the creatures are functional, we usually try to find a real-life inspiration that matches what we need (a cow for example) and mix it with something unique, usually a completely unrelated group of things (fruits, maybe), resulting in a brand new thing (a Plumpberry cow).

Once the initial design is ready and we know its function, we begin writing how these creatures fit into the world, how they would affect it, and how can they coexist with their more normal counterparts. If the creatures are lore based, we usually start from a theme. The world of the game is deeply spiritual, with magical beings and ethereal creatures roaming it, especially at night. It is a world of beauty, but also of mystery. Exploring these themes, we wanted a creature that embodied that slightly otherworldly, almost spooky beauty. Jellyfishes are strange, strange animals. The way they move, the way they glow...they seemed to us like a perfect fit for the themes we wanted to explore. And by reimagining them as graceful little ballerinas, the designs came flowing until we ended with our very own Meadow dancers. A group of small creatures that float around near the fields, drinking the dew of magical flowers and humming songs that entrance the travelers that hear them. And they make for a pretty good omen!
Little pieces of folklore were built around them, small events designed for when you encounter them for the first time, and even some dialogues for other characters who've seen them. [previewyoutube=hbMSgahZV_k;full][/previewyoutube] Every detail, every new creature, every small new piece of the game is carefully set into the whole, in that cozy world where everything and everyone just fits :)

The contrast of cozy and the "not so cozy"

Fairy tales are a curious thing, at times wholesome and at times scary, depending on the kind of lesson you want to teach children. The number of stories with creatures that steal children or lure them away for example is quite surprising. And we knew that Farmwand needed to have one as well. The Acorn Cloak came from this idea, a small child-like creature that offers sweets to kids and treasures to adults, luring them deep into the forests and trying to make them get lost. With their friendly yet naughty smile, they can look slightly creepy and are a common monster in the bedtime stories that kids at Lunahweld town are familiar with.
But that, turns out, is not a very cozy element. Yet somehow, it fits. It is a balancing act in the end, to write stories and a world that feels wholesome but at the same time has some spookiness and more mature themes to it. Maybe we can only truly appreciate the happy parts and the beauty of a world when we can also see the slightly darker or scarier parts of it. Still, this is a cozy game first and foremost, so those shades are never going to get too dark. We LOVE fantasy. And like any fantasy story worth telling, we feel it has to have something meaningful to say and a big world to get lost in. Will we succeed at it? We're doing our very best, and can only hope that by the time you play the game you enjoy its world as much as we have enjoyed creating it :) Please let us know if you want to hear more about world-building, as there are plenty of things to explore. The cultures, the towns, the locations, the different factions, the festivals and traditions... And it is something we've been dying to share with you all! :D *Font used in some images : Stanberry, by Jayvee D. Enaguas (Grand Chaos) 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012 GrandChaos9000. Some Rights Reserved. Under a license from Creative Commons (CC-BY-SA 3.0)

Hello dear Saeges! Its almost the end of 2023. We hope youve had a great year and are ready for the upcoming holidays to reward yourselves with some good rest and some great meals, because you deserve it! Before we go on to our holiday breaks, we want to share a last devlog for this 2023 and take a small look back at all the things we did during the year.

A productive 2023

The most exciting thing we did this year was without a doubt launching our Steam page. After almost 2 years of development, Farmwand was finally ready for you to wishlist. Even though it felt like a baby step towards the release, it still was so surreal to see Farmwand really show up on Steam! During the past 5 months more than 600 of you have wishlisted our game, for which we are deeply grateful. We appreciate all the support we have been receiving, and we want to thank each and every one of you for liking our game and believing in us. We truly hope you will keep following our indie dev journey and help us share the magic of Farmwand so that everyone can enjoy this fantasy adventure together
This year we made a great amount of art for the game. We finished all the base crops, most of the wild animals and all the base farm ones. We also created many different magical creatures that you may meet in the wild, both friendly and foul, and several that you can keep as pets or care for in your farm.

We also heard our stomachs rumbling and decided to add plenty of mouthwatering dishes. Yet there are many more still cooking.
We are expanding both the quantity and variation of customizable items so that you can decorate the inside and outside of your farms however you want.


