The Last Harvest

Project Overview: The Last Harvest is a first-person narrative farming simulator blended with progressive survival-horror mechanics. I am the core Programmer and Designer in a two-person indie studio, I architected the game’s core loops, balancing with dynamic, tension-building AI and branching narrative structures.

Technical Highlights

Core Game Loop & Progression Systems

Dynamic Objective Architecture: Developed a scalable quest and objective system that tracks player milestones, listens for global event triggers, and updates UI seamlessly without tightly coupling logic.

Narrative and Dialogue Architecture

Data-Driven Dialogue System: Engineered a custom, node-based dialogue parser that handles branching conversations, variable state-checks, and custom text events for unique entities (e.g., the Crows and the Pumpking).

Context-Aware NPCs: Programmed narrative NPCs with state-driven interactions, ensuring their dialogue and behaviors evolve based on the player’s progress and past dialogue choices.

Economic Shopkeeper Mechanics

Transactional Systems: Built robust merchant and shopkeeper mechanics to handle in-game economy. This includes transactional validation (checking funds/stock), and a modular system for tool upgrades.

Adversarial AI (The Scarecrow)

Tension-Driven AI: Developed the “Scarecrow” enemy utilising a Finite State Machine (FSM). The AI transitions seamlessly between stalking, hiding, and attacking based on player proximity and line-of-sight raycasting.

Navigational Logic: Implemented dynamic pathfinding [e.g., using Unity’s NavMesh] that adapts to the player’s ever-changing farm layout, ensuring the enemy remains a persistent threat.

Gameplay Screenshots