Welcome! This is the devlog for a farming rpg I started developing in june.
My vision is to create a game that is similar to the old harvest moon games, something relaxing to get away from the stress of everyday life. 
Opinions, criticism and ideas are always welcome!
I'm a solo developer that only recently got a playdate. I have some experience making games in unity and godot, but this is my first attempt at making a game for the playdate.
New UI and time progression mechanic
Took some time to work on the UI this weekend, the placeholders were really starting to bother me.
Tools can now only be switched by turning the crank forward. This way, it is possible to select a tool and then turn the crank backwards to dock it. Before, stowing the crank inevitably meant that the tools would be changed while turning it back to the default position. The reason this can be annoying is that the UI is hidden when the crank is docked, so it doesn't get in the way while exploring or working on the farm. This means that it wasn't possible to hide the UI and still keep the tool you were trying to use.
I quite like how it turned out and it is much more convenient than the simple icons I used before
I also changed the way time advances in the game. I started out just using a very simple timer and displaying the date and time as a string.
However, the thing that bothered me most about most farming games I played is that I would either get stressed out because wasn't enough time in the day to get everything done, or there wasn't enough to do so that the game quickly got boring.
Since I want this to be a relaxing game, I decided to try something new. Time will pass normally during the day, until about 7 pm. At this point, the clock will stop and the player can end the day whenever they like. 
I don't know if this system is going to work out. There are some obvious problems to this approach, and I have some ideas on how I'm going to adress some of them. I also have a few other ideas and mechanics in mind that I believe would go very well with this system if I can get them to work.
I really do hope that I can find some people willing to playtest, because ultimately this is the only way to find out if the game is actually fun.
Here is a little animation of what the clock UI looks like now:
The game finally has a shop where you can purchase new seeds to plant and better tools!
To be honest, right now it is still more of an online shop, since you can only access it through the pc in the player's house. It#s a bit unrealistic because any purchased item will appear in the player's inventory immediately, but it works, and I guess for now it will have to do.
Apart from that I have been redrawing some of the sprites for the obstacles and fixed a few minor bugs.
Next big thing I will be working on is the save system, which will hopefully not take too long to implement.
New Crops, Save system and randomly generated obstacles
Obstacles such as rocks, logs and weeds now are spawned randomly when the game is first started. They have to be cleared using the right tools to make space for planting crops.
I added 2 new types of crops (lettuce and cauliflower) that the player can grow. They each take a different amount of time to grow; crops that take longer to grow can be sold for a higher amount of money.
I also finally implemented a save system. The game is saved when the player sleeps and is loaded automatically when opening the game.
If you have a few minutes to try the game, I'd love to hear your thoughts!
I made a post in playdate squad discord channel (under playtesting requests)to collect feedback for the game; it's called " 
Farming Life Simulation 
".
I very much hope that I can find some people who are willing to test the game and give me some honest feedback. I always find it really difficult to judge my own projects. The project has really grown on me over these past few weeks, and I hope to make a game that people will enjoy
This is what the game looks like now:
Here is the demo build for playtesting:
farming_playtest_082024.pdx.zip (191.1 KB)
