Planned Release Date: 2027

About This Game

Season's Turning is a combat-less farming sim focused on exploration and environmental immersion.

I (Krystal) have been solo-developing this game for three years after leaving a 10 year career as an artist in AAA.

The game uses only human-made assets and no crowd funding.

HOW DOES IT DIFFER FROM OTHER FARMING SIMS?

We all know this genre is getting pretty repetitive, so here's how I'm changing it up.

Extra farming mechanics based on my real life experience.

I've spent the past year in real life building a large garden, setting up irrigation, and raising chickens. This experience is absolutely making it into the game in the form of extra mechanics such as Companion Planting, Irrigation based on piping, emitters, and water reservoirs, and realistic chicken behaviors.

Respect for your time

Players can change the speed of the day, and save whenever they like. Additionally, the time will pause in specific locations: Your house (to allow chill end of day decorating and keep those crafting stations off your lawn), the puzzle dungeons (to give you as much time as you need to think up the solutions), and the mines.

Reinventing the Mines

Usually, the challenge of the mines in farming sims is "how deep can I go before the day ends?" Since I'm pausing time during the mines, obviously I need to change this up. What I'm planning is a rogue-lite experience with limited actions instead of limited time. As you progress, you can dynamically rearrange the structure of the mines itself, unlocking new paths and strategies to help you go deeper and discover more.

Deep Environmental Immersion

Over half of this game's development time has been spent building a world that legitimately makes you relax just to be in it. The wind passes over the map realistically, rustling leaves, triggering wind chimes, and blowing your character's hair and clothes as it goes. Bees will gather around flowers. Squirrels will run when you approach. The rain patters off windowpanes. The trees gradually change colour as it turns to fall.

Cooking that makes every crop matter

Recipes are open ended, allowing you to use any of an ingredient type (ex. any vegetable) instead of one specific ingredient. You could make apple cinnamon tea, or jasmine mint tea, or lemon maple tea, all with the same recipe.

Each crop in the game has 1-2 traits (such as energizing or filling). When you cook, the value of the result is based on the value of the ingredients AND the variety of traits used. Specific ingredients will also go in and out of favor with your customers as the weeks pass, making choosing your crops a deeper strategy than just searching a wiki. And that's before we even get into gene splicing your seeds to mix traits & grow times.

Speaking of seeds...

An Focus on Exploration

The world in Seasons Turning is beautiful, but it's also full of secrets. You can find hidden caves, haunted ruins, and even alternate dimensions, but the most important thing to discover is new plants. In this game, you must harvest your seeds, not buy them. The world is full of rare and hard-to-reach plants, and it's up to you to figure out how to gather them.

No Combat, No Romance

This one may be a bit controversial, but it's important to know what you're getting into.

The game has four dungeons, but no combat. I've designed all the challenges around puzzles and problem solving instead. For this, I've drawn inspiration from all the games of my childhood, and I hope they bring you as much joy now as they brought me then.

As for the romance, worry not. The town is full of NPCs. They all have personalities, troubles, and hopes. They have relationships with each other, and opinions about you. Helping them with their goals will reveal more about them, and may even unlock new businesses or crafting options. You simply cannot throw gifts at them to woo them into dating you.

Tons of Character Customization options.

I won't say it's the most of any pixel art game, but it's up there for sure. 

There are 29 base hair styles, 13 bangs, and 8 beards to choose from, as well as 32 skin tones, 64 eye and hair colors, and more options related to customization unlockable after some quests.

Your character is whatever gender you want them to be at any time you want them to be it. You can wear whatever clothes or hairstyles you want (given a trip to the salon or clothing store). For clothes, there are 100 tops, 100 bottoms, 100 hats, 50 shoes, and 40 socks.

Quality of Life

• You don't need to fill half your hotbar with tools because most tools are used automatically. Hit a tree? It'll use your axe without you having to swap to it.

• There is also no stamina or tool durability.

• You can change the keybinds, reverse the scroll direction, and turn off the fishing minigame.

• You can swap between keyboard and controller on the fly, and select which type of controller icons you want to see (including actually displaying the correct a/b/x/y for Nintendo)

• I know the map is big, so you get a bicycle right away, and fast travel later.

• There is an unlockable tent to let you spend the night outside.

• Once the game first loads, there are no more loading screens.

• The map shows the locations of npcs and quests, but you can also hide those if they get in the way

• If you already have a lot of quests, npcs will hold onto new ones until you have less on your plate

• You can hold the scyth button to swing and walk at the same time like a spinning top.

And I haven't even gotten into the mafia barn cats...

Seasons Turning is expected to release in late 2027, with a playtest then demo coming this spring. I've been posting regular Youtube videos showing the game's development process since the very beginning.

See you in the June Next Fest!