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PeachTreeOath

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Timestamp	Since previous	Game		PeachTreeOath's comment
Jan 12 08:28:08		Cyber Shapes	♥ 2	lol I hit 20k and decided to call it, since I saw you had 16k. Then when I submitted I saw you put up 42k 😒 😒 😒 There are few games where you think "why haven't other games done this?" where you have a simple concept that's really effective. I honestly can't think of another game that does the power-up-powerup mechanic, yet it works so well. The closest I can think of might be something like Smash TV where you leave powerups around for when you might need them, but in those sorts of games the powerups disappear over time. Here it creates this nice, opt-in difficulty where you're creating your OWN obstacles of sorts. Big ramifications. Funny story about Geometry Wars, but that game led to the very first game I ever made. I made it because I HATED how long GeoWars1 took to spin up - the first 10 minutes were super boring, so I tried to fix that problem. But your game scales due to this opt-in difficulty. Instead of being a boring first 10 minutes, I was already trying to figure out how to get close to enemies to execute them, and generating a maze of powerups for me to avoid. So only after a few rounds I'd be pushing my limits in terms of the difficulty I was looking for. Really inspiring design, I'll have to think about what other genres you could apply that to as there is a lot more potential here. The enemies were varied enough to give the classic twinstick feel of analyzing the screen and figuring out a strategy on the fly. If it weren't for the shield, I think I would've been done for. In late game, I personally think the most satisfying sequence was harvesting an HP regen and then snagging a full powerup once you're about to die. Harvesting at the last second reminded me of pokemon, and there was surprising risk/reward to it. To get a regen one you would have to be very careful with your shots, while the shields were a lot easier to obtain. Another impressive entry from you. The novelty of discovering new enemies and powerups carried the early game, and the depth of mastery carried the end game. Main reason I quit was cuz I felt like I could go forever haha asdf.png
Jan 12 09:42:14	1h 14m	Season of Harvest	♥ 4	The concept is quite hilarious. It's like a fight in a phone booth, except instead of people it's farmers and sunflowers in a really tight space. This was the highest score I could manage: asdf2.PNG The beginning was rough as I kept trying to use the scarecrows effectively. Eventually I just ignored them nearly altogether. The strat I developed was based on the aggro system. Step 1: put 2 sunflowers together and then sacrifice your 3rd sunflower. The 3rd one makes it too hard to hide your other seedx. Step 2: constantly place your corn where the farmers will end up, but away from your sunflowers so that they will draw them away in the opposite direction Step 3: prepare for when sunflower seeds need to migrate. This is the most dangerous part of the game and you need to set up the farmers in a way that they'll give you space to safely migrate I'd love to hear any other strats for this game. It's unusual (a good thing) which is why I spent a lot of time puzzling it out. Very unique idea!
Jan 12 10:00:58	18m 44s	Bearly Fitting	♥ 3	When I first saw this design I was actually a little intimidated. It seemed like there was total freedom in combinations and that it would take a long time to figure out how to place things. I'm not sure exactly why, but it ended up being easier than I expected! In a good way - I was pleasantly surprised. asdf3.PNG The banana/onion combo helped a lot actually. Rather than being an obstacle, it actually reduced the solution space a good amount and helped me make easier decisions. It's a good thing you didn't add TOO many more rules because I'm not sure if I could've remembered them all lol A final, neat touch you had was the cool night/sunset victory screen. It's an unusual combination of colors and elements so it really stuck out to me, and gave it a nice cozy send-off. I really enjoyed the game. It actually reminds me of Wordle in the sense that the game seems hard at first, but due to the rulesets and constraints, the game is easier than perceived and made me feel extra accomplished. So I'll just ignore that fact and pretend I was clever playing the game :)
Jan 12 10:18:28	17m 30s	Flower Dash	♥ 3	Hah, when I first saw your game I couldn't help but see the similarities to our game. A nice friendly animal grabbing leaves in a physics environment. Even though the game appears simple, there is a lot of thought and care put into elements that I really didn't expect. Like others pointed out, you didn't HAVE to add the double dash mechanic. But as soon as I discovered it, I tried to see how little I could touch the walls while playing. You didn't HAVE to have the final vacuum effect leaving the stage, but it gave good variety to the visuals and pacing. Honestly it's a good amount of polish for a 1 person team. Really good job!
