Dev Log 0.4 - Pre Beta Release

This log contains all of the updates, changes and additions to the game in all aspects and areas. There were many online work sessions between the team and many offline work meetups to troubleshoot bugs and design decisions together.

Watering System:

Added accessibility settings after our alpha presentation feedback. Started work on the watering system, added pick up, button ui hover, water capacity ui, water drops, water stream, river refilling.

Terrain:

Altered grass game area to be bigger, the terrain to be larger and the river to come inside the game area more. Also added more trees and mushrooms. As well as grass placement fixes (removing lines and triangle patches).

Accessibility:

Created settings, includes FOV, mouse sensitivity and volume controls fitted out with custom ui. 

Art updates:

Finished off the house retexured and unwrapped. Added basic tree, willow tree and mushrooms. Fixed cut offs from river and fixed fence placements as well as added boundary colliders. 

Added decorations such as teabag, mug, kettle, pot, tables, tissue box, pencil holder, street light. Added mailbox and shipping bin. 

Added flowers such as lavender, tulips, daffodils. Updated bee model to be bigger, have stripe and wing flap animation.

Sound Design:

Created and implemented main menu score, day score and night score. Also created sound effects. 

UI:

Added mailbox ui. Added Catalog ui with decorations and more flowers added. Added interaction button ui hover on everything required. Added beehive jar honey collection UI. Added inventory UI boxes and updated flower UI. Created UI for all flowers, jar and watering can. Created guide book UI for gameplay instructions. Also added letter UI for background story context.

Added a new font globally across the game. Also added new controls UI to the main menu to better match the aesthetics of the game.

Added UI alerts, covers jar interactivity, honey sell amounts and shipment alerts.

Mechanics:

Pickable scripts for all items that are pickups. Interactivity scripts for all items that have interactivity. Created the rest of the flower object and product scriptable objects to integrate into the rest of the backend. 

Created and integrated shipment menu with menu system and made cursor visible in menus. Implemented buying in catalog, shipment into mailbox, shipped items into inventory pipeline. 

Day/Night Cycle:

Expanded on the night/day lighting swaps by adding grass colours to influence grass shaders directly. Also added sun rotation animation to automatically move smoothly along with the cycle time. Also added clouds to match this animation.

General Improvements:

Updated scripts for better optimization, clean up scripts for better backend/frontend interactions between our art and cs teams. 

Added colliders to everything so the player does not clip through decorations (but can clip through leaves and water because that makes sense).

Improvement on inventory slot swapping, expanding on inventory compatible items and input fixes. 

Added wind shader for trees to match grass wind effect.

Bug fixes:

Day/night cycle not working in build. Highlight raycast not working in build. Cursor not working in build (not unlocking and doesn’t have cute bee cursor ui). Bee and beehive improvements so the bees get stuck less and behave as intended.

Asset creation screenshots, UI and videos: