We know that garden upgrades are among the most anticipated mechanics for Potion Craft. Thus, we are opening a series of devlogs to share new features that are currently being developed for the garden, including new planting, upkeep, and harvesting systems.
Time is of the essence not only in game development but also in horticulture. Even if one is lucky to have a magical tree which makes everything grow faster in their backyard, nothing will sprout without a grain of patience, that is why we decided to add transitional growing phases for each plant.
But daily watering is also essential for growing plants, and the watering pot is just the right instrument for this!
Working on garden plants for different plant types, such as flowers, herbs, root vegetables, mushrooms and ligneous mushrooms requires a different approach. It is necessary to hold on to several principles while creating garden plants:
- They should be recognizable and distinguishable from each other even in the earliest growing phases;
- They should grow credibly, i.e. flower sprouts cannot have a bud in early phases, it needs to grow a bit first;
- The size of the plants should not be too big or too small, so they would not take too much space or, vice versa, get lost among other plants;
- And the most important one – the players should feel satisfaction while growing plants!
Sometimes it’s a real challenge to decipher how, say, a ligneous mushroom grows!
A sustainable gardener would never cut the plant to the ground when harvesting it, that is why it is important that harvested plants should look like they will soon re-grow again and yield even more. In order to meet the requirements of the new system we had to change the appearance of some plants compared to their current in-game visuals.
There is a lot of work ahead of us on updating and enhancing the garden mechanics, and we will share the sweetest fruits of this development in further devlogs, so stay tuned and follow our Steam Page and join our Discord so you don't miss other upcoming devlogs! Meanwhile, please share what garden improvements you would like to see in the game the most.