Horticular News

Magically whisked across worlds by weird and slightly airheaded gnomes for your magical, inborn gardening ability, you must help them take a devastated wasteland and turn it into a lush garden. That's the plot for Horticular, a horticulture-based gardening game that wants to find interesting challenge with the puzzle of a healthy garden and beautiful layout...
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To celebrate our inclusion in this years SimFest we are pleased to offer an update to the Horticular demo!

You check out the full patch notes for the demo below!



Major Changes:

Added a new animal: Rat.
Added Japanese language (99% translated).
Added new animal traversal and animation systems. Certain creatures now traverse multiple mediums, such as water and land.
Added creature swimming particle effect.
Reworked all existing animal assets to be in line with the overall aesthetics. This includes new idle animations to add more life.
Ground cursors polished to be more distinct.
Removed traversal overlay.
Fixed rare path-finding crash.
Fixed incorrect granite fact.

Hello!

We have some exciting news to share with you all - the Horticular demo has just received an extensive update to celebrate our inclusion in the Cozy & Family Friendly Games Celebration event which is running from RIGHT NOW(!!!!) to June 5th.



The event has a range of other cozy games taking part in it all with a lovely cozy and family friendly atmosphere (hence the name!).

One of the games we'd like to highlight is Circle of Kerzoven, which is currently running a Kickstarter campaign. The game is a settlement builder game with an extensive simulation of both plants and animals, which is why I think you all may enjoy it. Feel free to check out the demo here on Steam too!

With that out of the way, let's get to the juicy demo patch notes:

[h2]Description[/h2]
The major theme of this update is to address feedback from the previous demo and continue building the tech/features towards the final release.

Note that this version is not compatible with saves from the first demo. Should you want to go back, you can still play the first demo using the Beta branch called demo1.

Saves, screenshots, and logs, can be found in:
- Windows: "%localappdata%/inDirection Games/Horticular Demo/"
- Linux: "~/.local/share/inDirection Games/Horticular"

[h3]Additions[/h3]
- Sandbox modes that don't follow nor gatekeep items behind a story.
- Difficulty settings for the story mode, letting you choose between easy/medium/hard.
- Spells replacing the generic magic system. You find and upgrade them through the upgrade system.
- More natural looking plant placement with randomized positioning for many items.
- Quick select recent choices for the spade and item placer.
- Photo mode letting you change game parameters and take screenshots stored in the screenshot folder.
- Subtle ambient shadows for items. Toggleable in the settings.
- Habitat quality, making animals happier the better their habitat is.
- Habitat capacity, where good habitats can contain more than one animal.
- Habitat planning overlay, showing the suitability of an area for the tracked habitat.
- Traversable overlay, showing where your inhabitants can navigate.
- Keeper coverage overlay, showing where keepers are tending your garden.
- Indication of required amounts (non-exact) to make a habitat.
- Keepers can now fight back if upgraded to do so.
- Keepers can now heal creatures if upgraded to do so.
- Keepers now collect nectar for you if they find any.
- Archaeology. You find gold and some items by digging through the wasteland. Replaces the old gold reward system.
- Experimental accessibility setting for overlays.
- Brightness setting.
- Lore section of the notebook to show information on items you can't place yourself.
- Diary entries from Nightshade added to the lore section.
- Crash reporting launcher. Hopefully you never have to see this one.
- Seismometer item.

[h3]Improvements[/h3]
- Creatures can now traverse most plants, meaning keepers can get to most things in the garden.
- Replaced the day transition with a non-interrupting UI.
- Made income and expenses explicit in the details fly-out.
- Saves better indicate corruption or being an unsupported version.
- Keepers now restore before decay alerts happen, and they have become smarter in their decisions.
- Water rendering now has transparency and reflections.
- Main game UI has been overhauled for visual space.
- Overlays now use gray-scale for visual ease.
- Starting area is now consistent and easier to understand for a new player.
- Habitats only form for the medium of the animal (e.g. fish don't get a habitat from land plants).
- Critters are better at moving from disturbances (e.g. digging up ground).
- You can now pick up the council members if they are in the way.
- Borders are now rendered in some situations around habitats and creature drop-off points.
- Selecting "No" now takes you back to the main menu from the intro.
- Item categories have been reworked in the selector.
- Every item has been visually updated. Many have received additional variations.
- Flying animals now have a shadow to easier see where they are.
- Weather is now more designer-controlled and can never end up with a single perpetual weather.
- Land borders now look more magic.
- Saves/Logs/Settings are now in a shared and fixed location (see above).
- Lots of performance fixes. Path finding is 300x faster for instance.
- Game does now pause if a controller is disconnected.

[h3]Fixes[/h3]
- Resolution wasn't disabled in borderless mode.
- Bees unable to fly over unfinished ground.
- Nectar trading crash when obscenely rich.
- Render artefacts on tile edges when zoomed out.
- Larger habitats no longer can overlap with others of the same species.
- Keybinds bypassing disabled features.
- Keepers moving outside their home radius on their own, meaning they get lost.
- Camera panning affecting water movement.

...and so much more in terms of tweaks and small changes.

[h2]Known issues[/h2]
Flickering or black screen in full-screen modes on AMD GPUs with FreeSync enabled.
Workaround is currently to play in windowed mode or disabling FreeSync. If you experience this, feel free to let us know your specs and OS.

Mouse disappearing when tabbing out of Horticular in full-screen mode
Workaround is to restart Horticular. We currently, don't know the root cause of this, so any additional information would be invaluable.

Music stops playing intermittently
Rare bug where the music stops abruptly in the game, continuing again with a new track after a few seconds.

