Hello!

I would like to present the game I am working on right now: it's a 2D farming game, loosely inspired by the Harvest Moon series, being developped in C# using the XNA framework.

The general goal as follows: you have X years of time to turn a piece of land into a well-prospering farm, by gathering enought money to pay the debt, and getting the people to accept you. There will also be side-goals, and after the main goal of the game is won the player is able to keep playing, otherwise the farm is lost

What do I have so far:

- A lot of spaghetti code

- A map engine [pixel-based movement, the character actually waves his arms when he's walking!]

- Inventory system with adding/removing/dragging items and a hotbar

- Time system with day/night cycle, months, years

- Functional tools [Shovel/Hoe, Bucket/Watering Can, Axe, Hammer, Seeds, fence etc.]

- Basic particle system for the digging/cutting/etc effects [to help in fighting the urge to puke after seeing the same animation played for the 1000th time]

- Planting/growing routine [the plants grow only in the daylight, and if properly watered]

How does it look like:

Edit: Added some simple shadows under the player, trees and bushes

Changed the grass, soil etc. tonation to make it a bit brighter

I'm not really that good with graphics [the road looks like it's made of planks, and the character is ugly], so any constructive criticism welcome!

Looks quite nice to me! To improve the graphics you should of course add more variation (different trees, stones, bushes etc.) and I'd also recommend trying to add small shadows to your tiles and sprites, this usually makes it look much more professional.

Ah yes, I love variation - I just made the trees to test out how will the layering work out, so there's only one sprite for them for now, but more will be added soon [I also need to get two textures for each tree sprite, as I have a kind of ... wind effect 'moving' the plant leaves randomly to add some more life]

The shadow idea is certainly worth trying, I didn't think about that - thanks!

Also, do you mean full blown scale shadows of the object, or just simple darkened circles? :-)