Jan 13 06:13:43	19h 55m	Drake's Fortune	♥ 3	I honestly never thought I'd see Angry Birds with a metalayer and real game surrounding it, but here it is. Then again, I don't think it's even crossed my mind before lol. I legit really enjoyed it. The shooting mechanics were very satisfying. Hitting long range shots, while not totally necessary, was very enjoyable. I suppose both our games had that factor in it :D I saw you have plans to expand the game which is great to hear. I usually don't give suggestions on adding breadth of content (cuz LD is so short), but I couldn't help but think how awesome it'd be with different dragon types and upgrades. It was such a great design! Oh, I did run into a bug where I touched an archer and they launched me above some top collider. I could no longer move below it to gather gold and got stuck in the air :C bug.PNG
Jan 13 06:41:23	27m 40s	Travelling Tea Maker	♥ 3	The thing that caught my eye first was definitely the overall concept. I like merchant/caravan games, and I certainly haven't seen a travelling tea maker before. So the cover art was evocative and enticing. You probably made the right call to just gut the harvesting and focus on the people interactions and tea-making. I'm honestly not sure how you could do harvesting with that engine and make it not too tedious for the player. It was neat that although there is no exp/leveling system, I still felt a bit of progression as I was learning new recipes and or course, brewing the right one as well. I wasn't sure at first if I was going to get a ton more ingredients and recipes but luckily it wasn't bad. Definitely a different entry from what I've seen so far!
Jan 13 06:51:39	10m 16s	Glorious Pancakes	♥ 2	Oh god the blueberries scared the hell out of me lol. Clever twists when coming up to every minigame. I had no idea what to expect after doing the first one. One of the things that surprised me the most was the shadows actually! While I was harvesting eggs I couldn't help but stare at the back wall a bunch. I suspect I won't see another game where you're making pancakes as ants so hey, bonus points for being unique!
Jan 13 07:34:52	43m 13s	Pomodoro Panic	♥ 4	My greatest fear is to do a LD and not be able to finish a pkenney game. I thought this was going to be the one because that last level looked so daunting. I made the gamble that I should just water only the bottom 4 flowers and luckily that was it for me. Untitled.png Delivering the tomatoes is unbelievably satisfying. In this day and age people always talk about juice, and then cite THE juice video. I think this game shows how you can do a lot with a little. I think there's a hidden element that makes it extra satisfying too. I do think the difficulty itself makes it work. Because you know every tomato absolutely matters. All the levels are tuned very tightly so I feel that itself adds to the "juice" of delivering. I've absolutely never seen a game where crops died that fast. That in itself is a fresh mechanic. I suppose the closest equivalent then would be Overcooked but you're juggling everything yourself. It really is an interesting concept, I'm still thinking about it more. There is no single player Overcooked because usually you think "well this would be fun with more players". But you showed that it can work in this game. The game is very roughly a little supply chain game and you're trying to make sure you optimize your output flow by juggling watering plants vs delivering. On top of that, there are tricky-ish routes you need to take because pushing around tomatoes may or may not help you. I generally don't like saying this because it's cliche on LD but this seems like one you could go further with because it's pretty expandable. Loved the hidden strategies in the game. Deceptively strategic is a fine bar to set every time.
Jan 14 04:56:03	21h 21m	Scrapped	♥ 5	You read my mind when I was playing the game. I didn't read the tutorial text going into this game so I wasn't aware of the scrap mechanic. I started shooting robots as normal and they bounced around like a pinball so it take me too long to realize they were invincible. So then I thought "I wish there was a VS game where I'm pushing enemies into killzones." Lo and behold, that ended up being the primary mechanic in the game! The strategy change was a lot different from the others. You now have to camp around the scrap heap. On top of that, you needed to make sure your shot angles were correct and would push the robots in. This already created a different enough strategy that felt fresh. Although the bouncing mechanic killed me MANY times (24 was the highest I could reach), I'd still say that the design choice to do that was great, mostly because I'm tied of the same shambling zombie mechanic and having things come at me. The upgrades were pretty different as well. I can't help but guess you went for the implementation because you lacked the time to make a whole UI and selection menu :P Ultimately I'm ambivalent on the choice of upgrades instead of HP taking a hit, I think it could go either way. For such a loaded genre, you still managed to find a fairly unique design in it. Good stuff!
