Devlog: Idle Garden - Fertilizer 🌱

30 Oct 2024

Today’s update brings several new features, improvements, and gameplay adjustments to Idle Garden. Here’s what’s new:

Soil Management and Fertility System

• Soil Manager: This update introduces Soil Plots. Soil will degrade over time as it is used to grow plants.
• Fertility Mechanics: Fertility plays a role in the number of seeds available for withered plants as well as the price for harvested ones. Depleted soil yields no seeds, while fully fertile soil provides a seed bonus (up to 10 for fully fertile and 5 for partially fertile). Selling plants from fertile soil also grants a fertility bonus, with alerts to notify players.
• Fertilizer and Consumables: Fertilizer is now available in the shop and can be applied directly from your inventory. Adding the fertilizer concept has let to a new Consumables system, which not only handles fertilizer but also seeds and harvested plants. Consumables are accessible from the shed for easy management.

Shed Updates

• Inventory Overhaul: The shed now organizes harvested plants into an inventory rather than a simple count, providing more options for future development.
• Shed Actions: Labels in the shed have been renamed, with “Harvested” changed to Inventory and “Seeds” to Shop.
• Visuals & Performance: With the significant additions of Inventory and Consumables, the previous system for handling the shed has become a bit janky. You will notice for instance that fertilizer shows it’s quantity in the same column as seeds. Ultimately, I’ll be working to completely rethink the intersection of Inventory and Purchasing. Because I’m a bit in between concepts programmatically, the performance of closing the shed is not as smooth. This will be addressed as I work out the kinks above.

Other Changes

• Plant Management: Plants are now tracked as objects rather than integers, allowing more detailed management of their soil plot associations.
• Save/Load Disabled: For now, save/load functionality has been disabled to prevent compatibility issues during development. I’ll revisit this once things stabilize.
• Sound Effects: New sound effects have been added and integrated into the Sound Manager for using fertilizer.

That’s it for v0.19! These changes bring more depth to the gameplay and lay the groundwork for future updates.

Happy gardening! 🌼