We have written and designed most NPCs that will not only populate Farmwands world but also light it up with their own charm and quirks. Along with the NPCs, we are also working on the interiors of the many shops that you will visit in Lunahweld town, each of them filled not just with products but also with many little details related to the people that live in them.

On the tech side of things, we have reached version 2.0 of our customization system, the inventory and the crafting. Most of it keeps evolving as we move towards a playable release. We have improved the world renderer with fully custom tools, brand new trees, grasses and terrain. And of course, we had to show it all in a super cozy autumn scene. And right at the years end, we began upgrading our characters to have fully 3D faces (with far more expressive results!) and our whole project to Unity 2022.
But not everything went smoothly. It was a rough time when Unity decided to give a scare to the whole industry, sending us scrambling for options and forcing us to take a pause and see what to do next. Luckily common sense prevailed, and we could resume the work soon afterwards. Around that time, we also decided to prioritise the sections of the game that mattered the most to you, which meant putting the very complex and time consuming LAN portion of the game on hold, to focus on the single player and local co-op portions exclusively. But during those challenges and hard times, your love and support helped us to see them through, and have made Farmwand a lot better in the end. Honestly, it is strange to sum up everything weve done this whole year into a short devlog, but we feel this overview can help both you and us to know that all the work for Farmwand is going on steadily and, dare we say so ourselves, quite splendidly :)

A more amazing 2024!

What are our plans for next year? Mainly, to have something playable to share with all of you! We cant wait for you to get Farmwand in your hands, or at least a small part of it. We will be working a lot early in the year on building the settlements, quests and storylines for the game as well as on the whole magic aspect of it. Putting the WAND in Farmwand, so to speak. We also want to release a lot more videos showing you more gameplay, and even some local-coop action. Early Access? Only time can tell, but we are very excited and motivated for a new year full of magic, and full of Farmwand. And to you, we wish a year full of happiness, friendships (new and old!) and everything that makes your heart warm and cozy. Happy holidays, and an awesome 2024 to all of you! J & D

Hi Saeges!

We've been extremely hard at work with all things Farmwand, from the graphics to the general gameplay and lots of updates to our internal codebase. October was the 2 year anniversary of us starting the development of the game, and as such we prepared a super cozy little video to celebrate, featuring tons of new things. First things first, the video! [previewyoutube=JuWO-dKhON0;full][/previewyoutube]

Brand new tree shader

We decided to rework our tree shaders so that making each tree was a slightly faster process and to improve the performance-quality balance. In the end, we went for a billboarded approach with a better drawn leaves pattern (done with substance designer) which ended up producing exactly the results that we wanted.
The technique is not too advanced, we simply project each quad on the tree as a billboard (using the UV space as coordinates) and add a few parameters to tweak the scale & "billboardness" of the leaves. The trees are fully integrated to our custom renderer, so they get translucency, touch response, wind simulation and other features automatically. Overdraw was a bit of an issue (many trees on-screen caused a FPS drop) but simplifying the tree's topology and using an early-discard pass to remove all the leaves that are too far back, we ended up with trees that look prettier and run faster than before :) Add some random colors and boom! You've got a nice looking autumn scene.

Some old school tricks

For the lamps, we went with a billboard particle rather than with a more expensive "bloom" effect. This allows us to have a lot more control over how each lamp's light will look and behave, letting players customize their lamps even more.
We also spent a good amount of time working on our vegetation rendering system, further integrating them with the Unity terrain, adding more tools for working with it within the Unity Editor, previewing changes in the Scene view and multithreading all of it. Bad performance and lack of optimization seems to be a bit of a common trend with many recent releases, big and small, and it is something we want to avoid at all costs. But it is something that takes quite a bit of time and care.

