Why I am building Understory
I wanted a grow sim where the plant reacts to what you actually did. I could not find one, so I am making it on my own.
Understory is a cultivation sim I am building alone in Unreal Engine 5. Light, air, water and feed are modelled rather than faked, so a plant that struggles is struggling for a reason you can find. This is the log. I will post what worked and what did not.
- The plant is not on a timer. It is downstream of light, air, water and feed.
- There is no team. Everything in the game is mine, including the bad parts.
- No posting schedule. I write when there is something worth showing.
- Failures get posted as well as wins.
The problem with every grow sim I tried
They all run on a timer. You put a plant in a pot, you click a thing every so often, and a bar fills up. The plant is not really there. It is a progress meter wearing a leaf.
That is fine, and plenty of people enjoy it. It is not what I wanted. I wanted the thing where you walk into the room, look at a plant, and know something is wrong before any UI tells you. Where the fix is a real fix, because the problem was real.
So the plant in Understory is not on a timer. It is downstream of four things: how much light actually reaches it, what the air around it is doing, what it has been given to drink, and what is in that water. Get those right and it grows. Get them wrong and it tells you, in the order a real plant would.
What that means in practice
It means I had to build the boring parts first. Light is not a number on a lamp, it is what lands on the canopy after distance and angle and whatever is in the way. Air is not a slider, it is a volume being moved through a space at a rate. That took months and none of it is visible in a screenshot.
It also means I cannot fake a fix. If the plant looks wrong, the model is wrong, and I have to go and find out where. That is slower. I think it is the only version worth making.
Doing it alone
There is no team. I write the code, I make the assets, I build the world. When something in the game is bad, that is me, and there is nobody to hand it to.
The honest downside is that everything takes longer than it would with three more people, and some of it is worse than it would be with an artist who is better than I am. The upside is that I can change my mind on a Tuesday and the whole thing has changed by Wednesday, which for a game that is mostly one big interlocking system turns out to matter more than I expected.
Why I am writing this down
Two reasons and only one of them is respectable.
The good one: explaining a system forces me to understand it. I have fixed at least three things purely by trying to write down how they worked and discovering, halfway through the sentence, that they did not.
The other one: a game nobody has heard of sells nothing. I have no marketing budget and I am not going to get one. This is what I have got.
What to expect here
Posts when there is something to show. No schedule, because I would not keep one and I am not going to write filler to hit a Tuesday.
I will post the failures too. Devlogs that only show the good weeks are not useful to anybody, and I do not have the patience to perform.