Farm Inc.

Main Logo
Wide shot looking at all the tycoons
Mobile scenic lookout
Mobile seed planting overview

Our Inspiration

We've always loved a mobile game called Egg Inc, it's an incremental chicken farming game on mobile with an overview camera. We wanted to make something similar, while including more interactivity - such as being able to run around in the world and interact with others - as a core part of our gameplay loop. Farming should be a social experience!

Interactivity

For this game we wanted to have different ways players could interact with the world, whether that be through the overview camera, or in-world to immerse yourself. In Farm Inc, you take on a farm of your own, with a barn, silo and farm plot. You start with a small handful of wheat seeds, from which you progress and grow your farm to have more buildings such as greenhouses and water towers. Some crops even spawn with special modifiers like "Huge" or "Seedy"!

How we built it

We were immediately interested in the focused UI and overlay modes of Custom UI's, which is what we centered the gameplay design around. We needed to ensure all UIs worked seamlessly with 4 players, with rigorous testing on gameplay mechanics and carefully balancing performance with animation.

Challenges we ran into

Server performance was always a big issue for us. A lot of the visual effects we strived for were significantly harder to implement due to the constraints of the binding update limits or other RPCs. The performance tips on the CPU and TypeScript optimization and best practices page helped significantly, but we'd love some additional bandwidth or client-side updating capabilities where possible to make things more reactive.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're super proud of the overview system, being able to tap to plant crops from a camera and then find yourself immersed in the environment from the ground really brings the experience together. We love being able to watch your farm grow as you progress and see new buildings and decorations pop up at your friends bases as well! We're also proud of the incredible environment, making you feel like you're there in that beautiful golden hour valley.

What we learned

I feel that we both have learnt a lot from this project. We came in with a fresh perspective after getting the privilege to learn from the creator academy and in just one month we've made an incredible game that is really quite fun!

What's next for Farm Inc

The main thing we want to do is continue to expand on the current tycoon and it's framework, adding more content like crop types, more modifiers, more ways to interact and a lot more tiers to the barn. Additionally we plan to add leaderboard rewards, like crowns that the top 3 weekly players can redeem and wear in game. Last there are further performance optimizations we hope to make. We spent the last few days of the project making sure Farm Inc is as performant as it could be as the project grew and plan to optimize the UI to better handle larger data sets.