AdVancing Agriculture

Resource management can be hard for a farm which is why we created a simulation based on real data to help understand this topic and to bring further knowledge and resources to farmers.

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Inspiration

We were inspired by other farming games we’ve played and seen before, like Stardew Valley or Harvest Moon, which is a realistic farming game that accounts for seasons and such when planting crops, much like our simulation does. We wanted to make a more realistic version of that to help make the consumers of this simulation more knowledgeable about farming.

What it does

It is a simulator that simulates a few important aspects of farming/agriculture. This includes a variety of different crops to grow, each with their own set of conditions that you have to account for in order to properly grow them. Alongside the farming aspect, we also incorporated a currency system, each crop costs and sells for a different price, this allows the user to experience trying to make a good profit on the crops they are growing. Each of these mechanics were added with the intention of teaching the user about sustainable agriculture, nuances of crop cultivation, seasonal farming, ecological impacts of how they farm, and optimizing profits.

How we built it

The simulation itself was built using Unity, while the webpage is used to highlight some important information, which the simulation is embedded in, was built using HTML. We divided the work so that Alex built the website, William researched our topic, Sean made graphics, and Richie built the simulation.

Challenges we ran into

Time was the biggest challenge for us, we are used to typically having ample time for coding projects like this, be it assignments for class or our own passion projects, so having this tight time constraint on what we can make was definitely the most challenging; However, it was a welcomed challenge for us to see what we can come up with in this short amount of time. Another challenge was learning how to work together using our vastly different skill sets, we rarely had skills that overlapped so we had to rely on each other for hitting milestones of this project. The project was also very ambitious which meant we had to limit our scope without losing sight of the project's purpose. One feature we had to cut was to have the crops have different harvest times that would affect how they would function, but due to our time limit we couldn’t add that.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Considering the 36 hour time limit, we’re really proud of the quality of our project, the amount of features and information we were able to incorporate into it. For having this unusual time limit, we think we did quite well.

What we learned

With coding projects like this, we typically work on them on our own, so this experience has taught us a lot about working in a team, such as some of the industry standard ways of uploading our project so that it could be worked on by different people simultaneously, and how to upload our final product for events like this. Besides the logistics of working on a project like this with a team, we also learned a lot from our research about agriculture and a lot of the nuances that it has.

What's next for AdVancing Agriculture

Our next steps are to account for more variables in our simulation such as fertilizers and their impact on budget and soil, irrigation techniques, and other future advancements in the field of farming and agriculture. As we mentioned we also wanted to add a harvesting time versus how they are instantly harvested now.

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