Our game My Dear Farm mixes farming simulator mechanics with story-driven horror aspects. This left us with way too much to do. Luckily our development setup allowed us to iterate extremely fast on visuals and mechanics.

We used ReasonML as a programming language and Reprocessing as our drawing library. Reprocessing comes with multi-file hot-reloading, which means we can leave the game running and make any edits to the files and see them pop in without losing the state of the game.

Here's an example where I'm tweaking the text of the interaction (the game updates when I save the text file)

We can actually update most things from our game like this. Below is an example of me adding a whole new action for the seeds, which are game objects on the scene. I'm just adding another case saying "if you're not holding anything and you're facing the PickUp(Seed) action, then show this text" and same for the code actually updating what you're carrying. Then you can magically pick up seeds, like you can pick up water. Everything Just Works™

Here's a more fancy example where I git checkout master to get changes my friend made, and the game update correctly.

The last cool thing I'll mention about Reprocessing is that we developed this entire game compiling it to bytecode, but then, without needing to touch anything, compiled it to JS and published it that way. And this whole thing is just a drawing library compiled to very normal JS using webgl, it's a super thin stack compared to alternatives.

Hope you enjoyed this! The code is all on GitHub.

Would love to hear about what you think about My Dear Farm.