RANDOM GENERATION UPDATE

For new readers, Petal Gear is a story driven gardening game where you plant flowers and raise your mech army. I am currently working on the gardening aspect.

Major Additions:

Random Generation

For the summer slow jams random generation jam, I added several procedural generation improvements.

• Underground scrap now spawns in a random pattern, and is slighly visible.
• 8-10 props now spawn when a garden is created, each can be dug up and sold for scrap.
• The garden itself is not longer a flat plane and is generated with hills and valleys.

Tools

The big addition this update is the Tiler tool, which allows you to place tiles on a grid aligned with the garden. Other than the tiler, there are two additional terrain tools, the sand bag and the gravel bag. These let you cover the garden with their respective sediments.

• Added Tiler tool that allows you to purchase tiles to cover the garden with tiles.
  • 6 Tile variants are available for placement.
  • Tiles are placed on a grid that is aligned with the garden
  • Tiles do not block the growth or planting of plants.
  • Tiles slightly alter the terrain around them to mesh together better when placed on a gradient such as a hill or valley.
  • Tiles cannot be placed in water and will raise nearby water to ground level.
  • Tiles re-adjust their position if the ground below them is modified.
• Added Sand Bag
• Added Gravel Bag
  

Interface

A large amount of effort put into the update was improving the interface of the item shop.

• The shop menu has been completely overhauled into a scrolling grid interface.
  • Items have a preview, name, description, and cost in the shop menu.
  • Tools and one time purchases are removed from the shop when purchased.
  • A visual indicator lets you know if you don't have enough scrap to buy something.

• There is a main menu now.
  • Players can select two game-modes, "Progression" and "Free Play", free play giving you infinite scrap, while progression starts you at 0.
  • There is a placeholder "Continue" button for the upcoming save-load update.
  • Quitting from the garden now brings you to the main menu rather than closing the game.

Other changes:

• Made picking up and placing seeds more stable.
• Changed seeds so they no longer overlap on the same space.
  • WARNING: seed reposition technology is EXTREMELY unstable.
• Tools are now accessed through a radial menu rather than a scroll wheel.