Flowerpot

Hello and welcome to Flowerpot's source code repository on GitHub!

Flowerpot is a farming game framework for the multiplayer game engine Ambient. Using Flowerpot and Ambient, game developers have a strong foundation for building multiplayer farming games that involve large numbers of simultaneous players and vast, procedurally-generated worlds.

Flowerpot is not only a game framework but a standard interface for Ambient farming games. A goal of Flowerpot is to support extensive modding. Games that are built on top of Flowerpot will be able to freely interoperate, enabling players to mix and match their favorite Flowerpot games together based on what kind of experience they're looking for.

Flowerpot is also built as a general example for all Ambient game developers who need a large, functioning game built in Ambient that they may reference for their own creations. Care is taken to make Flowerpot's code as modular and simple as possible to maximize its reusability. Additionally, Flowerpot maintains a small collection of general-purpose Ambient packages that can be used in other non-farming Ambient games.

Features

• A tile-based, open world
• Chunk-based networking to enable large numbers of players to freely roam
• Perlin noise-based heightmap generation
• First-person movement and controls
• Left and right player hands that can hold items
• Planting seeds onto tiles to place crops
• Harvesting crops to obtain items
• A simple crafting system based on combining two items together
• Extensible content model using the prototype pattern
• Player-selected display names and nameplates on player avatars
• Live game text chat
• Content moderation for display names and game chat using rustrict
• Day/night cycle

Bundled Content

Flowerpot also bundles free, permissively-licensed game assets for helping to jumpstart the development of your farming game:

• 10 medium crops with 3D models for all growth stages
• 4 trees with 3D models for all growth stages and 4 variations
• item models associated with all crops

To-Do

Misc. Topics

• add instructions for making a mod from the template
• switch from per-tile entities to per-chunk entities
• water
• animated player character
• non-walkable tiles and movement code
• how do small crops reproduce?
• road networking and representation
• seeing items other players are holding
• crop neighbor counting and available neighbor tags
• animated item/head bobbing during walking
• held item animations
• crafting animations
• harvesting small crops
• credit use of mononoki font somewhere
• license the codebase appropriately
• give correct categories to embers

Tech

• fauna: rubberbanding
• rename chunks to regions
• player: change local_player_ref into is_joined?
• add more configuration to nameplate package
• SFX
• music

UX

• player reach
• generate colors for display names?
• document messages
• display player list in a tab menu
• scroll chat contents?
• add "i'm not picky" name button to randomly select nickname

Crops

• define a is_small_crop component
• define and spawn test small crops on chunks
• cover crops
• large crops

Items and Actions

• map items
• drop map items
• player map item targeting
• pick up map items
• crafting: more flexible pattern matching semantics for secondary items?
• items: define a prefab_url component
• game: grab some usable item models and define items for them
• game: define some workable crafting recipes
• player medium crop targeting
• player small crop targeting

Worldgen

• make a "procgen" mod
• procgen: figure out how to trigger chunk generation here
• procgen: instantiate random crops on each chunk
• terrain: terrain in the shape of an island
• terrain: define a cut_direction component
• terrain: define a checkerboard cut_direction system
• terrain: generate meshes according to cut_direction
• terrain: calculate height according to cut_direction
• terrain: experiment with different cut_direction heuristics
• terrain: define and use a terrain seed resource