Nuclear Springtime is a farming game in development for PC. I think of it as a hybrid between Harvest Moon/Stardew Valley and the flower breeding mechanic from Animal Crossing. It’s also writing and lore-heavy. There’s a lot of world to explore here, and if I do my job right, there’ll be some thematic depth and literary merit as well.

It goes like this: The landscape around your bunker is filled with vicious bramble, trapping you in the area around your home. In order to explore this area, you’ll need to clear the bramble, and you can do that by planting sunflowers that decontaminate the soil with their roots. A fully grown sunflower can be harvested for its seeds, so when the soil is decontaminated, the bramble can be cleared, and more sunflowers can be planted.

But be careful— you only have so much stamina per day. Seeds can either be planted or consumed for energy, so you’ll need to balance your hunger for expansion with your hunger for food. But as you breed more powerful flowers, you’ll explore more and more, find new plants and landscapes, and maybe find out what happened in the first place…

Features:

• Till the soil. Plant seeds. Water them. Watch them grow under your care
• Harvest plants for seeds, which you can either eat or sow
• Decontaminate the bramble. Slowly but surely expand your sphere of influence
• Tougher bramble will require tougher flowers. Breed mightier flowers to solve these tough areas
• Enjoy some flavor text and environmental storytelling

Screenshots:

Progress:
To give a little bit of background, I started teaching myself Godot in May of this year when I realized COVID-19 wasn’t going away any time soon. I started making this specific game in June, and have been slowly teaching myself/making progress ever since.

This is my first time making a video game, so I’m prone to making errors in estimation, but I think things are roughly here:

So yeah! Decent bunch of stuff done, but still a lot left to do.

I’m primarily making this topic for a few reasons: 1. I’m curious about any feedback on this project, and 2. If I make this topic, I’m now accountable to other people lol. I’ve chickened out on completing projects before, but I don’t want to do that this time.

But yeah, thanks for sticking with me this far! Keep an eye on this topic for future updates, and I’ll be in touch!

Why is this idea so genius? Post apocalyptic farming. The closest thing we have to that is Plants vs. Zombies, but that’s more of an army-building RPG than a real farming game. Also, LORE!!

@ Andounuts

Yeah, I have a lot of ideas for the bunker! Luckily, the game probably won’t get too complicated because it takes work to make all those mechanics, hahaha. I don’t want scope creep to get the better of me here.

As for your other question, this will likely remain a solo project, as I have roughly zero budget to properly pay people for helping, hahaha. Although I will likely release a demo at some point, and I’d appreciate playtesters at that stage!

@pio-dov and Drake Inferno: Thanks!

You’ll just have to wait and find out Maybe one of these days I’ll upload some screenshots of the bunker
and maybe one of these days I’ll actually finish making the bunker lol

Small update!

—harvesting now works for all plants

Fully grown plants will generate a flower with collision at the base. You can walk up to the flower, use your sickle on it, and that will cause the flower to disappear from the overworld. Your seed number will go up from doing this, and the inventory/overlay will display as such. This works for all currently programmed plants with no glaring bugs.

This is such a basic mechanic for the game, but getting here has taken a surprising amount of work hahaha. I had to get like fifteen other things working first before I could get this done, and I’m quite proud of it!

—selecting a seed in the inventory tab now automatically changes the current tool to the seed bag
Because the way it worked before annoyed me THAT much while playtesting, hahaha

—bug fix: input display now goes away on controller input, not just keyboard input
You know the little gray box at the bottom of the first screenshot with all the controls? That’s this guy. It goes away while you’re playing so you have a better view of the screen, but if you ever forget anything, it’s there for you.

Did I mention this game works with controllers? Godot’s default support for inputs is really good, and I put some love and care into making them nice. So right out of the box, you can play one of three ways:

• with a controller
• with a keyboard, lefthanded (WASD keys + nearby buttons for menu, etc)
• with a keyboard, righthanded (arrow keys + nearby buttons for menu, etc)

Feel free to combine those as you see fit! And if that still doesn’t meet your fancy, there’s a screen in the menu where you can remap inputs to whatever your heart desires. Except the F10 button.

Next up will probably be more of the inventory menu. There are two tabs there— one for planting seeds, one for replanting plants. The seeds tab is done, but the plants tab needs work, so that’s probably next on the docket. After that, I can get the shovel working so you can move flowers around. In short, progress continues apiece!

Very well done getting multiple control schemes in. Although the font you’ve chosen un-nerves me a little, probably because it, combined with the layout reminds me of yandre simulator more than anything else. I won’t be mad at you for continuing to use it though.

