CowSim: A Dairy Odyssey

by: WriterArtistCoder

This game was made for my level 2 project at The League of Amazing Programmers.
Click here to download and play!

1. Why I Made This Game

I had already started on it. I also wanted to make another farm simulating game, after making an egg farm simulator. https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/238394341/

2. What I Learned

They recommended a feature that would automate some things, like selling milk and paying bills, and a "Sell all milk" button.

3. Architecture of My Game

At the start, the user is given one cow and $100 in money. Milk is slowly generated and sold, and more cows are bought, increasing the milk flow and getting more cows, until the player wins the game at 100 cows (and by then the milk is just going up and up and up.) The CowSim class does just about everything in the "game" scene, and the GameWindow class provides a frame and splash panel. CowSimUpdater downloads new releases, and CowSimRunner is the master of everything. It creates the window and runs the updater.

4. Technical Implementation

I am proud of my new "saving" feature. It allows the user to save the game as a .cowsim file, which is actually a .txt file, and import the game later, play it, and save it again. That was one of my best features.

5. Most Challenging Part

I created a "farmer" feature that would hire farmers to sell milk and pay bills. This took away most of the user's control, and removed most of the game. After much urging from one of my testers, I reluctantly took out the feature.

6. Future Fixes and Updates

I am working on a field feature that makes the milk flow dependent on the grass quality.

7. How can I learn more about CowSim?

See https://github.com/WriterArtistCoder/cow-simulator for the source code and https://github.com/WriterArtistCoder/cow-simulator/wiki for more about CowSim and how to play it.