Starfarmer

Turn barren moonsoil into a thriving farm with the help of flying robots, alien scientists, and a sturdy garden fork.

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Evolution of the Helper Robots: Part 3

This post covers the development of helper robots in Starfarmer. Read part one here and part two here..

Converting robots from an end-game feature to a gameplay staple was easier than I expected. Instead of forcing players to earn their first robot, we gave them one to start with. We didn't want robots to be too easy to get, so extra robots are pricey, and players can't buy more robots until they upgrade the robot shed. To prevent the robot from being too good for a starting feature, we limited its functionality. It's helpful enough to be clear that it can be a good investment, but you won't get far if you try to rely on it alone.

Once again, this decision had a rippling effect: we had to re-evaluate tool upgrades. 

Some of the tool upgrades we had designed. Only one of these is still in the game.

Tool upgrades are a common feature in games like Starfarmer, so we had originally designed several "super" tools for the player to use. We were so sure they were going to be part of the game, I even made art for them! But as I played the game with robots in it, I questioned the necessity of upgrading your tools. We had essentially given the player two ways to take care of their crops: upgraded tools, or upgraded robots. Now that they weren't a stepping stone, super-tools seemed more like a dead-end. In the end, we only kept  a couple tool upgrades in the game.

These were the most talked-about design decisions. Others came a bit easier - having the robots limited to one tool at a time felt like a no-brainer, due in part to our visual design of the robot ending up with one hovering body with a tool that attached to the bottom.

We tried out several robot designs before we decided that tools would be attached to the bottom of the robots.

Robots lose charge because that's a common technology problem, and it limits the time they can spend outside. We gave the robots two modes ('patrol' and 'sweep') so players could choose to keep robots outside as long as possible or send them out when there was work to be done. These and other mechanics pretty much fell into place once we had solved the big questions.

Robots are just one example of how a feature can evolve from a vague idea for a feature to a core gameplay mechanic. Each game feature we designed has its own challenges and problems that we had to solve, and the way we solve those problems is what makes Starfarmer the game that it is.

I hope you enjoyed this brief history of designing robots. See you next time!

-Kit

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Evolution of the Helper Robots: Part 2

This post covers the development of helper robots in Starfarmer. Read part one here.

In part one, we decided that managing helper robots through a menu would not work for Starfarmer. While we were discussing alternatives, we came up with a new idea: a portable 'marker' that you placed on the ground to mark out a 3x3 plot for a robot to work. This solved all the problems we had with our original idea: it would feel action-oriented, we could limit the robots' coverage by limiting the number of markers they could work, and the player would have complete control.

This idea had one unfortunate side-effect, however. We had planned for robots to also help the player take care of animals, but animals do not fit well within a 3x3 plot. After discussing it further, we decided that it made more sense for the robots to focus just on crops. We kept this limitation in mind when designing animals later on in the project, which influenced how animals worked and how many you could own.

Once Sku added markers to the game, we found that they changed how you thought about your farm’s layout. Because markers were solid objects, you had to change how your crops were laid out if you wanted to use robots instead of watering them by hand. We found ourselves experimenting to figure out where best to place markers. And because markers had to be activated to determine where the 3x3 work area lay, that changed how we set up our farms as well.

Playtesters also experimented with markers! They sometimes had to cut down crops to make room.

Robots were also interesting in other ways. I actually filed bugs for some of the mistakes they would make, and after discussing it, we would decide that it was better if robots were a little dumb. Because robots won't work around each other, managing multiple robots is more challenging than using just one. Deciding which markers and robots to assign to which channels was its own puzzle. It was clear that robots were a unique feature, so we quickly decided that robots shouldn't be relegated to the end of the game.

There was one other incentive to make robots a core feature, and it's a little less magical: robots are hard! They took a lot of programming. As we will touch on later, indie developers can't afford to put a lot of resources into something that only a few players will see. Luckily for us, robots were fun to start with and required only minor adjustments, so it was a no-brainer to put them more front-and-center. I'll talk about how we did that in part three.