I don’t know. I think it would be better if the sunflower’s petals was a more saturated yellow. They seem to blend too much into the background and making the petals more saturated would both help it stand out and re-enforce the idea that you’re healing the world because you’re adding colour back to it.

But you will look into the saturation on the petals?

Oh would you look at her go! Three weeks in and you’ve got the primary gameplay loop down.

Small update!

Been a bit busy with job hunting this last week, so no super big updates, but progress nevertheless continues apiece!

—Bramble can now be decontaminated by all currently programmed plants
—Decontamination now happens overnight instead of at the time of planting (or at least it will, when I fully code the day/night cycle stuff)
—Bug fix: using the shovel on bramble no longer crashes the game, lol
—Bug fix: health bar displayed too far over to the right due to graphical distortion. This has been fixed

No screenshot this week, sorry, but things are coming along. I think of game dev as a marathon, not a sprint. Slow and steady will eventually win the race if I stick with it long enough!

EDIT: I got a topic bump manual override notice for this post. Rude! I’ve actually been keeping up with this project lol
EDIT 2: Also before I forget, happy Halloween! Hope you all have a great day

Do you think you could tell me how you figured all of this stuff out? I’m creating a framework in Godot for EarthBound fan-games and I’m struggling to do it all without asking for help. It’s embarrassing and I wish I didn’t have to do it so often.

I love how you’re posting these updates in the style of a changelog, which is funny since the game isn’t actually released. I love it.

And I’m back!

—Plant breeding now works! For all plants! It’s a miracle lol. Took a fair bit of work, but it works now. Phew!
—Added another plant type. Meaning I created the graphic assets for said plant AND did all the programming for it.
—Major code optimizations/automations to help with adding plants in the future. The above process was a fair bit more intensive than I wanted it to be, but I decluttered my code and that helped a fair bit. It should be easier (and better documented!) for me next time, hahaha
—Minor changes to the overlay in the top right corner
—Oh yeah, I bought FL Studio and did a bunch of music this week. FL Studio is great and I probably should have purchased it years ago hahaha, it’s so nice to not be on the demo version and to be able to actually save my work

And, as I promised last week, I have screenshots!

So first, I’ll explain the magnifying glass tool that I made last week. It allows you to check what kind of plant something is— you can see the little text box over the Farmer’s head in the screenshot.

Also, it lets you see plants’ roots. When you walk by a plant, it shows the roots of that plant for 5 seconds (in purple). Different plants have different shaped roots. This affects the areas you can decontaminate, as well as the areas that you can breed plants in.

In this case, I’ve set up two basic sunflowers next to each other. You can see the dark purple square where their roots overlap. That means that breeding can happen in that square.

“But Rhyselinn, plants breed with pollen in the air—” Yeah, that’s true. However, mechanically, it would make breeding flowers difficult because you wouldn’t be quite sure what flowers you were breeding in any given moment. Also it’d take more work for me to program. Also something something plot reasons handwave handwave HERE’S ANOTHER SCREENSHOT

Look at that! You hoe a spot, water it, and if you’re lucky, the next day you’ll see that the miracle of life has happened. Isn’t nature beautiful?

Let’s talk about something else for a bit. If you read back to my OP, the three major things that I needed to accomplish were the breeding mechanic, the harvesting mechanic, and the bramble mechanic. All of those have now been accomplished, so there aren’t any major mechanical hurdles stopping me from releasing a demo at this point.

I still have some things I want to do before I release that demo, though.

—Graphics, writing, and some minor programming for the bunker (including a day/night system, which mechanically exists but hasn’t been fully implemented into the game)
—Start screen/intro/tutorial stuff
—Put the music I’ve made into the game (and make at least one more song)
—Overworld map design
—Some other quality of life stuff that I may or may not do for the demo, but will do at some point (eg. save files, sound effects, some other stuff like that)

In conclusion, things are moving along really well. I feel confident that the demo will exist before springtime. In fact, depending on how much else I decide to include, it’s possible I’ll have it out before the end of the year. I’m excited for you all to see what I’ve been working on for yourselves.

That’s all for this week. Stay safe!

And a Friday update!

Not a TON to show for this week, but important work still happened.

—Optimized a bunch of code. Game now runs much smoother than it did before
—Fixed dialogue to work with current game, as it hadn’t been updated since I first made it back in June, hahaha
—Stress tested the GUI scaling a bit (so hopefully the game will work on your computer monitor no matter what size it is, as long as it’s bigger than like 600 × 1080, I believe)
—Shovel clears squares now (that way if you hoe a square, there’s a way to undo that action)
—Started on bunker tilesheet/assets (bunker doesn’t look great right now, but it exists, and that’s a start! As they say in the writing business, you can’t proofread an empty page)

Last but not least, at pio_dov’s request, a song for you all! This is the NS main theme, uploaded to SoundCloud for your listening convenience:

https://soundcloud.com/user-730843043/nuclear-springtime-main-theme

And that’s it for this time! If all goes well, I’ll have a completed bunker layout to show you next week, or maybe the week after since I still have a bunch of assets to make. Until then!

