Building a farming game, which is mostly a calendar problem

Strip the genre back and there are four things. A clock that advances and cannot be rewound. A grid of soil with state on it, wet or dry, planted or empty, ready or not. An inventory and an economy that turns the harvest into money and money into more capacity. And people, who are there on a schedule and who react to you.

None of those are hard individually. What makes the genre demanding is that they all touch each other. Watering matters because the day ends. The day ending matters because the season ends. The season matters because the villager you wanted to give a gift to has a birthday in it.

That interlocking is exactly the kind of thing that is tedious to program and easy to describe. Which is why the split in Flockbay lands well here.

You describe the rules. Crops grow one stage a day if they were watered. Rain waters everything for you. Sleeping past two in the morning costs you the next morning. Tools upgrade at the smith and the upgrade changes how many tiles you cover in a swing.

Flockbay writes that as GDScript inside your project. The day cycle, the crop state machine, the save file, the shop, the gift preferences of each villager. It is real code in a real Godot project, so the systems can be as specific as your design is rather than as specific as a template allowed.

Then you play a week of in-game time and find out that watering thirty tiles is boring, or that money comes too fast. That verdict is yours to make and it is the actual design work. You say what is wrong and Flockbay revises.

More on this: A no-code RPG maker that does not come with an RPG in it

Stardew Valley, which ConcernedApe shipped in 2016, is drawn from above on a grid, and so is most of the genre it revived. A new project in Flockbay opens on one question, shown as two pictures — 2D or 3D — with no default and nothing created until you answer. For that farm, the answer is 2D.

Then you paint the land rather than place it. Ground is a tile layer and you drag to say which cells are ground, then drag again to take it back; which picture lands in each cell, where the edges and outside corners fall, and what the character walks into are all derived from that one map of covered cells. A grid of soil with state on it is the genre's central object, so this is about as direct as world-building gets. Whether a material stops a walker is declared per material, which is how the same gesture gives you a dirt path you cross and a stone wall you do not.

The village and the people in it are placed pictures, put at an exact position, turn and size by hand with the mouse. A sprite sits on its own drawn bottom-centre, so the barn stands on the ground instead of hovering by however much empty margin its file carries, and draw order follows the same point, so a villager walking below the porch passes in front of it. Most of what a valley needs is already in the Catalogue: 55,073 of its 60,648 objects are sprites, searchable by name with a picture of each.

Pick 3D instead and you get the other set of tools, and this is one of the few genres with real use for all of them. You shape the terrain, put the river where it should be, place the farmhouse and the barn, and the sky, the weather and the time of day are part of the world rather than something bolted on — which matters when your seasons are supposed to feel unlike one another. That is the 3D side's own kit, and it is the reason to take the extra work if you want to stand in the valley rather than look down at it.

Either way you lay out the village and decide how long the walk into town is. That walk length is a design decision disguised as geography, and it is one of the most important numbers in the genre. None of it goes through a chat window: you are arranging a place people will walk through a thousand times, and arranging is done by pointing.

Flockbay is a desktop app for Windows that ships with Godot. Your game runs on your machine when you press play. That matters for this genre specifically, because a farming game accumulates: crops, animals, villagers on schedules, weather, a save file that grows all year. A browser tab is the wrong place for that and browser tools quietly keep your scenes small so it never shows.

Building needs an internet connection, since Flockbay, asset generation and world data come over the network. Playing what you have built does not.

One field, one crop, one day. Plant, water, sleep, wake up, see it grown. If that loop is satisfying with a single crop it will be satisfying with twenty, and if it is not, adding twenty crops will not save it.

Then add the thing that makes yours different. Every farming game has soil. Yours needs one reason to exist, and the sooner it is in the build the sooner you know whether it works.

Crops are arithmetic. People are not. What makes the best games in this genre stick is that the village feels inhabited: someone is at the shop in the morning and at the bar in the evening, they notice the season, and they remember you turned up with the wrong gift.

That is a scheduling system with memory attached, and it is exactly the kind of thing that is miserable to write and easy to describe. You say who goes where and when, what they care about, and what changes after you do something they mind. Flockbay writes it.

Then you play a month of in-game time and see whether the place feels alive or merely populated. Only playing tells you that, and it is your call to make.