Huge UI Update + Upgradable Inventory

Today we're releasing a huge update to Farmhand Go! that does a major refresh of the in game UI and adds the ability to upgrade the inventory.  

The inventory was initially set to have a static 4 slots (even though there are 6 crops available) to force the player to make choices about which seeds to buy and when. This turned out to be a bit less fun in practice than we hoped and caused frustration more than anything. We received consistent feedback from play testers about having to burn through hundreds of seeds just to be able to buy one of the other types. This was not the intention, so we decided that we should make it so the player can hold all of the available seed types by purchasing inventory upgrades.

It turned out to be the beginning of a rabbit hole! We realized that the UI was getting pretty cumbersome with an additional upgrade in the Shop, and the additional inventory slots started running into them. We had to go back to the drawing board to think about a new UI for this. What we came up with was a brand new in-game menu that could be used for purchasing upgrades, viewing stats, and an in-game options menu. We found that this also served well as a replacement for the pause screen. Once we had this in place we were able to simplify the amount of things shown when viewing the field. 

In the process of moving things around in the field UI we also worked on a neglected area where we were displaying the income, day, and debt. This was just using some plain text despite the face the we had some nice UI assets available. We cleaned this up a bit to show the day of the week and the player's income in a nicer fashion. The debt remaining moved to the new menu where we could display it as a progress bar to better represent it as a goal.

A few other changes made their way into this release: Robust stat tracking that can be seen in the Stats menu (stats will not exist if you load a saved game), the ability to play at 2x speed on demand, some particle effect updates, and some balancing updates to the cost and growth duration of crops. The full list of changes from the PR had about two dozen items! 

The best way to check out all the updates is of course to play a round of Farmhand Go! Feel free to check out the game, which is currently available with the latest and greatest features, and let us know what you think of them. Happy farming!