The song sounds really nice! It sort of reminds me of a music box. The whole project is really coming along very fast. It all looks really cool!

Aw thanks, you guys I appreciate it

Happy weekly update! Progress on the bunker assets continues apiece; I’ve completed the left “half” of the bunker (this will make more sense when you see the final product). I have admittedly been busy with holiday-related shenanigans as well, and that’s slowed me down, but slow and steady wins the race!

Rhyselinn:

But be careful— you only have so much stamina per day. Seeds can either be planted or consumed for energy, so you’ll need to balance your hunger for expansion with your

what about jumping in the hot springs five times every time your stamina runs out?

Dear god… Not another harvest moon like game. I cant go back again. Rhys why, i just escaped from that obsession

The colour scheme makes this place look quite cozy, and I love how the books look on the bookshelves.

I don’t know how I haven’t seen this before!!

It looks great!

Hey I’m back a little sooner than expected because I fixed the bug! And I’m excited about it! So here’s an early update on the game, including a screenshot:

(I was hoping the bed would be visible, but it’s not. At least you can see the bottom of the cute frilly trim. One of these days I’ll show it to you in its entirety lol) (and yeah I still haven’t changed the tile shape yet. As you’ll see below, I have been very busy with other nonsense.)

Here’s the big accomplishment of this update:
—When you go check your bed, it’ll ask if you want to go to sleep. If you select yes, then all of your plants will age by one day. If you watered them, they’ll grow. If you didn’t, they’ll wither away a bit.
—Entering and exiting the bunker no longer causes the plants to stop existing. This sounds like a silly problem, but solving this problem involved creating like fifteen other ones, all of which required fixing. This is a huge accomplishment and I’m proud of it.

Also some minor stuff:
—minor bug fix: player doesn’t walk endlessly into wall when dialogue is onscreen lol
—fixed weird bug where bed would clip through the player sprite due to poor collision masks

So, where are we at now?

I made a goal to have a demo out by Northern Hemisphere springtime, and I think I’m still on track for that. Here’s what I’m hoping to accomplish between now and then:

—Basic Sunflower: There’s going to be a flower in the bunker that produces seeds on a regular basis. This is to prevent the game from being unbeatable if you don’t manage your seed stores properly.
—Opening cutscene/tutorial. I have a cute little storyboard made for the cutscene; I just need to implement it is all. The tutorial will be simple since the controls for this game aren’t terribly complicated, but it does need to exist.
—Music: I have the songs for the demo basically completed, but I still need to include them in the actual game hahaha. While I could post the demo without music, it would make me sad.
—Map design: The overworld is kinda barebones right now, and it will probably remain so for the demo, but I still wanna put in at least SOME content. This will mean art and writing, but at least the programming for this is all but done already.
—Other misc stuff: This includes stuff like changing the bunker tiles, possibly updating the sunflower sprites, and fixing some other minor graphical stuff I’ve noted along the way.

If I have time, I want to add some other aesthetic/quality of life stuff. Like animations when you use a tool, a plant almanac, notifiers when you try to perform an action when you can’t, etc. These are all things that will be in place for the final game but may or may not be done for the demo.

Thanks for sticking with me! Or at least for scrolling to the bottom of this message. Keeping this topic helps me stay on track with this project, and I appreciate the kind words I’ve received along the way. So really, sincerely, thank you.

This is great, Rhyselinn! It’s nice to see this coming along, and I actually really appreciate your long winded rant, as someone who’s into programming myself I both find it fascinating hearing about it and also appreciate how hard it definitely is.

What is this about?

Hey! It’s been a bit and I’m back with an update.

Progress on the game continues. The intro cutscene has 9 illustrations that need to exist; I have finished 3 of them.

As a heads up, since we live in a capitalist nightmarescape, I have been pursuing professional development, so I will be unable to work on this project from March through May while I attend a coding bootcamp to hone my skills. Between that and the prep work for the bootcamp I need to complete before March, I expect progress on this project to slow substantially (hence the gap between my last post and this one), but I’ll keep working on it as I’m able. Slow and steady wins the race, and while real life may take priority for a while, I will emerge triumphant in the end!

edit: I swear I get scolded by the topic manual bump override every time I post here lol. you’re not the boss of me mom