Hey everyone!
First, a big thank you!
It has been a little while since our last update, and the support, patience, and honest feedback we have had in that time has meant an enormous amount to a very small team. Nobody was obliged to stick around after everything SunnySide has been through. A lot of you did anyway, and we do not take that lightly.
So here is where things stand:
Losing That Drive Turned Out to Be a Blessing
If you read the last update, you will remember that one of our SSDs died and took a chunk of our early rebuild work with it.
We were… not thrilled at the time.
Looking back, it might be the best thing that could have happened to this project. Redoing that work meant making all of those decisions a second time with everything we had learned from making them once already. Almost every system came back cleaner than it was before with fewer assumptions carried over out of habit and far fewer shortcuts. Sia’s work this time around has been nothing short of incredible.
We might've lost a few weeks but we gained a much better foundation, and honestly we’re really thrilled about it.
The Remake Has a Name
We finally get to say this out loud.
We’re calling it SunnySide: Regrown
Same town. Same people. Same heart. Built again from the roots up, with everything we have learned since. We are genuinely happy with this name, and we hope it says what we want it to say about this version of the game.
Rebuilding the Guts in C++
The original programming for SunnySide leaned very heavily on Blueprints. We still love Blueprints and we still use them, but a lot of the heavy lifting in the old game was being done in places where it really should not have been.
This time, all the systems that do the hardest work are written in C++.
The inventory is a good example of what that buys us. It already does things the old one never could:
Sorting that actually works
Items remembering when you picked them up, so you can sort by what you gathered most recently
Faster access, fewer clicks, less digging
No stutters or frame drops when opening it mid-game
That last one matters more than it sounds. Opening your bag should never cost you a single frame.
Time Moves On Its Own Now
The time of day system has been rebuilt in C++ as well, and it changed how the whole day works.
Time now flows continuously and smoothly. You no longer have to sleep to push the game into the next day, because the day gets there on its own.
Instead, you build up exhaustion.
Push through a long day and you will start to feel it. You can fight it for a while with coffee and a few other things, but exhaustion is not something you can ignore forever. Eventually you need to actually sleep, both to clear it and to charge your phone.
We like this a lot more than the old loop. Your day ends because you ran yourself down, not because the game needed you to click a bed in order for your plants to move to their next growth stage.
The New UI, and Your Phone
This one has been a fun one!! You all know how much we love UI work!
The UI in the original game was one of the quieter reasons for its performance problems. A huge number of assets were being loaded at once every time you opened the phone, and a lot of them were interface elements. It looked fine but it cost far too much.
For Regrown, we are using MSDFs for icons, which means they stay crisp at any size while taking up a fraction of the memory that the old ones did. The UI now looks cleaner and performs better at the same time, which is not a trade we expected to win, but we’ll take it! It also allows us to bring in animations and effects that were not possible before! We really think everyone is going to love the new look, and we can’t wait to test it.
We have also settled on a new look: a soft, glassy style that sits over the world without burying it.
Your phone now lives in the corner of your screen permanently, as a small always-visible version serving as the clock and notifications are readable at a glance. You can open it at any time without the game stopping, and you can keep walking while you use it. No more freezing the world every time someone texts you.
We loved the feeling of pulling out your phone, and we loved the way it looked sitting in the player’s hand, but we traded that vibe for usability and we’re not going to do that again. The player character will still hold the phone in their hand while it's being used but it won't stop you from moving.
Building, Properly This Time
We were never happy with how player houses worked in the original SunnySide.
Being honest about why: it came down to the limits of our programming skill and understanding back then. We built what we knew how to build but we know a lot more now.
In Regrown, you build modular structures from the ground up, piece by piece. A shed, a house, a greenhouse for your plants, whatever you need, assembled by hand out of parts. A lot of what we learned making Vending Dokan went straight into this.
We are also removing the friction that can make building in games so frustrating:
Cut pieces of a building to extend it, instead of tearing it down
Copy an entire building and place it somewhere else
Nudge and rotate freely to get the angle you actually wanted
Swap the style of a whole building without rebuilding it, from traditional walls to something modern in a couple of clicks
The system is built to be expanded, so we can keep adding new sets and pieces over time, and every new set becomes another style you can flip an existing building into. No more sacrificing FUN for realism.
