Released 'The Old Farmer'

I finished my latest game, The Old Farmer! It is a short, casual farm-themed management sim, which is inspired by farming games like Stardew Valley, and also by old school adventure games like Maniac Mansion.

In The Old Farmer, you play as the titular grumpy ol' farmer who is unfortunately too old to work his fields. He must give instructions to his worker to till the soil, plant seeds, and grow crops. Customers will come along and order specific crops, and you must grow the required crops to fulfil their order.

The game has three levels - tutorial, normal, and endless mode. It should take about 5 - 10 minutes to reach endless mode.

For this game, I deliberately restricted myself to making it from scratch in one week. I focused on keeping the scope relatively small - one play area, three crop types, four commands. Keeping things limited and setting a deadline forced me to actually finish the project instead of just getting bored and giving up partway through (like usual).

I definitely learnt a few new things with this project. The shadows in particular are something I'm proud of discovering - instead of creating a separate shadow sprite for each object, the game takes the object's base sprite and colours it black before scaling and shearing it to draw it at an angle behind the object. This process made shadows super simple, since any changes to the base sprite would automatically be reflected in the shadow for that object.

I also put a lot more effort into the visual and audio aspects of this game compared to my previous projects. Although it still uses simple graphics, I spent more time on the art than usual. I also purchased a sound effects pack and used opengameart.org to get some really good sounds and music that fit the game and make it sound cartoony and fun. I definitely think this extra effort paid off, as this is by far my best-looking and best-sounding game. One thing I would have liked to add is a custom font, since GameMaker's default font isn't particularly pretty, but I ran out of time.

Anyway I hope you enjoy the game! If you have any feedback, I'd love to hear it! :)