Jan 15 04:21:14	23h 25m	Island Survivor	♥ 2	I'm definitely a fan of making a game in a genre you don't know, it gives a chance to see a lot of novel mechanics since the dev may not be familiar with all the tropes. VS clones could certainly use a dash of innovation right now. So I'll talk about some of the differences and what they entail: - The first thing I noticed was that the resources spawned from the coconut tree above it. I thought that was fantastic since it quickly gave me the goals of "follow the trail of coconut trees" to level up. Most games either spawn from killing mobs (which doesn't encourage exploration) or they just spawn powerups willy nilly in the middle of nowhere. So the theming of the trees and such were a good idea. - The different terrain. To my knowledge this also hasn't been done before, and immediately gave me vibes of Heroes of Might and Magic terrain. This allowed for some risk/reward and decisionmaking. You didn't go too hard into this mechanic, but I liked that it was there and you could certainly play more with it if you had time. Trying to run out into the ocean only to have boars eat me alive was a terrible end. I really liked your approach of making the terrain more interesting to navigate and scattering your rewards that way. Since you haven't played VS, you may not know that the terrain tends to largely be arbitrary and ignored. I think it's a lost opportunity and you showed some ways designs can evolve for that!
Jan 15 04:47:42	26m 28s	Farming Combos	♥ 3	I can't believe how well thought out each level is. This is the sort of stuff you'd see in The Witness, where you're really thinking outside the box on how to explore the core concept. After the first few stages I thought OK, they'll probably just kinda increase complexity and strategy. But little did I know you were just teaching the player the basics so you could REALLY test them later on! Fast Food was the first one that showed me the light. I immediately thought about Osu and I thought it was hilarious how I was playing a farming game but suddenly my mouse speed and accuracy was being tested. Tortoise and Hare was a brilliant use of shapes and tiles. Ok well, a little creativity is required on the hare's depiction but the idea is there lol. Scatter Plot was very very tricky to optimize. This is where I learned to really juggle my tools and "plant over" other plants in order to not accidentally cut them. After the Storm - so cool. IMO harder than the last stage since counting out how you're going to lay things out is very difficult. The final stage I mostly just blasted things onto the fast tiles. I was kinda skeptical coming into this, but ultimately I believed in its title + the promise of fastpaced action. It delivered! I was tested on several skills I've never seen before. Quickly tracing my previous mouse movements, which still being themed as crop harvesting, was very innovation. And then there's the strategic side of it which is figuring out what the best things are to trace in the first place. The different crops having different growth rates are a key to making this all interesting, otherwise it'd be all pure tracing routes. There are lots of great directions the game can go in, and from what I've seen from your creativity skills, you're more than capable of continuing to surprise the players. Overall this is a very raw design, and I mean that in a good way. You went for a very novel gameplay and it's great to see a game pushing the boundaries. This is one of the reasons I do LD, to see what people can come up with on the cutting edge.
Jan 15 06:08:58	1h 21m	A Day in the Life of Death	♥ 3	Once I saw BOTH the wave and hidden mods I was like yep........the name is DDRKirby for a reason :) I'm so happy the narrative wrapped up the way it did. I think an issue with a lot of jam games is that they tend to be designed with the pacing of a normal game in mind. Where it feels like there are some lingering threads even when the game ends. But you wrapped this game up with a BOW. A perfect jam experience. Actions were all super satisfying. A big part of that is the sound design, followed by the animations. The final area is of course, the best because everything's building up to that moment and it's fantastic watching the crowd slowly change over to your side. Ending on a high note is always great. And during the credits it reminded me how much effort you put into the whole game, like the different characters, and the texting system itself. Really well thought out game that was finely executed.
Jan 15 18:52:40	12h 43m	Catchy	♥ 1	So happy you put up a video showing the full run. I was missing two and couldn't figure out if I needed to catch a certain amount of fish before they could start spawning. To my surprise, you caught a salmon right off the bat! Very fun game though. I got the feeling of really being an explorer-hunter where I was hunting for rare species all along the map. Probably like many others, I actually spent a long time just farming fish until I realized I could just leave and start finding the rest of the fish to finish the game. I suppose that's due to how the upgrades were spaced, and once it got too far spaced I realized what I needed to do. Really cool that this is your first LD game, and even cooler that you're very active in reviews too. Great to have you here!
Jan 15 21:08:36	2h 15m	Pseudo-Harvest	♥ 3	Oh my god I can't believe some of the screenshots I saw coming in here. There is a LOT more flexibility in setups than I expected! A serious testament to the design of the game and how much creativity it allows. I really enjoyed this game. It's an intuitive concept, yet not one that I've really seen or practiced before. You perfectly tie this in with the theme of inspections in a shady country to seal the deal. The quilt was a brilliant idea. I've seen other stacking type games in the past, but none that used this sort of joint-system. It made it very unpredictable in a good way. Like some of the comments here mention, it was harrowing to watch as your perfect quilt sunk under the weight of the grain and have you lose in the end. Unlike the others, I found this fun and a nice challenge to overcome. This appears to be your group's first LD entry, and it is SUPER impressive for being that. Hope to see more from your group in the future!
