UI Updates

Part 1: UI

• Settings actually work now, supports sliders and switches
• Made this cool inventory UI (Went through a few iterations)
• Bottom left shows status effects (Active potions, friend bonuses, whatnot)
• Ascension Tracker on top! Now you do not need to travel to the board just to see your progress
• Bottom GUI circles (To open things like inventory, looks kind of bad right now, I’m gonna fix soon)

Part 2: Onboarding (WIP)

Motivation:

1. When a player joins the game, the first experience is the most important, since it decides whether the player is retained OR leaves within the first 5 minutes.
2. In my first game, the tutorial was merely a giant piece of text… and the results of that is reflected.. (see the image of the graph) Lesson learned!

This onboarding system features a spotlight masking, which was weird to implement since Roblox does not have a native feature to punch a shape-shaped hole out of a UI overlay (no CSG/boolean cutout support), so the spotlight had to be faked using a UICorner-and-oversized-UIStroke trick.

For 3D objects, I projected the 3D target’s screen-space bounding box into 2D so the spotlight could track a world-space object using the same screen-space hole-masking system as the UI targets.

Part 3: Upgrade Tree

Wired to the server, right now we are using a bunch of toy upgrades. Next time, we will actually implement content.

• Going more technical, the upgrade tree works as a giant tree (kind of a DAG but not really)
• We do a level-order (BFS) traversal to produce the cool closing effect.
• Node revealing uses a lazy DFS-like frontier expansion at runtime (revealing a node spawns only its immediate children as a locked preview ring; deeper nodes don’t exist client-side until their parent is actually leveled. So the client never materializes the whole tree at once)

Part 4: Refactors 💀💀

Yeah. The front-end code was a bit messy so had to refactor a bit. I decided on eliminating pseudo-OOP and just using static declaration since it’s more simple and maintainable.. well I hope..

Part 5: Convention reinforcement

Wrote a quick shell script that runs a sequence of checks across the codebase to enforce conventions, like variable naming, stylua, and selene. This will be ran every pre-commit and github ci/cd. At this point I might as well add PMD.

Part 6: I have no idea lol

If you want to discuss or talk about this project, don’t hesitate to post a comment or add my discord: SeasonedRiceFarmer

(Watermark to prevent work stealing; yeah it happened before.. multiple times.. not in hack club though, y’all are mad cool…)

UI Updates

Part 1: UI

• Settings actually work now, supports sliders and switches
• Made this cool inventory UI (Went through a few iterations)
• Bottom left shows status effects (Active potions, friend bonuses, whatnot)
• Ascension Tracker on top! Now you do not need to travel to the board just to see your progress
• Bottom GUI circles (To open things like inventory, looks kind of bad right now, I’m gonna fix soon)

Part 2: Onboarding (WIP)

Motivation:

1. When a player joins the game, the first experience is the most important, since it decides whether the player is retained OR leaves within the first 5 minutes.
2. In my first game, the tutorial was merely a giant piece of text… and the results of that is reflected.. (see the image of the graph) Lesson learned!

This onboarding system features a spotlight masking, which was weird to implement since Roblox does not have a native feature to punch a shape-shaped hole out of a UI overlay (no CSG/boolean cutout support), so the spotlight had to be faked using a UICorner-and-oversized-UIStroke trick.

For 3D objects, I projected the 3D target’s screen-space bounding box into 2D so the spotlight could track a world-space object using the same screen-space hole-masking system as the UI targets.

Part 3: Upgrade Tree

Wired to the server, right now we are using a bunch of toy upgrades. Next time, we will actually implement content.

• Going more technical, the upgrade tree works as a giant tree (kind of a DAG but not really)
• We do a level-order (BFS) traversal to produce the cool closing effect.
• Node revealing uses a lazy DFS-like frontier expansion at runtime (revealing a node spawns only its immediate children as a locked preview ring; deeper nodes don’t exist client-side until their parent is actually leveled. So the client never materializes the whole tree at once)

Part 4: Refactors 💀💀

Yeah. The front-end code was a bit messy so had to refactor a bit. I decided on eliminating pseudo-OOP and just using static declaration since it’s more simple and maintainable.. well I hope..

Part 5: Convention reinforcement

Wrote a quick shell script that runs a sequence of checks across the codebase to enforce conventions, like variable naming, stylua, and selene. This will be ran every pre-commit and github ci/cd. At this point I might as well add PMD.

Part 6: I have no idea lol

If you want to discuss or talk about this project, don’t hesitate to post a comment or add my discord: SeasonedRiceFarmer

(Watermark to prevent work stealing; yeah it happened before.. multiple times.. not in hack club though, y’all are mad cool…)

UI, Backend Revamp, Basic gameplay, Automation!!

