Big Farm Tycoon

Inspiration

We based our game on tile farming games. We loved farming simulation games in the past, but noticed that a lot of them just have the crops sitting there when they are ready to be harvested, without the importance of not letting the crops become overripe. Therefore, we wanted to hone our skills to make a slightly more time-dependent farming game.

What it does

We allow the user to till, plant, harvest and replenish nutrients in the game. Crops have three phases: premature, ripe, and overripe. You will gain the most amount of money back if you harvest when ripe. If a tile runs out of nutrients, you will not be able to plant there again until some time has passed. You can directly add nutritional value to the soil by fertilizing or by staggering your crop planting patterns to allow the soil to replenish its nutrients over time. Therefore, the game is built upon managing your crops, managing your soil, and managing your income as well.

How we built it

It is built on Java. It used JFrame, Swing, and is complied using Maven.

Challenges we ran into

Challenges we ran into are working with JFrame and optimizing the app. The code itself also took a lot of memory to run, and we therefore had to work on optimizing the game code.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Building a product in a day and creating a working version of the game, as well as implementing a lot of the ideas that we thought of adding it (a money/currency system that you can earn when you sell your crops as well as a soil nutrition scale).

What we learned

We learned a lot about JFrame and how to work as a team through Discord and GitHub.

What's next for Big Farm Tycoon

We plan to add upgrades to the planting and harvesting process, automation, weather and natural disasters, optimizing the currency system by incorporating supply/demand, and making a database for the plants.