Hi everyone, and welcome to the very first dev update of Crops & Conveyors! 

You may be wondering what's going on with the game and if the game's been abandoned as there have been no updates over the last few months. Firstly, let me say that the game's not (and will never be) abandoned and there's nothing to worry about. A lot has happened during this period and there are some big updates which I want to share with you!

To provide a bit of context, I'm working on this game fully solo and I do everything by myself except the music. I have a main job as a programmer and I spend most of my free time working on this game.
When I first started, this was just a hobby/passion project and I was going to be content with releasing the game on just Steam. I chose 2d pixel art as the visual style and Love2d as the framework/engine. These choices were made mainly because they would require the least amount of time to learn & build and also because the Old Gen Pokemon games like Fire Red, etc are very special to me and I absolutely love that style.

So, I spent a few months learning pixel art, Love2d and many aspects of gamedev in general and built some portions of the game, enough to convey the idea and feel of the game. I then took a few screenshots, made a trailer and created this Steam page. This was a few months ago and even though I haven't done any marketing whatsoever yet, I'm quite pleased with the amount of interest & wishlists the game's been receiving so far.

Ever since then, I've been taking the game a lot more seriously and I'm no longer treating it as just a hobby project. I have bigger plans for the game and I'm going to release it not just on PC but on consoles too (Xbox, PlayStation & Switch, possibly mobile too). For this reason, I made the decision to switch from Love2d to Unity as Unity is way better for porting and continuing with Love2d would've made things much more difficult in the future in this regard.

Next, I've also decided to overhaul the visuals from the current 2d pixel art to 3d because based on my experience so far, I've realized that switching to 3d will help me better deliver the vision I have for this game. To give you an idea of the new style I'm going for, think of games like 'Animal Crossing: New Horizons' or 'Kingdoms and Castles'. This might sound a bit worrisome to players who like the current style but please trust me that the new style will also have the same clean, cozy & chibi aesthetic and if you like the present style then I'm confident that you'll like the new style too. 

To achieve this, I was teaching myself Blender and Unity these last few months and this is why I've been quiet all this time. But I'm now ready to start working on the actual release version of the game and I will be posting updates frequently from now onwards both here and on Twitter about the game's development.

I am deeply passionate about this project and I'm more motivated than ever to deliver the best game I possibly can. If you have any questions or thoughts, I'd love to hear them in the replies!

Thanks for reading,
WonkyEars.