A LOT of work

After a LOT, and we mean a LOT of work, we managed to have a basic LAN setup working for the game, but it became clear that developing the LAN portion of the game was going to severely delay...well, everything else. After asking you on our social media, we decided to put LAN on hold and focus on the single-player and shared screen portions of the game. But after that small roadblock, we moved on to work on even more decorations for the game and finally finished with all the non-magical crops to be included on initial release during the Early Access. The final count came at around 25 different crops, and we are still working on the flowers and fruit trees. Here you can watch a small selection of the new crops. [previewyoutube=AzKCwKlzPlA;full][/previewyoutube] Finally, we're also adding lots of new decorations, new buildings and stores to visit in the town, writing many stories and plots for the characters and adventures waiting for you in the game, and in general trying to close the year as strong as possible. It has been a busy, heavy and eventful one!


Next devlog should be our last for this year, and we're off for the holidays. We can't wait to see what 2024 has in store! Until next time, and thanks for reading! J & D

Hello Saeges!

Oh boy, what a month, right?. After some very disturbing weeks early in September, courtesy of Unity, we could finally get back on track and continue working on new gameplay features and technical stuffs. But that was on the gameplay side, as progress on the more artistic portion of Farmwand kept going on without interruptions. What is coming to the game? What new things can we share? Let's find out what we've been working on during this past month!

Magical animals

There's tons of animals coming to Farmwand for you to raise and care for. From pigs to cows, to hens and ducks, there are all sorts of cute creatures that you can fill your farms with. But the world of Farmwand is full of magic and as such, there are plenty of magical creatures that may join your stables and coops. One such creature that we've been working on is the Plumpberry cow!
The Plumpberry cows, magical as they are, produce uniquely flavored milk and have a very curious, cheerful behavior. But animals are not the only thing we worked on during September.

New decorations

We've also been working on plenty of decorations for the game, so that you can arrange your indoor and outdoor spaces to your heart's desire. While these are still a work in progress (since they still need a coat of paint and all their many variations to choose from), they are already looking quite cozy.

Optimization, optimization and...oh yes, optimization

We have worked on Farmwand for almost two years, and during that time we have made quite a bit of tools, systems and other technical assets for the game that hold a lot of value. They are designed to ensure that the world of Farmwand can be big and full of life, and that it can be experienced at its very best on all sorts of devices. One of our biggest hopes is to see it at some point released on the Switch and other consoles. But a future Switch port requires our game to be playable on very low end devices. Because of that, we've been running a lot of stress tests for the vegetation, the landscapes, and recently, for the animals. HUNDREDS of animals. The results were...adorable.

And these tests ran at a consistent 30-40 FPS on an underpowered laptop with a core i5 6200U CPU (from 2015) running at 60% speed with an Intel HD 620 graphics card. PC was working in power saving mode. The system has 8Gb of RAM, but our early tests show that 4Gb should be enough. Things are looking brightly as we reach the next stages on the development of the game :) See you next time, and thanks for reading!

Hello Saeges!

It's been a while since our last post and there is a reason for it. We've been doing a lot of work on the technical aspects of the game, something that often goes unseen but is the backbone of everything to come in the near future. This little post is dedicated to those of you who love to take a look behind the curtain and see what game dev looks like. It will be split in parts, so let's begin!

Part one : Rendering

Early on we decided that the "default" look of Unity was not what we wanted for our game. The materials looked a bit flat, the lighting was too simple and we could not achieve the right "tangible" look on our models. We wanted them to feel like old-school stop-motion figurines come to life, and to do that we needed them to have the slightly squishy look that translucency provides.
Unity offers such features on HDRP, one of its new rendering systems. However, this new system is not fully compatible with lower end devices and is considerably more demanding. This went completely against our guiding principle that Farmwand should be experienced on all sorts of PCs and, at some point, the Switch. Its other new rendering system called URP, while fast, lacked a lot of the features we were looking for at the time. Thus, we decided to work with the older "built-in" rendering system, open everything we could and modify it to our liking. We called our custom fork of it "Project Bao". And the very first thing that "Bao" provided us with was a unified materials system with full support for up to 32 unique translucency profiles with a virtually unlimited amount of lights.
As time went by, we added more and more features that integrate entirely with our system. We added an obstacle detection pass that automatically fades any object blocking the camera from seeing the player, which runs entirely on the graphics card:
And lately we have been working on even more features, such as fully interactive vegetation and objects that can be bent as you run by or flutter in the wind. Little systems for cloud shadows, snow and rain coverage for those stormy seasons, emission based lights and more are being added, all while keeping the whole thing running at 50+FPS during stress tests in an old Intel HD 620 (of course, with several settings in low-quality mode). But we will talk more about this in a moment. Most of last month was spent rewriting our shader code to target much lower end devices while keeping the visuals intact. This means the game runs at a slightly higher quality on older devices, and much faster in newer ones. But the rendering quality is not the only thing we worked on.