-Kit

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Evolution of the Helper Robots: Part 1

One of my favorite things about game design is how dramatically an idea can evolve. Something that starts out as a minor feature can end up being a core element of the game. In the case of Starfarmer, this was the helper robots.

When we started designing helper robots, we intended them as an end-game feature. You would upgrade your hand-held tools to be more efficient, then later buy robots that would automate some or all of your crop care. Robots would prevent you from hitting a limit on how many crops you could plant - if you wanted to fill your farm with crops, by golly, we were going to give you a way to do it!

That being said, the initial idea for robots was pretty vague (or as Sku put it, "-handwave- and there'll be robots"). Our first design challenge was to answer the question: How helpful should the robots be?

On the one hand, we did want robots to actually be a boon to the player. Setting up robots should be more efficient than doing the work yourself, so it should be relatively simple. That's why some of the robots' intelligence is automatic - you don't, for example, need to tell robots how much water to give your crops.

On the other end of the scale is what you might call 'game-breaking.' Imagine a robot that scans your farm and spends all day zipping from plant to plant, making sure it's perfectly watered and has enough sun. We figured that, although the idea was to make players' lives easier, people generally play a farming game because they want to farm. We didn't want players to be able to finish all their tasks before noon and then wonder what they were missing. For this reason, we decided that one robot shouldn't readily cover the whole farm.

The question then was how exactly the player would tell robots where to go. Our first idea was to split the farm up into chunks that the player would then assign to a zone, and each robot would also be assigned to a zone. The player would be able to make several different zones, but each zone would have to be contiguous. This would be done through a menu, so it could be changed at any time.

One of the earliest menu concepts in the project: a mock-up of how robots would be assigned to different work areas of the farm. The menu is quite a bit snazzier nowadays!

This idea had a few problems. First of all, we want Starfarmer to be action-oriented, so it seemed unwise to make a core feature menu-based. Secondly, we couldn't decide the best way to limit how much space the robots could cover. Finally, splitting the farm into arbitrary chunks would limit the player’s control of where the robots worked. A single plot for crops is a block of 3x3 tiles, but we couldn't predict ahead of time where the player would plant these plots. What if they ended up planting a plot that overlapped several 'chunks' of the farm? This would make it needlessly difficult to assign the robots.

It was clear that this method of controlling robots wasn’t going to work well for Starfarmer. Luckily, Sku came up with an alternative, which I'll cover in part two.

-Kit

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Source: http://lnk.al/38YN

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Feature Development: Helper Robots

Welcome, future Starfarmers! Kit again, and today I’m super excited to talk about one of Starfarmer’s unique features: helper robots!

Farm automation was on our minds from the start of the game’s development. After building up your farming skills and acquiring All The Money, we wanted you to be able to build a farming empire. We bounced several ideas around, including everything from traditional tool upgrades to installing irrigation trenches. However, since we wanted robots in the game anyway, we figured they would be the perfect solution.

We’re going to cover helper robots’ design evolution in-depth later on, so let’s start by talking about how they ended up:

Robots live in a central hub building, affectionately called “the roboshed” (working title).

Each robot charges, changes tools, and repairs itself inside a special bay in the roboshed. You can interact with a robot’s bay to give it simple commands.

Robots work according to ‘markers’, items placed on the ground that mark out a 3x3 grid for the robot’s work area. This grid can be set to any side of the marker, or centered over the marker.

Each marker can be set to a channel, and robots can be set to any matching channel. Markers and robots can share a channel, but one marker or robot cannot have multiple channels.

The first robot you start with is old, and the roboshed it lives in is broken down and can only house that one robot. Once you upgrade your roboshed, you unlock the ability to buy a second robot, more markers, and even upgrades like a better power cell  and a speed boost. These are expensive, though, so you may find yourself buying animals or upgrading your tools first.

