OVERVIEW
Crop Benders is a fully playable agricultural simulation game that puts the player in control of their own evolving farm. It blends strategic planning (think: upgrades and daily limits) with real-time decision-making. The gameplay changes based on your difficulty, crop choice, and season, making each round different.
This project started as a six-milestone dev cycle and became a full-stack build: I designed the UI, coded the core engine, implemented logic for upgrades, states, and market functions, and tested everything with JUnit. Everything, including backend, frontend, animations, and interactions, was custom-built.
KEY TOPICS
Custom UI with JavaFX
State management (Game Start, Market, End Screen, etc.)
Object-oriented design + clean architecture
Daily cycle and time-based limits
Upgrade systems (tools, machinery, irrigation)
Score logic + win/lose conditions
Gameplay balancing + debugging
JUnit testing for new features
Storyline
You are a farmer trying to optimize your farm! Grow your crops all throughout the seasons, upgrade your tools, and grow your farm!
Game Structure
The game runs on a daily cycle. Players either win by hitting 10,000 coins, or lose if they run out of money and all their crops die. A game over triggers a restart option. Before the game starts, users can pick their difficulty, season, and seed type to customize how challenging or fast-paced the round is. Power ups include
🌱 Dynamic Farm Expansion: Players can buy new plots that appear on-screen, with increasing costs. The UI auto-updates as your farm grows.
🚜 Tool & Machinery Upgrades: Tractors and irrigation systems boost how much you can harvest and water per day. Logic is tied to pop-up alerts when limits are hit.
Learnings
This project gave me the chance to deepen my understanding of JavaFX and game state logic, especially when it came to balancing UI clarity with system complexity. Working across both design and development helped me see how thoughtful architecture and visual feedback can shape a smoother player experience.
It also pushed me to think critically about gameplay pacing, user feedback loops, and how to debug layered interactions in a scalable way. Building Crop Benders from concept to a playable sim was a rewarding challenge that sharpened my full-stack thinking and made me even more excited to work on creative, interactive systems.