Part 1: UI

So I made a bunch of UI (took really long, and was kind of painful tbh)

We have the side menu, with a shop button, an emerald button, an settings (keep in mind everything currently in the setting menu is a placeholder)

We also have ascension. Kind of regret not using a reactive UI framework, but might switch to one (like vide, roact)

Also, cool notifications thing I guess

Part 2: Backend

Backend is pretty mature right now, most of it is written and all I really need to do is just to expand upon the reusable structure.. and just.. reuse? Since I have a modular design, it is very easy to scale the architecture in the future and iterate fast for update after game release.

I specifically avoided heavy-OOP like inheritance chains, polymorphism, etc.. because lua is terrible for OOP… In fact, classes aren’t even a thing and you’re forced to use something called metatables to replicate class-behavior.

But after the backend, I plan to add VFX, SFX, and music to make the game actually feel alive, since it feels boring and dull right now.. I mean it’s literally just a bunch of backend so…

Part 3: Gameplay

So the main loop is literally just.. eat stuff the chef cooks for you and get “plates.” You can use plates to buy upgrades in the surface GUI.. There’s also a separate upgrade tree that uses emeralds, but the currency has not been implemented. Players can ascend, rebirth (also unimplemented) and.. yeah it’s just an incremental.

Part 4: Long term goals

There’s really no content in the game right now, just scaffolding…

Planning to dopamine-max and retention-max so I can keep a hopefully steady few thousand CCU when it’s released. Because of roblox’s questionable updates lately as a response to all the lawsuits I’ll probably have pay the 100k robux fee to accelerate age-restriction reviews to quickly push to younger audiences. But RIP ad credit funding lol…

Part 5: Bugs

Ran into scaling issues (see screenshot), had to refactor the backend a few times.. not really a bug but it made it better (I guess?)

also, ascension is supposed to reset.. E V E R Y T H I N G.. but I forgot to add it in the hashmap so the video doesn’t show resetting…

Part 6: I have no idea lol

If you want to discuss or talk about this project, don’t hesitate to post a comment or add my discord: SeasonedRiceFarmer

UI, Backend Revamp, Basic gameplay, Automation!!

Part 1: UI

So I made a bunch of UI (took really long, and was kind of painful tbh)

We have the side menu, with a shop button, an emerald button, an settings (keep in mind everything currently in the setting menu is a placeholder)

We also have ascension. Kind of regret not using a reactive UI framework, but might switch to one (like vide, roact)

Also, cool notifications thing I guess

Part 2: Backend

Backend is pretty mature right now, most of it is written and all I really need to do is just to expand upon the reusable structure.. and just.. reuse? Since I have a modular design, it is very easy to scale the architecture in the future and iterate fast for update after game release.

I specifically avoided heavy-OOP like inheritance chains, polymorphism, etc.. because lua is terrible for OOP… In fact, classes aren’t even a thing and you’re forced to use something called metatables to replicate class-behavior.

But after the backend, I plan to add VFX, SFX, and music to make the game actually feel alive, since it feels boring and dull right now.. I mean it’s literally just a bunch of backend so…

Part 3: Gameplay

So the main loop is literally just.. eat stuff the chef cooks for you and get “plates.” You can use plates to buy upgrades in the surface GUI.. There’s also a separate upgrade tree that uses emeralds, but the currency has not been implemented. Players can ascend, rebirth (also unimplemented) and.. yeah it’s just an incremental.

Part 4: Long term goals

There’s really no content in the game right now, just scaffolding…

Planning to dopamine-max and retention-max so I can keep a hopefully steady few thousand CCU when it’s released. Because of roblox’s questionable updates lately as a response to all the lawsuits I’ll probably have pay the 100k robux fee to accelerate age-restriction reviews to quickly push to younger audiences. But RIP ad credit funding lol…

Part 5: Bugs

Ran into scaling issues (see screenshot), had to refactor the backend a few times.. not really a bug but it made it better (I guess?)

also, ascension is supposed to reset.. E V E R Y T H I N G.. but I forgot to add it in the hashmap so the video doesn’t show resetting…

Part 6: I have no idea lol

If you want to discuss or talk about this project, don’t hesitate to post a comment or add my discord: SeasonedRiceFarmer

Some progress on a cool incremental game about food

so for the past few days, me and two other people have been working on a cool incremental, right now we are getting used to new tooling (rojo, blink networker, reactive UI frameworks, and ci/cd)

we made huge progress on the backend and we really only have to do frontend things and then keep developing it to finish the mvp

but yeah im excited to see how this will turn out, we are actually pretty far from the most challenging parts!!

also the map isn’t built yet 😔😔

we also took on a challenge (no claude code) for this game since we are pretty rusty and want to gain our programming skills back

(also check out the cool skill tree thing we have)