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