Jan 15 23:14:26	2h 05m	I Require Human Parts	♥ 4	No doubt my favorite of your text-based games, and also one of my favorite ones in the genre in general. The hook is immediate. I can tend to read quickly through text, but when I read the part about the tentacles grabbing people I was like wait WHAT and made sure to read more carefully. It is an amazing premise and not often explored in games surprisingly enough. Certainly not in parasitic hunting form. The UI is intuitive in helping the player figure out what they're doing and the premise of the mechanics. Watching the HP countdown immediately gave me a sense of urgency and understanding of what I needed to do. What I did not expect was a small element of "skill" to the game. Learning the parts of the ship and how they're named and how to navigate it had some mastery to it which is very uncommon. I bumbled around on my first playthrough, but on the 2nd one I was able to navigate much better, putting the security cams to much better use and knowing how to quickly get to the snack machine. Cornering 2 crewmates and wombo comboing them felt GREAT. I don't care if it was a bug lol. A super fun entry which made me rethink the abilities of Twine. I'm curious, is it difficult to implement this stuff in the engine? Whenever I see a Twine game it tends to be a much more straightforward narrative game. I'm curious if you're pushing it to its limits or if it's always been able to do this but people don't.
Jan 15 23:33:14	18m 48s	Folk Farm	♥ 2	Wow there is a lot of content here, you put your whole team to work! I remember running off to the right side and getting lost in the woods because there is a big spiral there with lots of seeds. I definitely didn't expect this much map from a gamejam game. I'm actually not sure I've played a game with this concept before. I've seen games where you farm/harvest and then convert the crops to money, which buys defenses (Farm for Your Life I think does this), but I haven't seen one where the crops directly are used as ammo. It was a pretty neat idea and I could see how a full game could really utilize that. Another novel thing you did was have it be a boss rush game rather than a wavebased. Usually for a farm defense game you have to deal with waves of enemies. I really liked the change of pace where you face bosses who look pretty different from each other. This gave it a lot more personality than just waves of standard enemies. I know what it's like to be a on big LD team so I know that it's very difficult to coordinate (5 people is way easier). The fact that you only worked on it in short bursts of 4h is even more incredible. So I think you did great considering that and hope to see you try more like this!
Jan 15 23:59:32	26m 18s	Menagerie Street	♥ 3	Im glad zungry listed out the solution, I kept getting stuck on some other details that misled me and probably why I couldn't solve it in the end. It was a good cast of character with very diverse backgrounds. It actually made it pretty relatable because I would map some people I knew to the characters and think about it that way. It felt great chipping away at the mystery chunk by chunk. It's possible I missed a key branch but I still enjoyed what I had uncovered. I also really liked the extra music that played whenever I was onto something. It very much matched the atmosphere of suspicion and mirrored how I was feeling about the subject. This is a pretty unique LD game. Don't think I've quite seen a mystery game where you're looking at people's arguments/stories and then choosing based on that. Nice job!
Jan 16 06:10:17	6h 10m	The Time Traveler's Garden	♥ 4	Ok, that was very unexpected, and very funny lol. So much lore you just imagine after you step out of the portal and deliver the food. I really liked how there were consequences to your decisions, even if small. After a while I realized I could position certain enemies apart, like the peppers on the left and the tomatoes on the right for instance. The rolling guys were NASTY though, as I tended to have trouble timing my own rolls against them. Ultimately, I think the best thing about this game is the contrast to punchline. I loved how the music changed and has a high-pass filter-ish sound to in. Once you exit the portal, everything returns to normal and you hilariously just serve food to the customers. Everything is timed perfectly and the joke is executed well!
Jan 16 06:39:14	28m 57s	Pulling Teeth	♥ 2	Very unique idea, probably the most oddball one I've seen yet. It's one thing to harvest teeth, but to "grow" cavities in people beforehand is a very clever way of leaning into the theme even further. I do like my shopkeeper games so it was a nice, though simple implementation of one. Tbh I had a bit of trouble keeping my money up between the days, but I at least got to experience the loop a couple times. Mashing was totally fine with me. I was impressed you went through the trouble of even implementing different houses to choose from. Looks like you have a team this time around instead of a solo venture. It's good to have more firepower! Hope to see it continue to grow and churn out more LD games in the future.