Crash if a held item is destroyed
Holding an item when it is destroyed by decay crashes the game. Can happen in edge-case circumstances but I haven't seen it happen in actual gameplay.

Hey folks!

At 4pm BST, Robert, the developer of Horticular will be jumping on a stream to play through some of the game, feel free to submit any questions for him here or during the livestream and they may be answered!

And don't forget to check out the other awesome games taking part in the Earth Appreciation Festival:

https://store.steampowered.com/sale/appreciateearth2023

Cheers
Dan, Slug Disco!

Welcome to the first development update post-demo launch!

January 20th was a huge day for Horticular, as I launched the demo into the world and for the first time the wider public had access to my game and the reception was so lovely. We had some amazing support from content creators, and got a lot of excellent feedback to make the demo (and the future game) an even better experience.

We've got a lot to cover in this update so let's get into it!

[h2]Horticular Hits The Road[/h2]



For the first time I'm taking Horticular to an event! The game was lucky enough to be chosen to be part of WASD Curios, which will be a collection of games at WASD in London at the end of this month. I will be there along with a few team members from Slug Disco, Horticular's publisher!

If you're there, be sure to stop by, try out the latest build, and say hello!

[h2]Community Feedback[/h2]

As mentioned, this was the first time a wider audience had played Horticular, something both terrifying and exciting at the same time! Nearly 13,000 people installed the demo, 3,000 people played it, and 56% of those played the game for over an hour (2% played it for 10 hours!!!)

Below I want to go through some of the updates I'm making to the main game, these may or may not make their way into the demo - we'll have to see how development goes!

[h3]Sandbox Mode[/h3]

Image depicting the current new game screen. The player can select whether they want to play the story at a given difficulty, or a particular sandbox mode.

I have had my eyes on making a sandbox mode for a while now (in fact, I've even used a hacky version for development purposes). And with the demo, one of the more requested features has been to have either an easier difficulty or a sandbox mode and I thought, why not both!?

A difficulty setting to let you choose the intensity of the story playthrough. Maybe you want a more relaxed setting for the after-work wind-down. Or you're looking to challenge yourself for a second run-through. These will need some wider playtesting to really nail down the balance of each difficulty level, and we will definitely involve the community in that.

The Sandbox mode will disable the story altogether, and allow me greater creative freedom in changing the rules (since there's no story progression to upend). For now, that means a mode with everything enabled from the get-go. And one that additionally removes antagonistic elements, appropriately dubbed “Peaceful”.

[h2]Spell Wheel[/h2]

Work-in-progress spell wheel where you select an effect and then charge it up to the desired size.

The magic system of Horticular has gone through multiple iterations and mechanics. In the demo, you’re currently charging up a multi-purpose effect, selecting the area of effect that you want in a spell wheel. However, previously, there was no wheel, and the area was decided by the timing of your input. It turns out that both were key ingredients to the next iteration of the magic system.

One of the design principles of Horticular is that most (if not all) actions should be accomplishable by mouse only. So I never went with multiple spells and opted to keep a simple multi-purpose one instead, even though choosing the effect felt like the better option.

So, when I returned to upgrade the magic system once again, it finally clicked. Combining both the previous input methods would give a system where the player had to choose the intended effect and be able to charge it up to a greater level. It feels a bit like coming full circle with the magic system, but I think this way gives more agency to the player and makes actions feel more intentional.

Furthermore, since each spell is shown to the player, the usages for magic are clearer and play on existing conventions, making the system easier to understand as a whole.

Finally, it is now possible for me to balance effects independently, which previously was a big hindrance to not having magic either too powerful or too slow or too expensive.

It’s still a work in progress and there are still three spells missing, but in the picture you can see the restore spell for restoring your garden; the finisher spell that wraps up your surface changes quickly; the healing spell that keeps your creatures healthy; the banish spell to deal with corrupted minions; and the freeze spell that stops time for creatures.

[h2]Translation Tech[/h2]



Two examples of different writing systems. Don’t mind the actual text or visual as it was machine translated and quickly thrown together.

Finally, a smaller development but an important one for the upcoming launch of Horticular. I have long thought about supporting multiple fonts, so I researched its feasibility and what it would take to get in. Turns out it was absolutely feasible.

The reason why this is big is that it enables two things. The most obvious is that we can now translate to non-Latin based languages such as Japanese, Korean and Chinese. But this also paves the way for accessibility fonts, where a setting can toggle to use more legible text for people who have a hard time with the default pixelated font.

I don't have a list of confirmed languages for translation just yet, and some may be added after release, this is currently just getting the technology in place to allow for them. That said, if English isn't your first language, leave a comment to let me know which languages you would like to see in Horticular.

[h2]Creator Support[/h2]

For any indie game visibility from content creators is very important and Horticular was lucky enough to be covered by a wide range of people across Twitch and YouTube, and I just wanted to highlight some of the videos here (YouTube only as it's easiest to embed):

[h3]Ash's Cozy Corner[/h3]
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

[h3]The Geek Cupboard[/h3]
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

[h3]Katherine of Sky[/h3]
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

[h3]Nookrium[/h3]
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

[h2]Community Gardens[/h2]

It's been so lovely seeing how different everyone's gardens in the demo have turned out, I've collected some of my favourites below from the games Discord! The gardens below we submitted by Yuuko, Matcha, Reetno & Velocity!









That's it for this development update, if you want to see more Horticular in the mean time, subscribe to the Slug Disco YouTube channel where every other month Horticular will feature in the Slug Disco vlog!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]