u/PrettyFlyDev

Hi!
Every since I implemented the nice looking grass in Fred's Idle Garden I wanted to cut it. Finally I've added the ability to do it and I decided to go for the manual approach where you need to use a scythe and click each tile. Most other things in the game are automated so it is nice to have some manual labor.

Technically it is very simple with a fake particle system that spawns when the player cuts the grass and the original grass is just removed. I use instance rendering for the grass to ensure that I can draw lots of grass without impacting the performance too much.

If you have a few minutes over please take it for a spin and let me know what you think. There is a free demo on Steam, just search for Fred's Idle Garden.

Hi there!
I've been working on this idle farming simulator which sits on your desktop while you do other things for about 1 year now. I finally feel ready to share it with you and hopefully get some feedback on the actual game. The demo is available on Steam and a wishlist would be just awesome but feedback is even better at this point 🙏

What is this game about?

Grow & harvest crops 🥕🌽🍅🥒

Grow various crops and watch the coins roll in! Use your shiny earnings to unlock even more crops, upgrade your characters abilities and buy some nice decorations for your garden. Expand your garden and farm more crops.  

Run your own little cozy shop 🏡 📈

Once you have grown and harvested your crops, you’ll also need a place to sell them! Manage your shop, making sure it's stocked with the crops your customers crave. Keep them happy, and watch your little business thrive!

Decorate your garden 🌳🌼🌵

Decorate your garden with plants and trees to create your own cozy little place.

Fully automated ♾️ 👨‍🌾👩‍🌾

Fred's Idle Garden is a great game for farming multitaskers! Your character does all the hard farm work while you do your own thing. You can place the game wherever you want on your screen, zoom in and out, and it'll quietly do its thing without getting in your way. When you feel like it get back and add new things to your garden or upgrade your character.

A cozy desktop companion game 🌿🌷

Whether you’re working, studying, or just browsing the web, Fred’s Idle Garden sits comfortably on your desktop and quietly grows alongside you.

Wow, it soon been a year since my page store page for Fred's Idle Garden was created. Initially it went pretty good and I was happy at the pace the game was gaining wishlists but then my motivation for the project started to drop and I felt like heck I'm not even sure about this project anymore. After publishing the demo I had some problems getting people to try the game and then I decided to just skip to Steam Next fest and it gained some wishlists but the problem was and probably still is that the demo isn't engaging/fun. My life situation has also changed so I'm not able to put in nearly as much hours as I did before. But I'm way more happy about the game now than I've ever been and I now found my fun in working on the game again which is a big win. Before Next fest I was starting to get burned out on the game and was forcing myself to work on it.

I've hardly done any marketing except for the random posts on social media and well I did put the trailer out on my YouTube channel which has about 4K subs but the audience is mostly gamedevs and they're not my target audience.

Anyways finding this place very nice to hang out on since it feels like there are other fellow tiny devs out here and not just the ones gaining thousands of wishlists every day who are super successful.

Howdy!
In the game I'm currently working on, Fred's Idle Garden, I needed to figure out a easy way to customize characters appearances. This was needed for both NPCs (customers) and the player character. The game is built with Unity 6 but the concept I came up should work with most versions. One option was just to change textures but it felt a bit too boring. After a bit of testing I found that changing the individual meshes and textures for the different skin mesh renderers worked well enough. All my characters are from the same artist so they share the same rig and bones. This is the result of that feature and it lets me uses different heads, body, arms, legs and accessories such as glasses and hats with different textures and materials. The data is contained in scriptable objects so I can easily create random characters and allow players to customize their character a lot.

If you are interested in learning more about this, let me know in a comment below and I'll see if I can make a YouTube video about it.

I'm also very interested in receiving feedback for the game so if you have a few minutes over please take the demo on Steam for a spin and let me know what you think