duckydaniel 2018-08-13 13:27
Found it quite hard with balancing the debt and and building farms, I couldn't get passed to corn, but a great concept with great art and music.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD42 → Lien Acres
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 317 | 3.44 | 21 | |
| Fun | 509 | 2.94 | 21 | |
| Innovation | 264 | 3.36 | 21 | |
| Theme | 157 | 3.94 | 21 | |
| Graphics | 57 | 4.07 | 21 | |
| Audio | 122 | 3.50 | 21 | |
| Humor | 2.31 | 18 | ||
| Mood | 53 | 3.75 | 20 |
Found it quite hard with balancing the debt and and building farms, I couldn't get passed to corn, but a great concept with great art and music.
Nice game! I made it to year 45, season 2. Once you have a good strategy, the game becomes fairly easy. Graphics and music were really nice. Great work!
I really LOVE this game. It's the best I've played for the moment. Everything is cool: the theme interpretation, the mood, graphics and music. It's a little too hard at the beginning, maybe. I'd really like a full game like this, with different levels, difficulty and themes. Great job!
My farm has last 47 years and 1 season!
Very nice atmosphere, really enjoyed it. You are kinda thrown into it, so a tutorial would be nice! Great job though!
Thank you guys!
Yeah I had plans for a start screen and instructions and stuff but ran out of time.
I think one thing I will share here is that planting Corn with your starting money is a bit of a trap. The little wheats that are up aren't really producing enough at that point to sustain you until that corn grows, and by the time it does the wheat is dead and all you've got producing is a little corn. So right out the gate, spamming wheat is best. Just don't rely on it for the full playthrough ;)
Early you're building up and getting self-sustainable, later on it's about making enough gold to really spam the two Gold Sinks to attempt to delay the city :)
My own personal best during testing at the current numbers balance and timing was 50 years, 1 season.
Very relaxing game with pleasant music and very nice NES-style graphics, I didn't quite get at first, because I just got launched in there and didn't have any money once I got to the window. Some things could be made a little bit clearer (amount you're taxed, what conditions the buildings have in terms of getting built over your fields). I made it to year 46 on my second try.
Interesting game. There doesn't seem to be a whole lot that you can actually do -- I ended up spamming tomatoes and the first action, which was the only one I could afford.
The graphics are nice though, and the music is fittingly melancholy. So good job there.
Yeah, count me in as someone who would love to see a full sim game with graphics like these. They have an almost SNES Sim City feel. Great work on this.
I seemed to be able to build greenhouses for free (once I had the 300 gold) a few different times, I think that might be a bug? Maybe I'm misunderstanding something though.
@quicklyer: That is definitely a bug; at least 2, in fact. I didn't catch that at all during my own testing and thought I had accounted for a one-greenhouse limit, but I was pretty tired by the time I implemented that so who knows, it'll be fun to dig around and see what's going on there, ha ha.
Thank you! :)
I juste replayed your game. It is REALLY cool. :-)
I could not made any strategy beside spamming corns and ending up with huge debts or tried corn once and bakrupt faster. Well, im not a good strategist anyway. I liked the concept and the nice retro graphics, just as well the music, which fits the theme and the atmosphere of the game as well. The game theme is kinda depressing, especially when you see that kind of thing in the news and it bring up the feeling of - What we are doing to this world? -.
Its has become a very common sight of concrete buildings taking the place of fields at a faster rate each day that passes, and is exactly what i saw in the game, a countdown to the emminent concrete jungle takeover.
However, the feeling aside, the game is a pleasant experience of trying to exist while the end is comming and you can see it.
Took a bit to get the hang of this one, but really enjoyed it overall. Seems like you could take this in a bunch of different directions moving forward. :)
Have a great LD!
The map is pleasantly SimCity Classic inspired, and the music is similar too, but both are good in their own right as well. Playing from the perspective of the farms (often, but not always) left out of the SimCity series is a nice twist. Playing it feels smooth and polished, plus your possible actions are clear from the beginning (excepting that in what way I lose money each season will always be a bit opaque to me... the tax rate isn't really shown anywhere I think?)
The land-grab option seems quite balanced despite being random. During my first playthrough, it even seemed to get higher chance of effectiveness towards the end of the game. (Perhaps tied to how much the city has already taken over?) But my second made it clear that I just got lucky last time.
It's a small detail, but I also like how the end-text changes depending on which of the two outcomes you get. Another small detail is the tower, of which the city doesn't seem to build more, but is there to give the impression that the city has some sort of centre and outskirts.
If I have a big criticism, it is this: During each stage of play, there seems to be only one 'correct' (dominant) style of play:
- In the hectic, somewhat difficult beginning: Spam wheat throughout the entire map until you can reliably afford corn. - Then there is a short stage that is mostly about mixing in more and more corn until you can afford the greenhouse. - Keep planting corn (and _maybe_ still a bit of wheat) while you mix in more and more tomato-fields (which seems to be limited to 2 at first, but almost as soon as I build them, this restriction was lifted). - Keep planting tomatoes until you can afford 'delay land-grab', and later on 'friends in low places', and keep spamming those while planting tomatoes only.
Thus, there is really no reason to keep wheat or corn around when you can afford tomatoes, and the greenhouse upgrade is a one-time only thing, leaving only three options to play around with. Even there it just seems 'spam each of these as often as you can'. It becomes less a game of strategy, and more of luck.
Another, related issue is the strange difficulty curve: Hectic in the beginning, as you struggle to get enough wheat out, then more and more sedate and drawn out. This even becomes worse in the end, as your money dries up, so you can't pick the options as often, and the fields don't need replacing that often because you just don't have that much any more.
In a way, this is of course very much in line with the 'fighting a losing battle' motive, and it helps with the mood in that regard. Impressive if intentional! Still, the gameplay suffers just a little.
P.S. I normally try not to promote my own game in feedback, but this time our respective games just match up almost perfectly: So, if you'd like to play from the perspective of the encroaching city, maybe give my game a try :-) It doesn't match 100% (as you don't fight a farm, or anything, per se) but the inspirations are drawn from the same place.