Posted June 30, 2017 by Boxhead
#Grasspocalypse #Grass Growth #Tree Growth #Camp Fire
This is a Camp Fire. It is created by Pushing (or pulling) 2 tree logs together.
It is more efficient than simply burning a log and it, unlike the log, doesn't move when you press the E key. This makes moving items around the fire a little easier as well as establishing a campground more satisfying. The Logs of the Camp Fire are not destroyed when the fires uses all the fuel either. To refuel the fire just drag a log into it and re-lite the fire with 2 rocks. If a log is on fire when dragged into the Camp Fire it will lite the Camp Fire.
Getting Grass to grow was a nightmare. Well not really, I just underestimated the amount of grass that would actually spawn, and how fast it would grow. I was also incorrect in wishing the grass to be self sustaining. Let me explain: Grass is spawned from trees. Every step of the game each tree has a 1 in 1000 chance of spawning grass near by. Each patch of grass has a spawn chance of its own making sure grass grows near grass not just near trees. In my head it allowed patches of grass to kinda travel around the world but having them stem from trees. Yeah It wasn't pretty and you can reference my Twitter for that. (https://twitter.com/boxheadpix...) After a few hours of tuning, grass is still heavily reliant on the existence of trees to grow (for some reason) but there is a (very) small chance, a 1 in 100,000 chance, that grass will spawn more grass, leading to occasional grass patches growing away from the trees.
As of right now grass doesn't do anything but will soon play an important roll in the existence of animals and the survival of berry bushes. I would like to continue working with an environment that depends on itself and requires you to be mindful of what you consume. It will be hard to balance that system so that a simple mistake doesn't just destroy the entire forest and force you to restart.
Also if you leave a fruit alone for 15(ish) seconds it will become a sapling and eventually grow into a tree. Right now they grow way too fast but the goal is that tree grow will be slow enough to evade perception but not so long you find yourself waiting for more trees.
So that's been the past 2 days. Please break it and tell me how. As always please give me any feedback on existing systems or ideas for new ones in my itch.io thread(https://itch.io/t/113155/super...) or on my Twitter @BoxheadPixelart (https://twitter.com/boxheadpix...)