Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD46 → Harvest Saga
By kamekai
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 1282 | 3.47 | 26 | |
| Fun | 1630 | 3.12 | 26 | |
| Innovation | 2305 | 2.60 | 27 | |
| Theme | 2209 | 3.02 | 27 | |
| Graphics | 1201 | 3.64 | 26 | |
| Audio | 493 | 3.66 | 26 | |
| Humor | 2.12 | 6 | ||
| Mood | 708 | 3.66 | 26 |
I like the squiggly graphical style a lot. I did run into a rendering issue though: For some reason the game was slightly larger than my play area on Brave browser, but when I scrolled down to see the bottom it would mess up the area detection for selecting things in the game.
@no-grapes-games Yeah that's a critical issue that popped up right at the end and I didn't notice till submission. I've already fixed it but until I push an update tomorrow, just making sure the browser window is taller than it is wide when the game starts should do the trick.
It was a bit of trial and error before understanding what to do, but after that it is a very relaxing and minimalistic farming game, which I liked!
@splitpainter glad you enjoyed it. The first season can be a little slow till you upgrade your watering can and hoe, and I was hoping to combat this with minigames, like bugs or birds which would occasionally swoop or crawl towards crops and need to be be clicked, random bonus drops, stuff like that. I also wanted a pond upgrade which would have fish randomly jump on screen for a moment and clicking them would net you extra cash. These features will be in the post-jam next week so follow me if you want to try it then!
@kamekai I know the feeling of having X features but then skipping all of them just to be able to submit the game in time, hehe :) I'll definitely follow.
hi, your HTML5 link isn't working correctly.
@vivek-sharma20 Thanks for bringing that to my attention! I just switched it out to a shortened URL and switched up the 4 and the 6. >_<
It should work now!
It's a nice game. It would have been easier if you didn't had to click each tile to water it. That's the only thing I would change.
Also... Isn't Europa a bit chilly for gardening? I'm more of a Mars guy. I mean Mars is a bit cold, but around Jupiter is 4 to 5 times worse. Hope you are doing good.
@mircea123 Upgrading your tools makes it significantly quicker to till, water and harvest. After one upgrade to your hoe and watering can, being able to drag would make the game just too easy. I do wish I had time to make it more explicit to the player that the experience gets less tedious quickly.
Europa is perfect for winter radishes!
Pretty nice and soothing game. For some reason this kind of experiences get my attention. I would have liked more things to do though! Maybe a little bit less of waiting time, or a bit more actions while you wait. I do know it's a game jam, but I liked it so wanted more! :hugging:
@sndr I totally agree! It's too tedious during the first season. I had really hoped to get the chance to add a few features like basic pest control and "fishing" with a pond upgrade (fish jump into the screen area for a moment and can be clicked) and another minigame or two to keep your attention while waiting for things to grow. By year 2 I wanted things to start getting really frantic! Then I would have had two modes, classic arcade mode and a more peaceful mode.
Anything in particular you would like to see included in a post-jam? Give me a follow if you'd like to play the update later on!
I understand.
When you have time, you could bring some radish salad to Mars. The potatoes are good but I am low on Ketchup.
@kamekai classic arcade mode sounds very interesting :eyes:
Such a lovely game. I spent way too much time playing it. But after getting most (I think?) of the upgrades i have encountered a weird bug. Crop area got duplicated and I couldn't finish the game :(
harvest.png
Nonetheless, it's a very nice, complete experience. Hope to see more from you!
Cheers!
@ryzy27 I have tried but I cannot seem to reproduce this error. A friend of mine also had this issue. I can't determine if it consistently happens for the users who do experience it or if it's some kind of rare race condition bug. If you happen to play again, let me know if it happens again.
Thanks for your feedback and I'm glad you had fun! My goal with this game was to have at least one person tell me they spent a lot of time playing it, and it's great to see that happen. I only wish you could have been properly rewarded with a bug-free endgame! I'll be paying extra attention to this during the next week while I work on the post-jam.
Dude the game is so good,you seems you were pretty modest commenting on my post tho, now I feel my game ain't gonna be doing so good with such great farming game out there.. :( The art style is very good,and so is the audio, just a great game overall, 5 stars from me
One more thing, PLEASE opt out of humor if your game is not intended to be funny, hurts me to rate 1 star in humor to such a great game.
@devesh-sharma While I did get a chance to sprinkle in some humor, it was pretty much isolated to just the random text on the confirmation dialog between seasons. I took your advice and opted out of the humor category. Thanks for your feedback! What was your favorite part?
I haven't played your game yet (on my Linux machine atm) but I'll share my thoughts in a bit :)
@ryzy27 I posted a patch which should bubble up in a few minutes, next time you play press Ctrl+Shift+R to do a full reload so you get the updated file and not the cached one. I forgot to add an 's' at the end of a word in a property in the Radish object!
That was a fun game! I enjoyed the simple gameplay loop. The art was nice and so was the wiggling animation on the UI, it really set the mood of the game! The music was good too, the acoustic guitar was a good choice though I wish the loop was longer and more varied (Not that it's easy with such a short time!). At first I thought that it was hard to see which crops were fully grown and which tiles were tilled/watered but that might just be me. Good job!
