Hi Saeges! It has been quite a while. While we have been hard at work as always, we did have some slow downs at the start of the year as life demanded a lot more attention than usual. After several weeks of crunch with 16 plus hours of work each day, my husband managed to pull off everything that his day job demanded and ensure some extra funding that would allow us to focus on Farmwand a bit more in the upcoming months. But still, we managed to pull off a lot of new things for Farmwand as well!

Brand new Capsule Art!

First of all, as you may have noticed, our Steam page is decorated with brand new art! Late last year we got in touch with a wonderful artist, sister and dear friend of ours, Alejandra Pinal. She made an awesome piece for our game, one that truly shows Farmwand at its very best (including plenty of small teasers of things to come, for those who know where to look ;D ). After some months of hard work and lovingly painted details, the artwork was ready!
We can't be thankful enough for all the effort and care she put into this drawing. It brings our vision to life in a way we could only imagine before. So please, let us know how you think about it!

Graphical improvements

To ensure a great balance between performance and quality we decided to add an upscaler to our game. We settled on AMD's Fidelity FX (using the open source implementation by Nico de Poel), as it has great compatibility with all sorts of devices (including consoles).
While this helped us preserve a high visual quality without sacrificing any performance, it produced a lot of ghosting when pushed, such as when using lower resolutions or when the vegetation had lots of motion, as in a stormy / windy day. Lots of improvements were done to our vegetation system so that it would feed more information to the upscaler and in the process, reduce the ghosting. And in the process, we also improved the way the vegetation system handles the batches of plants, increasing the base performance of the whole thing.

Creatures to populate the world

We've been working on many new magical creatures, and adding lots of animations to the more "natural" ones. One of the new creatures we worked on is the Mistletaurus, a magical bull that is deeply linked to the lore and winter traditions in the game.
We also added lots of new animations to the deer, rabbit, foxes and many other critters that you will see prancing around in the forests of Farmwand.

A little bit of mining

We worked on the mining and gathering mechanics for the game, as well as on how to spawn the different resources in a semi-randomized way. We've also been working on how they will refill over time, to ensure that gathering does not become too much of a chore. [previewyoutube=IklPSK54EEI;full][/previewyoutube] A similar system was used to control how the different NPCs are spawned all over the world, so that we can have different regions full of parameters to control every bit of the simulation. Saving and loading an open world game, even if it is a smaller one, is a real challenge. Yet all of these little systems and structures we are building help us greatly to do so in a more efficient and manageable way.

Smell some pretty flowers

We've also recently started work on flowers. We want you to be able to build beautiful gardens in Farmwand, but we wanted it to have its own distinct flavor, different from the normal farming. We decided that flowers will need to be placed in pretty flowerbeds that will connect and attach to each other in multiple different shapes.

This, together with the fences, lamp posts and many archways and other decorations we've made, will ensure that you can create some wonderful gardening masterpieces. It is still in development, but we can't wait for you to try it out!

Our very first event!

And finally, we were SO EXCITED to be part of the Women's Day Sale, an event organized by WINGS.
It was a wonderful showcase full of great games developed by women and other gender-marginalized devs, it helped us reach tons of new people who found out about Farmwand for the first time (hello, you all!) and to find out about lots of other fellow devs. We can't wait to see what comes next for Farmwand, and we know you can't either. So stay tuned, as we are preparing lots of things for our upcoming new demo and soon after, the start of our Early Access adventure.
So exciting! And...so nervous!

[ 2025-03-25 00:13:41 CET ] [ Original post ]