Three years ago, during a scorching summer, I received a call from a woman who worked for an institution where I had previously given gaming classes. She was preparing a proposal for a European grant focused on the circular economy and wanted to explore potential applications in the gaming field. I was standing on the balcony enjoying the cool breeze from the sea. Without thinking too much, I suggested:
“A Farmville-like game! One where the cultivation aspects are less central, and instead the focus is on maintenance, management, and optimization of natural and other resources…”
She liked the idea immediately, and after two years the grant was approved, and the project officially started in 2024.
The company that was commissioned to manage the project for the European Founded Project is http://www.softcarestudios.com/.
Game Design Document:
The first person I contacted was Brunella Botte, a friend and university colleague who is a Game Designer specialized in serious games. She reviewed all the documents we had and prepared a GDD to provide guidelines on how to structure the game. The document did not go into technical implementation details, which allowed me the freedom to design the gameplay mechanics my own way.
Starting from some basic suggestions about the relationships between different resources, I began structuring the entire game from scratch.
Tools:
- Unity3D
- Blender
- Krita
- Inkscape
- Audacity
Development Time:
The actual development time was quite limited. While working on this project, I also delivered 5–6 courses for various institutions, so in total, I had about one full month of work, spread between February 2025 and mid-April 2025.
Contents:
For the 3D assets, we didn’t have the resources to create everything from scratch. I therefore purchased a couple of 3D asset kits focused on management-style games. I modified many of them in Blender to adapt them to our specific needs (hierarchies, scale, rotations, animations, materials, etc.).
For the 2D assets, I used a couple of free GUI kits, icons, dingbats, fonts, vector graphics, raster, and created several custom elements manually.
AI-Generated Content:
I decided to include two contributions generated by AI:
- Photographs of cultivated fields used in the various info panels and backgrounds.
- The main soundtrack.
As for the color palette, I chose pastel/light tones for resource buttons, and green, brown, and white for interaction buttons.
Tech:
I used Unity3D 6000.0.x , creating a URP 3D – WebGL project and set the camera to isometric view.
The navigation and zoom scripts were, of course, the first components I implemented.
The HTML template was immediately customized with a more fitting color scheme and layout.
All configurable elements are controlled through scripts that use ScriptableObjects.
Data persistence is through JSON.
NPCs move around using the pathfinding.
Some assets are placed using splines.
Terrain look is controlled by a custom single shader graph.
Particle systems are used for snow, rain, leaves, insects etc.
The REST APIs are extremely simple: profile creation, login, saving and retrieving game progress, password reset. They interact with a single-table database.
Time and Weather:
While progressing with development, I realized that a simulator without weather events would be too flat. Weather needed to play an important role—not only to mark the passage of time, but also to provide some natural resources. But weather couldn’t be the only variable…
Throughout the year:
- The world’s color palette gradually shifts from the hot yellows of summer to the cool blues of winter.
- Seasonal weather events occur randomly (but always in a controlled way), including rain, snow, and wind with falling leaves. Rain and snow slightly increase water reserves.
- Audio varies by season: wind in autumn and winter, birdsong in spring, and cicadas in summer.
- Visual effects include dry leaves, butterflies, accumulated snow, and flower carpets appearing in the fields depending on the season.
Interactions:
Each action produces a custom animation: natural fertilizer, preparing terrain, chemical fertilizer, harvesting, cropping.
Animals and humans:
Around the farm i placed some animals which randomly walk around the area.
When harvesting an human walks around the cultivations.
Main Menu:
The main menu consists of buttons, static and particle-based backgrounds, with subtle random effects to make the scene feel more dynamic.
I also immediately thought of a pseudo-random farm name generator, to prevent users from entering overly “creative” names.
Tutorial:
The tutorial was the last scene to be created, it uses the same components of the game and enables/disables the single elements.
GUI:
The layout of interactive areas required some adjustments, but eventually I found a good balance:
a) Top section: current resources and related actions, with visual indicators based on color progression (and quantity shown on mouse-over).
b) Left section: the goods produced (oil, hemp, and wine).
c) Bottom section: calendar, four gameplay statistics, and the menu button.
End-of-Year Journal:
Back in the ’90s, I played a football management simulator (despite not being a sports game fan), and I remember one particular feature I loved: at the end of each season, it would show a newspaper page summarizing the events.
That inspired me to create a similar end-of-year journal screen, populated with columns of game-generated content.
Visual Elements:
In addition to traditional info panels, I added icons directly on individual soil plots to indicate specific needs (water, fertilizer, harvest).
The plots also change color and texture throughout the growing cycle and gradually shift to gray, representing soil exhaustion.
To provide tooltips and messages, I used two avatar characters that randomly alternate in their communication with the player. The complete absence of human figures made the environment feel too artificial otherwise.