Jan 16 06:50:39	11m 25s	Afterlife Assistance Agency	♥ 1	From the screenshots, I thought this was going to be Papers Please type of game. Tbh, I'm not really a fan of those types of games, because they tend to just be shoddy ripoffs of PP without adding anything unique. I was really glad this game was not the case! Instead, it was a rapid fire Where's Waldo game, of which there are very few games in that category. The faces were fantastic and you made good use of a face generating system to make it relatively hard to pick out the correct face, especially in later levels when there's a lot of people running around. There seemed to be quite a bit of variability. The first time I played I could only get 6. I often had to wait several seconds until the guy popped into frame. Only upon coming back here and seeing posts did I realize that was a very low score. I tried again and got 14, with a lot of contract-characters being on screen already. Judging by your comments, the 1st case should've been rare so I'm not sure what happened. Either way, I did enjoy the game very much. This is a genre I always want to see more of but there doesn't seem to be a lot for it. The later levels were awesomely hard and really challenged me. Great stuff!
Jan 16 07:44:48	54m 09s	Lavender Fields Forever	♥ 3	Incredibly engaging game, it was hard not to want to finish out the game. I was on my way to 300 lavenders when I thought of the genius idea of seeing what would happen when I totally walled myself in... The game of course, totally lagged and died on me. But I got a very good taste of the game leading up to that. Summoning the different animal friends was the best part. I actually liked how the automation was unreliable. I grabbed a bunch of raccoons and prayed that they would plant seeds but they tended not to. I think it's good to have that sort of imperfect behavior, because otherwise the automation would be TOO easy like Factorio. It wouldn't make sense for animals to be perfectly trained anyways. Like many others, it didn't take too long to create a kill-tunnel for the gnomes to run through. It was super satisfying to blast down the tunnel and 1-shot everything. I think if they took multiple hits it really would've ruined the experience, despite that being the logical thing to do to up the difficulty between rounds. Another impressive entry, and probably the one with the most longevity given what some of the comments are saying. Super good game.
Jan 16 18:55:16	11h 10m	Adelie - Water Under the Bridge	♥ 2	What a well designed game! Like Roguelike combat but in its purest form where it's a puzzle game without any stats or leveling involved. I thought it was going to be a very manageable game until I got eaten for the first time. Then I realized I needed to put on my thinking cap. From there, positioning and enemy management started coming into play. Any enemy on its own was easy to kill. The hard part was making sure you never got put into harrowing situations where groups of enemies could checkmate you. At this point I was utilizing the rocks more to skip my turn which was a smart mechanic. I actually can't sing enough praise for the intro cutscene. Seeing some penguin babies and then diving into the water was very motivating and put me into the context of the game in 2 secs. Incredibly effective. The game feels very good to play and it feels even better with familiarity as you learn sequences and combos and can kill things quicker. Nice work!
Jan 16 19:30:10	34m 54s	Farm Island	♥ 2	Didn't expect to see a Powerwash Simulator type game in here :) It was actually pretty fun replaying and trying to get onto the leaderboards. I bareeeeeely squeaked in at 2nd to last with 707. I am curious though, what determines tractor speed? Sometimes it went faster or slower than I expected and I never could figure it out. Does mouse position matter at all? Sometimes I'd pull the mouse further away and hope that it would make it go faster. I'm guessing it's purely based on how many you're harvesting at a time but not sure. Either way, the game is super satisfying, and speedruns were harrowing as you would clear out a row but then accidentally leave 2 stalks standing, killing the whole run!
Jan 16 19:43:34	13m 24s	Harvest Mouse	♥ 3	The mouse mechanics reminded me of this game, which also features a rat with similar attacks https://store.steampowered.com/app/1283430/Fighting_Fiends/ The early parts was super promising. I liked that you showed off the cat fairly early. Like others, I actually thought the concept of being a rat in a field was really engaging and I hadn't really had that experience before. Having a nice, powerful dash really sealed the deal since you could scurry around like crazy, as a mouse should. Overall I loved the idea. Dark Souls but a field mouse is a great pitch lol.
Jan 17 01:56:37	6h 13m	Barn Busters	♥ 3	lol this a wild concept. I wouldn't have thought of this from Harvest. It was super fun to just watch the chaos unfold, I was hardly playing optimally. The tool I liked the most was just the tri-spinner. It had a whole lot of coverage and would easily bounce animals over to other nearby traps. I didn't realize I could carve out water myself until a bit later. It is definitely strong and you can set up some creative mazes with it. I'm not toooo sure why but I can't finish the game. There are 2 animals left and I'm constantly knocking them off the stage. Ah well, fun game regardless and I'm very impressed with how many towers you bothered to put into it.
Jan 29 00:32:01	286h 35m	Carrot Conundrum	♥ 0	Played this going through the winners. Very deserving of the #1 spot :)