The best part? You will be able to share what you make. Any building you create can be uploaded to the Steam Workshop, and you can download what other players have built. This has been our dream for a long time, and VD:KK walked so that SunnySide: Regrown could run.
Farming Gets Room to Breathe
Farming is getting attention too.Sydney had a vision that was held back a bit by programming ability, but we’re finally going to be able to deliver.
We are working on letting you till multiple plots in one go, because nobody has ever or will ever enjoy doing that one square at a time.
We are also getting rid of plant sizes as a category. Instead, plants have footprints. A larger crop might need eight tilled spots to grow into, which makes laying out a farm a real spatial decision rather than a menu one. We want farming to be the most realistic feeling system in the game, and we want to branch into real world farming techniques in the future. We’re laying the groundwork for that now, and we’re excited about future possibilities. Feel free to share ideas with us in Discord!
Also, we are extending the blueprint planning system from buildings across to farming. That means you can plan out a farm around seeds you have not acquired yet, laid out in the holographic style from the original game, to then plant and fill in as you go.
This also means potentially future automation systems can know what you want grown where. Whether it's Sparky that does the farming or one of your friends. We haven’t decided yet ;)
A Real Town, Built the Way a Real Town Grows
The map has been one of our biggest discussions.
As we said last time, we cannot simply drag the old map into the new engine and expect it to hold up. We thought maybe we would just do some recarving and mold SunnySide’s map into something that works better for Regrown… but instead we took the opportunity to rethink it from the start.
Instead of fixing the old map, we are going to start by recreating a real town in Japan, and doing it faithfully.
That means working from actual geological data: where the rivers run, where the mountains sit, how the land has eroded, and where people historically chose to settle because of all of that. Towns are shaped by their landscape, and we want ours to feel like it was.
From there, we will adjust the landscape to be uniquely SunnySide, to suit the history of the town and the people who settled there.
SunnySide will look different to the version you know, but it will also feel far more like a place that could actually exist.
And we promise that it will be smaller and more fun to navigate.
About Multiplayer
We want to talk about this one carefully, because we are not going to promise it.
We keep coming back to how much fun SunnySide could be with a friend, especially with everything above in place. Sharing a farm. Building a homestead together. Splitting the chores and then arguing about the layout.
We have not confirmed that co-op is possible for us yet.
What we can tell you is that every design decision we are making right now is being made with co-op in mind, so that if it turns out to be within reach, we are not having to tear anything apart to get there. We would rather build the door now than knock a hole in the wall later.
More on this when we know more!
A Decision We Want You In On
A few weeks ago we got an email from a SunnySide player.
They laid out a case we had not properly considered about how we release Regrown, and it was good enough that it made us stop and rethink a plan we thought was settled. We love that this is the kind of community we have.
Here is the short version.
Our original plan was to release Regrown as an update to the SunnySide page you already own. What we are now considering instead is releasing SunnySide: Regrown as its own game on Steam, where it can go into Early Access, and where you can play it and shape it as it grows.
If we do that, and you already own SunnySide, you get Regrown for free. That part is not up for negotiation.
We have not made this decision, and we are not going to make it without you. There are real trade-offs in both directions and we have written them all out honestly in a survey, along with a couple of other options and some questions about crowdfunding.
Please take a few minutes to respond to the survey below. Your input means the world to us. <3
👉 https://forms.gle/xGVshBJZXjHG6McU6
Thank You
Thank you for reading all of this.
Work on Regrown is going well, and it has picked up a lot of speed over the past few weeks. We are enjoying it enormously!!
Honestly, there is nothing out there quite like working on SunnySide. We still have so much love for this game and this town and these characters, and we are at our happiest when we are building it. Getting to do that on our own terms, at last, is not something any of us is taking for granted.
We are looking forward to the survey results, and to your comments below. We read them.
And if you want more frequent updates and the occasional sneak peek before it shows up here, come and join us on Discord: 👉 http://discord.gg/sunnyside
Thank you all. We will see you in the next update! 💛
The Aftabi Games Team
