Unity Barren Bargain [Development Thread]

[Winterchill.]

Damn, animations are a tough nut to crack! Spent about 25 hours on this one. Drawing, slicing, assembling for animation in Aseprite, animations for 9 states, exporting spritesheets, slicing and setting up spritesheets in Unity, creating animations in Unity, configuring the Animator, setting up the script, adjusting timings, testing... No wonder Winterfire wrote in his guide: " Let's assume you are fucking insane and decided to develop a game on Unity..."
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Now it's time for the mini-tasks that just need to be done/wrapped up. I'll start with tutorials and level transitions. Later, I'll need to more organizedly write down what else needs to be done.

 

[Winterchill.]

Lost track of time... For some reason I thought today was Thursday... But it's already Friday, or rather Saturday, heh. Finished the tutorial, not sure it'll help much, doubt anyone will want to read it... Well, at least it's something. Also made the transition to the main game — a couple of images and text.
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I'll keep polishing small details, need to draw various icons for the focus system, for dialogue options, for scenes, the wife's portrait, etc. And overall, need to replace all placeholders with real content.

 

[Winterchill.]

Drew and integrated icons. 31 total + wife's portrait. Also fixed camera bounds — now it stays neatly within the map edges.
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Basically just plugging holes now, then the start menu, and we'll have a first demo... The problem is the number of holes, hehe. At least now it's less soul-crushing — tasks are simpler and clearer. Just need to be done. More creativity will be needed later, but after the demo. Shouldn't be any more draining tasks. Back to work.

 

[Winterchill.]

Made solid progress that week, even if it doesn’t look like much visually. The game is finally taking shape. I connected the tutorial level to the main game — now it transitions automatically once the player meets the conditions.

Some quality-of-life improvements: added keyboard shortcuts for planting and fertilizing, and made dialogue skippable with the action key instead of forcing mouse clicks. Also now you can click anywhere on the screen to advance text.

Also tweaked small stuff, like removing the day counter from the tutorial UI, adding tutorial bits in main game. Introduced a short input delay on interactions to prevent misclicks and accidental energy waste — currently only for plants, but I’ll add it for collecting fertilizer too.

Put together a task list. Some items are quick, some will take time, but I’m starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
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[Knight6797]

Made solid progress that week, even if it doesn’t look like much visually. The game is finally taking shape. I connected the tutorial level to the main game — now it transitions automatically once the player meets the conditions.

Some quality-of-life improvements: added keyboard shortcuts for planting and fertilizing, and made dialogue skippable with the action key instead of forcing mouse clicks. Also now you can click anywhere on the screen to advance text.

Also tweaked small stuff, like removing the day counter from the tutorial UI, adding tutorial bits in main game. Introduced a short input delay on interactions to prevent misclicks and accidental energy waste — currently only for plants, but I’ll add it for collecting fertilizer too.

Put together a task list. Some items are quick, some will take time, but I’m starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
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looks fantastic so far honestly, great job! very clean

 

[Winterchill.]

Still polishing various details — some minor, some major. Added effects for actions — more visual feedback now, so it’s clearer what’s happening. Improved the action progress bar. Added more hotkeys (like Escape to exit menus), though it doesn’t work everywhere yet. Plus tons of other small fixes.
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Also added cheats for testing and testers — we’ll be playing soon!

looks fantastic so far honestly, great job! very clean

Thanks. Hope you'll enjoy not just the visuals, but the gameplay too

 

[Winterchill.]

Hi. I'm still adding various things. Drew a couple of additional characters, animated them and placed them around — now the world feels much more alive. Also animated the piglet. Added characters with trading options to the camps — overall, the system turned out well and can be easily adapted. Kept drawing sprites — leaving doors open that you can’t enter was a mistake. Added an option to exit the game, currently as a placeholder.

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But I think the main thing will be something else... Better to write about it in a separate post so it doesn’t get lost.

 

[Winterchill.]

I think we can start game testing now. Join the Discord, download the build, and share your thoughts. The download link will be in the #releases channel.

Here's the invite link:

You must be registered to see the links

The game is still very rough, but you can already try playing it.

 

[Winterchill.]

Hi. Still polishing things up. Finished working on scene variations — the game now has 17 scenes. Not all of them are completely unique graphically, but the dialogues are always unique, and the animations have been tweaked to fit the context better. I think that's enough for the first release. The mercenary scene variation turned out especially fun. She tried to trick the main character, but he was smarter, and now she has no choice. Probably no one will figure out how or why to farm bad relationships, but the options there are more interesting than in the good ones. It turned out a bit counterintuitive.