Thank you so much for your video, that kind of feedback is priceless. I laughed when you moused over the day counter and then spelled out HI. The game definitely needed more prominent help and feedback!
I wrote the music and then tackled the line boil effect before doing anything else for the game, because I figured if I could get the mood right then I could get away with an otherwise sparse gameplay loop given the time constraints. A whimsical, childlike presentation was key to excusing my awful programmer art and lack of animations.
I did write more music for each season but didn't get a chance to rerecord better versions of them in time. The post jam will feature more upgrades, minigames, the missing music, and a proper win condition :)
link's broken :(
@theaidency I just checked each link and they all work fine. Give it another shot!
I really liked the shop mechanics and the game flow. The music is relaxing and nice. Good job!
Very nice mood throughout, some feedback when completing the small tasks in the game would really add to it all
Congrats for the game. The artstyle looked like it was painted with waterpaint, and this fit the game perfectly. The music was well done as well. Overall a very nice game, with solid mechanics.
what a chill game! nice mood with those amazing art and sound!
Lovely and chilling game, simple management mechanics but overall enjoyable. Good job!
great game, I'm always open to gardening games :smile: Musics are good fit to general game and little vibration effect around boxes look cool
Very cool time killing game! Not much to do, but kinda relaxing. Seeing the crops pop up little by little was always fun. A "boredom button" (= something to click while you were waiting for the crops) could have been fun. I just spammed watering all the time, so it was good that over-watering wasn't a mechanic :')
Nice and relaxing game with fitting graphics. Impressive to have such a nice finish in this short amount of time.
My only feedback is that the background song gets a bit repetitive after a while. Maybe you could have moments where there are only ambient sounds and then the song comes in every now and then?
Anyhow, well done!!!
@marcusnystrand I totally agree. Especially given the amount of time one might play the game.
I wrote a song for each season and a more ambient track for the upgrade shop... Rerecorded just one of them in case I ran out of time and figured I'd come back to it. Sadly after three days of coding my RSI was flaring up and I couldn't even grip my fretboard hard enough to re-record the other songs.
I thought I would have the time to rerecord them over the last two weeks... not sure where the time went! Something for this week. :)
@kamekai The song is very fitting and cosy by the way! Nice to hear that you recorded it yourself
@marcusnystrand thanks lol, I'd only owned an acoustic for two weeks when LD46 rolled around but I figured I'd give it my best shot. I have an electric but I've only been playing for a year so it takes a few times to get a good recording with few mistakes which really slows down the process.
@kamekai I see! Results are great though, well done :)
Im a bad farmer
planta.jpg
Wow, what a great little game! Immediately fell in love with the art style. A huge fan of the hand-drawn aesthetic, I think it works really well and adds a lot of charm.
I tried the pre-jam so forgive me if you have already made some of these changes!
I feel like there could definitely be some more cues for the player to tell them what they need to do, how they should go about doing it and what the actual goal is! Particularly at the start, just explaining what un-hoed (if that's the right word for it) ground looks like/hoed/watered, etc, What the days/season refers to in line with the plot of the game. I was slightly confused when suddenly the game stopped with gold and I thought it was over but actually the season had just ended. It would be great if that was explained beforehand so I knew what to expect once Summer was over! It would also be great if there were some hints to the life cycle of the plant - I kept trying to rake the wheat for example because I thought it was fully grown but then it grew further. Some more information would really help push this a long way!
Overall though, these are really small nit-picks. Fantastic entry :)
Great music and art! I think a bobbing mouse cursor might not be the best choice. Kale and wheat should be easier to identify when they are finished. It would be nice to have a few seconds to review which plants I have available before the season begins, and we are also not told how many days are in a season. Other than that, solid game and fun to spend some time in :) nice one!
@conor-galvin yep, the help page is something I forgot to enable before shipping out... it's in the post-jam but I didn't want to modify the pre-jam beyond a major bugfix. I also added some more visual cues like what the next season would be, a checkmark next to grown plants, etc. Overall I played the game so much that I lost focus on what a new player's experience would look like. Thanks for your feedback!
help.png
I obviously went for a slightly cryptic help page, but any thoughts? Would this have been enough?
@madbarron I think we will disagree about the cursor (it's gpu-offloaded and the position doesn't affect click position) but you're definitely right about not letting people know how many days are in a month and needing time to review. If I had time I would have liked a moment before starting the next round to review your inventory so you can plan.
As for crop growth indicators, the post-jam adds a checkmark next to finished crops to take out all the guesswork.
Glad you enjoyed it :)
@kamekai that is definitely much more helpful! Nicely done :) Like I said, some explanation of the game cycle (going through seasons) and the end game goal (earn more money) also would be great! Sorry I played the pre-jam, I wanted to rate the original submission to be fair. Nice work though!
Cute, relaxing game. I included it in my Ludum Dare 46 compilation video series, if you want to take a look. :) https://youtu.be/W3MIuB5jBTw