Scarecrow's Dangerous Job

ominusgalaxy44 2023-01-09 21:27

The music fits in very will with the game. The art looks very nice as well! However, I think there needs to be some sort of invisible wall or barrier so that the player can't just keep walking away. I also think that you're already using the mouse to aim, so might as well use it for shooting or planting. Overall, really cool concept and I love the style!

chompdev 2023-01-09 21:42

Nice execution of this idea! I like the Harvest theme here being that you need to protect your turret crops long enough for them to grow and eventually defend you. If you happen to add some more features later, I'd love to be able to hold down the button to shoot, and be able to see my health. It might even be fun to be able to plant health-giving crops that heal you over time or produce one item you can eat later to heal up. Great job on your jam game!

pengu123 2023-01-09 23:13

In idea, this is a really creative game, and there's a lot of potential!

I thought at first that I broke the game when I crossed the limits, and I think that the different waves are a little too slow to come. Maybe implement a mechanic that can spawn the wave early if needed?

The controls could be tweaked in a more pleasing way. Perhaps the left click could be the shoot button while the right plant seeds.

All in all, solid entry. Good job!

ravernt 2023-01-10 20:01

Fun game but controls could be tweaked

celtican 2023-01-10 23:24

I really wanted to make a game where you play as a scarecrow as well, but I went with something completely different. I'm glad to see another team picking up my slack :joy:

I agree with Pengu, decrease the time between waves and change the shoot/plant to left/right click. I'll also add on that note that it may make more sense to plant things where the player is standing instead of where they are pointing, just because that's how other games do it and so that's how I expected this game to do it.

Some thoughts: - I love that the plants fight back. I was expecting this to be a game where I had to protect the plants, but no, they're practically protecting me! It felt like a throwback to Plants vs Zombies, in a good way. - Sometimes the plants disappeared. I think there was an expiration mechanic? It wasn't very clear. Maybe the expiration mechanic could just slowly decrease their health over time instead of hiding their lifetime invisibly—I could have made more strategic decisions and generally felt more satisfied. - I noticed the green bar on the plants are how close they are to growing and the blue bar is their health. Switching these would have been more clear: green is already associated with health in this game, the plants should be no different. Better yet: just hide the blue bar and make the green bar associated with both health and growth. - The game was quite hard for me. I made it to Horde 4, reset, and then made it to Horde 5. Developers tend to be better at their games than their players, so usually the way to make games appropriately easier is to make them way easier than you think they should be and playtest it with other people while developing it. (I think it was just the blue wisps being very fast that made it hard, but still)

Lovely game, I had fun playing it! I hope to see you in Ludum Dare 53!

gubidubi 2023-01-11 14:02

Thanks for the feedback! :heart:

@ominusgalaxy44 @celtican @ravernt @pengu123 Using keys instead of mouse click to shoot and plant is a personal preference of mine in games, I didn't know other players disliked it, I'll be more careful with this in my next game.:sweat_smile:

Sadly the game is unfinished, we initially planned to have a day-night system and the plants would need to be watered, thats why the enemies don't spawn for a while between hordes and plants have that blue bar. There were also many sprites Emanuel made and we didn't use, for more plants and one more enemy. This enemy was finished in the last ten minutes but there was a bug we didn't manage to fix in time, so decided to remove him. The lack of time to finish everything derive mostly from the bugs we had with unity engine while trying to implement 2D lights for the day-night system (unity was crashing constantly for some members), we wasted a LOT of time on that.

harmofish 2023-01-13 08:17

A shooting game that is perfectly suited to the theme. One suggestion is to use the left mouse button for shooting, but the E button is inconvenient.

willoxs 2023-01-14 20:53

Yes I agree with the other comments - wasd+eq is an unfamiliar control scheme, especially when you already use the mouse. There is no need not to put fire/plant on lmb/rmb.

Another thing - maybe use a default setting of audio at 50% or something on those lines. I played my first round completely muted because i thought somehow it was at 100% before.

Your pixel art looks individually good. You even have animations for both player and enemies - BUT many sprites are scaled to different sizes. That results in an unclean appearance and can be pretty easily prevented by using one scale throughout the whole project.

Those are the simple fixes i can give.

Overall id say its not bad but does get boring very quickly. The ai isnt particularely smart and there is no new stuff to discover quite fast. This probably stems from the usual time shortage so the game feels unfinished (we had the same problem). Probably the best things to learn from a jam is how to correctly scale a project and manage your time doing so.

(I hope that doesnt come off as rude - i just want to give honest and hopefully helpful feedback)

Now to end on the good stuff:

I really like the music and the idea behind the theme implementation is good. The sprites as said are individually nice looking especially the player. Hopefully we see you around for the next jam and good luck!

bugblue 2023-01-16 01:51

@willoxs Thanks a lot for the feedback :) In fact, unfortunately there are many things that did not have time to finish. I would have liked to make the crow's AI more visually noticeable, but it works like this: There are the following states: Fly, FlyToDive, Dive, Flee and FlyAway. Initially the crow searches through all the plants, chooses one at random. If it doesn't find any, it goes to the "FlyAway" state, where, every 2 seconds, it checks a few more times that there are no more plants while flying with an opposing force to the player, until the object is destroyed. If there is a plant, it randomly chooses one of the sides and then it will start pushing towards the first approach point which is a little more distant and above the point where the bird will perform the dive. When it gets close enough, it slows down a bit to make a smooth turn and goes into the "FlyToDive" state. In this state, every frame, it pushes to the Dive point. Getting close enough, set a velocity down and a force up, making a parabola. During that time, it will deal damage to the plants it hits, and at the end, it will look for a new plant and random side and return to the Fly state. There is a fear ray in which, if the player gets inside it, the bird will switch to the "Flee" state immediately, running away from the player (who is a scarecrow) for a few seconds. Thus, the player can quickly prevent a plant from being eaten by approaching it during a dive. Then it would fetch another plant and reset the state machine. Our idea would be to visually illustrate each state, but we ran out of time.

dfaouaz 2023-01-24 11:39

Nice little game! At first it reminded me of Plants vs Zombies! Nice job!