Part two : A segmented world

For many months we were building our world using a series of tools from the Asset Store, as that is what you have to do most times as a tiny team to save precious development time that you can then put into the actual game. We had tools to manage our terrains, tools to manage snow, tools to manage the vegetation and more. But there were some big problems. Each system handled some things in a different way, each one had limitations that had us finding workarounds for different features of the game and each one had unexpected issues when interacting with each other. Some tools were even abandoned while we were making the game. We could not leave the world of the game up to something we could not trust 100%. So, we decided to get rid of most of those tools and focus on making our own set that we could ensure would work on consoles and any device we targeted, tools we could fully tailor to what Farmwand is. We talked a bit about this in our previous post, but now you can get the whole picture. The pros of switching to our own tools greatly surpassed the cons of spending extra time, in a way, reinventing the wheel.
Our new vegetation system is now well in progress, with tons of small editors that allow us to set up & optimize each blade of grass and flower and how they will interact with the player and other creatures / objects in the world. It is part of our "segmented world" approach, which splits the game into tiny sectors, each of which has its own piece of data for everything it contains. These sectors are processed and adjusted in parallel which makes them very efficient, and since all of them can be modified at will that means that everything in the game can, in theory, be interacted with or used in some way by you. That makes the world feel more "alive".
We are also letting go of Unity's terrain and going for a more old-school approach, where we will model our landscapes externally and use our own rendering tools to handle them in game. This will be not only more performant but will also pair very nicely with all the weather effects we are working on.

Part three : A more open development

And finally, it's time to talk about what is to come for Farmwand. We are approaching the two year anniversary of the start of this project, and while a whole lot of the first year involved planning and early prototyping, we are now more prepared to share with you a bit more about how the game is coming together. Very soon you will be able to see on our official Discord server a new channel dedicated to our roadmap. There you will be able to see the different features of the game as they move from planning, to integration and finally into completion. In Discord as well as at Patreon and Reddit we will post some more in-depth updates on the different portions of our roadmap and ask our community for feedback, so this is the perfect moment to join if you haven't already! And very soon we will be preparing a series of posts detailing what exactly you can expect from Farmwand, especially if you are on the fence about what makes our game truly special. We are very excited to have you all on board and to include you all a bit more into the development of the game, sharing our steps (and missteps) as the game grows and evolves, and letting you have a look at how its world takes shape. Until then, and until next time. See ya! J & D

Hello Saeges!

Over the past week or so we have been redesigning completely the way that crops work (internally) in Farmwand. This was a task we were not necessarily looking forward to since our previous system worked quite well, but we had two very important reasons for the revamp. First, we are already implementing the whole save/load mechanics of Farmwand. We are quickly entering the alpha stage and the ability to save/load the game is a must, even if just for testing more complex scenes. When you save a game, you are only storing information. Little numbers, texts, true/false statements, etc. That beautiful farm you made gets turned into a list of values and then, when you load, those values are read so the game can "re-plant" the farm matching exactly the recipe contained in your save file. In our previous system each plot of land was its own self-contained thing. This made coding for it easy but saving the game...not so much. That level of "independence" between each crop made organizing them in the save file kind of messy. The second reason (also super important) was performance. While Unity and our PCs can handle very large amounts of crops without issues on our old crop system, we still plan to release the game for more limited and slower devices like some non-gaming laptops and eventually the Nintendo Switch (fingers crossed!). We want Farmwand to have a great port, where the main change is the screen size and not the quality or performance of the game. And while we had our discussions about how big of a farm is too big, by checking on other titles actual sizes for their farms we decided to run a few stress tests on older and newer devices.
So far so good, almost 90FPS, but still not good enough. Those FPS will drop after adding the landscapes, the towns, the animals and decorations. We needed a bit more margin if we want to be able to hit that 30FPS spot on lower end devices without issues. Enter version 2 of our system. A full rewrite that turned all of our crops from "objects" into simple values within a table and now handles the processing of those values and their displaying as beautiful crops through the power of multi-threading, that is, using every little bit of processing power available on your device. The math was scary, setting up all the data to work as efficiently as possible and finding a Unity version where everything worked without errors involved a healthy dose of hair pulling and more than a spoonful of programmer's tears but in the end, we managed to make it all work. And the results speak for themselves.
Our field went from 1024 (32x32) crops in our early stress test to 3000+(we've gone as far as 6000+) with version 2. There are still some more tests to be done, but with a field more than 3 times bigger and almost a 300% performance boost, we think we are on the right track :D But what is left to do? We are taking out some of the third-party assets we've been using for foliage, terrains and other world-related stuff and replacing them with our in-house tools. This will allow the game to run much better in smaller consoles and devices and, hopefully, with enough power to spare so that the graphical quality does not get impacted negatively (no one likes a bad port where you get 10% of the game's visuals running at 20% of the speed). A lot of work lies ahead, but once again, things are on the right track. So, thank you for coming to our Ted talk, and until next time!