Robots do also have a few things they can’t do, so don’t think you can take a vacation just yet! For example, robots don’t have protocols for taking care of alien plants (more on alien plants in another post!). They also don’t zap pests for you. Finally, your animals require a personal touch, which robots can’t match.

Besides helping you build a huge, successful farm through automation, robots also tie back into one of the core gameplay mechanics: space management. Because markers are solid objects and they take some time to move, you have to think carefully about how to add them to your farm.

Interested in behind-the-scenes information about Starfarmer? We’ll cover more on how the robots evolved soon, so stay tuned!

Starfarmer will be available for PC in 2017. Stay tuned for more updates by following us on Tumblr, Twitter, or Facebook.

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Source: http://lnk.al/32Dz Photo by Steven Depolo, licensed under CC BY 2.0: http://lnk.al/32Dy

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Spooky gene mutations aren't in Starfarmer, but we thought this was a cool factoid! Source: http://lnk.al/32Dv

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Source: http://sta.cr/2zDLx

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Feature Development: Crop Care

Hey folks! Kit here. Today, we're going to take a look at one of the core mechanics of all farming games: crops.

It's probably no surprise that we drew inspiration for Starfarmer from classic farming games, like the original Harvest Moon on the SNES. In Harvest Moon, and in many games inspired by it, you water crops once per day. If you forget to water a crop for a day, it's ready to harvest a day later than normal. We wanted to make crop care a little more in-depth in Starfarmer, so we changed a few things about this familiar mechanic:

Crops grow at the same pace regardless of whether you care for them or not, but they suffer mistreatment if you do not care for them properly. Different types of crops need different levels of water and sun each day.

Weather affects both the amount of water and the amount of sun for the day. For example, you may not need to water your crops as much on a rainy day, but crops like sunflowers require lots of sunny days to grow best.

Each type of crop has different tolerances for mistreatment before it wilts or dies, so it’s best to start with hardier crops until you’re confident in your farming skills.

Some possible states for a ripe potato, and the produce you could get when you harvest them.

Originally, we also made soil 'remember' its water level overnight. For example, flooded soil would drain over the course of a few days. This worked well when Sku and I playtested the game, but our playtesters found this to be too challenging. It was simply too much information to keep in one's head all the time. In response to their feedback, the soil now resets to a neutral state at the start of every day, before being affected by the weather.

Finally, one of our favorite things about the original Harvest Moon was designing our farms in order to maximize our crops' potential. In order to keep that challenge, we kept crops unwalkable in Starfarmer. Our playtesters have had a lot of fun trying different designs for their farms - some of the results are below.

Not all of these fields are optimal! Many playtesters also changed their fields to accommodate robots, which we’ll cover in a separate post.

Starfarmer will be available for PC in 2017. Stay tuned for more updates by following us on Tumblr, Twitter, or Facebook.

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Introducing: Starfarmer

After years of hard work, we're pleased to reveal a new project inspired by the classic farming games of the past: Starfarmer!

Starfarmer is a farming simulation game developed for the PC by a small independent team. You play the role of a pioneering farmer sent to a colony on the Moon, recently established in collaboration with Earth's closest alien neighbors. You'll need to use traditional farming techniques and advanced technology to grow crops and raise animals from the Earth, the Moon, and the aliens' home planet. As a new member of a small colony, you'll also need to learn how to get along with your fellow colonists while balancing your social life with the seemingly endless amount of work to be done. Don't worry though, you'll get a helper robot to start you off on your journey to farming success!

Starfarmer has been in development for over three years and we're working towards Beta. We'll be sending out major development updates over the next few months via a newsletter. We also have a brand-new website, which will have all the newsletter updates we've sent out.

If you'd like to be kept even more up-to-date, you can also follow us on Twitter @starfarmergame and on Tumblr at starfarmergame.tumblr.com. If you need to contact us, you can @-message us on Twitter, send us an ask on Tumblr, or email us at [email protected]. We look forward to sharing our game with you!