Today I added seeds to the world of Plantasia! I want to avoid having user interface elements on the screen as much as possible, and instead let the player get what they need by playing around with the world iteslf. To that end, the "seed bank" where you get your seeds isn't a scrolling list in a menu but rather the underside of your island! You just flip the island, pick the seed you want, and flip back to plant it.

Eventually, when there are different plants in the game, choosing seeds will make more sense. For now I'm just randomly generating seed colours and applying that to my one plant model. I think I'll keep colour customisation in the final game, but I might tweak how they're selected. I'm also thinking I'll eventually make the seeds tiny, simplified versions of the plants themselves so it'll be clearer what you're picking.

Some Technical Notes

I also did some refactoring today and replaced all my custom raycast + picking logic with Unity's built-in pointer handling events., such as IDragHandler and IPointerDownHandler. My PlayerController class was starting to get a bit bloated and had a lot of logic that should have belonged to individual objects (such as the island, seeds, etc.)

By implementing these interfaces (which I'm literally using in another project right now, so not sure why I didn't think of them before!) I actually managed to get rid of the PlayerController completely. Not only is the code cleaner, but now game logic is more sensibly encapsulated and should be a lot more robust and extensible going forward.