Hello fellow Saeges!

We are very excited to have you here on Steam with us, right as we begin a new stage of our adventure. We are Jorge (Mr. IrrSoft) & Di (Mrs. IrrSoft), the developers of the game, and from time to time we'd like to share with you some small behind the scenes peeks at Farmwand, some teasers of things to come, have some fun discussions and all sorts of community activities here in the hub. Today, as the first such post, let's talk about a favorite cozy topic of ours : Animals! (And in case you are wondering, a Saege is a magical, human-looking creature that can cast spells and brew powerful potions...and yes, that would be you, the player!)

The creative process

Our team is tiny and as such we don't have firmly established roles. We both do a bit of everything, though we have our main strengths. Mrs. IrrSoft handles most of the early drafts for the designs as well as the 3D art while I handle most of the finished drawings and the programming side of things. When it comes to animals, we try to find one that we both love and that can fulfill a purpose either in the game (get resources, provide some fun challenges, look adorable) or simply to make the world seem more alive. Then we look at tons of pictures of the real animals before we draw them in our very simple, doodly style. Reduced to their most basic shapes, yet still easy to recognize:
But sometimes, like with the chicken above, an idea that sounds just too cute to let pass presents itself. What if chickens were just, basically, eggs with legs? :D We model them in Blender, using a very low-poly count (since we want Farmwand to run even on slower PCs and for you to be able to have dozens of chickens if you want to, because who wouldn't want to?)
Animating them takes a while. Depending on the animal, some other sections of their body may have little bones that need to be animated too, like the feathers on the baby chick's head. That little tuff has to move! Mr. IrrSoft is the main animator, and he sometimes makes drafts for the movements on paper, sometimes he just gets the feel for it while creating it, and on some occasions you can see him pretending to be a chicken or a goose around the house, just to get the motions right!
But once the animals are designed, modeled and animated...what can you do with them?

Love your animals!

In Farmwand, some animals will give you resources in exchange for keeping them happy and well cared for. Cows will give milk, pigs will find truffles, hens will lay eggs...you get the idea. But they are living things that deserve some love!
We are making a huge effort to make sure that most if not ALL animals can be pet, many of them with different animations depending on the context. Feeling very attached to a particular cow? Why not give her a unique name, or even better, a customized collar or hat?
Want a pet? Why not get a cute dog or a cat, take them on your adventures and teach them some tricks? You may find some cute little puppies and kittens for adoption on the community board in town! Or maybe you can give a home to that sweet, sweet stray that followed you around after you pet her head :)
Maybe you want a more unique kind of companion, like a raven or an owl, or a magical bird! Or maybe you will just pack a bit of honey and try to bribe that mighty looking bear into a friendship. The possibilities are just endless! Which kinds of animals are you more excited to see? What kind of things would you like to know in more detail? Let us know, and we will try to cover it the next time. Until then, thanks and have a lovely weekend, dear Saeges!