It's still hard to tell if the game is clear and playable — only 2 people showed up for testing... But it seems they figured it out. Thank you guys, by the way!


Testing continues! Join the Discord — the game build is in the #releases channel.
Here's the invite link:

You must be registered to see the links

 

[Knight6797]

Hi. Still polishing things up. Finished working on scene variations — the game now has 17 scenes. Not all of them are completely unique graphically, but the dialogues are always unique, and the animations have been tweaked to fit the context better. I think that's enough for the first release. The mercenary scene variation turned out especially fun. She tried to trick the main character, but he was smarter, and now she has no choice. Probably no one will figure out how or why to farm bad relationships, but the options there are more interesting than in the good ones. It turned out a bit counterintuitive.
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It's still hard to tell if the game is clear and playable — only 2 people showed up for testing... But it seems they figured it out. Thank you guys, by the way!


Testing continues! Join the Discord — the game build is in the #releases channel.
Here's the invite link:

You must be registered to see the links

It was fun testing it, the game has alot of potential!

 

[Winterchill.]

Hi. I took on the task that scared me the most — the save system. As it turned out, it's not as complicated as I imagined. As far as I know, in Godot, specifically for noobs like me, you can just save the current state of the application with minimal effort. But I'm working in Unity, and for every tiny thing, you have to write code, while also considering and using past (rather poor) code. It's very flexible, but it's easy to get confused or stumble over old mistakes. Still, it seems I'm managing — I've already figured out how to save various things (plant states, relationships, resources, day of the week). I also figured out how to save to a JSON file and load from it. Essentially, all that's left is to bring everything together.
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I actually want to make a start menu and a pause menu, but without saves, there's not much point. So I took on this seemingly incredible task. Now I can think about a full-fledged menu with logic and functionality.



I also wanted to remind about testing. It seems I set up the previous invite link incorrectly somehow.

Here's the new link:

You must be registered to see the links

Also you can download it through mega:

Spoiler: MEGA

You don't have permission to view the spoiler content. Log in or register now.

 

[Winterchill.]

Now the game has a save system! And also a pause menu, which still needs some polishing, but everything works as it should. At least, I think so... Everything gets saved and loads when I do it, but without proper testing, I can't be sure. I need to spend some time on it, at least playtest it myself.

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I still haven't managed to fix the camera position on load. The damn Cinemachine just doesn't respond to anything, but without it, the character controls won't feel good. I need to figure it out... Or maybe make the fader transition longer, we'll see how that works out.

 

[el_ramon]

It looks great, I love the pixel style.

 

[Winterchill.]

Everything turned out just as I planned – it's all smooth and polished now. I also made various small changes wherever my eye caught something. Turns out, Cinemachine has a special function called OnTargetObjectWarped specifically for moving the camera when the object it's following is teleported instantly.

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I'm starting to think a bit about promotion now. There's not much left to do for the public demo version: essentially, just adding sounds, the start menu, and, judging by the feedback (thanks, guys), some kind of intro at the very beginning after all.
I'm trying to figure out what others are doing and what I should do. I don't think I'll go too deep into it, even if I wanted to, I couldn't do it well due to lack of time, just like before. But I need real experience working with an audience, managing a project in this sense. I'll probably put together some kind of plan, choose things I can actually do, and then we'll see how it goes.

It looks great, I love the pixel style.

Thank you. I also really like the style of your project – it's so nice to see that everything is drawn by a real person and not by AI.

 

[Winterchill.]

Wow, I never thought it would be so difficult just to register accounts. I somehow managed to jump through all the hoops of verifications and confirmations. But I still haven't done everything I planned. It's really annoying that you even have to spend time on this. I did manage to get some drawing done, of course, but I could have done more. What do you think of my logo?

 

[Heathmoore Games]

Game looks good and the logo looks good. Like the Barren being rock and the Bargain being wheat. I say go with it.

 

[Winterchill.]

Finally, i can get back to work. I've drawn, and partially programmed the start menu. I also want to make the character standing on the right interact with the player. I'll add interactivity later. But so far, everything is going according to plan...

 

[Winterchill.]

There’s not much to show at the moment, and I don’t think there will be until the public release. Right now, I’m continuing to prepare for the release itself — planning and adjusting various things. Of what really needs to be done, three things remain: fix the balance, add minimal sounds, and create an introduction. I've already come up with what to draw and have written the text.