hfsevans 2023-01-10 06:42
This is the first game where I'm like "These guys harvest." Felt like a nice chill sim.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD52 → Escape From The Ostrobothnia
By tomssuli, kakka22, tuulosss, duckman, Dasnukki, A4po, koalanalle, Salvation and Nani
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 405 | 3.50 | 45 | |
| Fun | 465 | 3.27 | 45 | |
| Innovation | 549 | 3.07 | 45 | |
| Theme | 243 | 3.96 | 45 | |
| Graphics | 654 | 2.88 | 45 | |
| Audio | 263 | 3.46 | 45 | |
| Humor | 292 | 3.19 | 43 | |
| Mood | 458 | 3.37 | 45 |
This is the first game where I'm like "These guys harvest." Felt like a nice chill sim.
Nice little farming simulator. Really enjoyed the harvester driving mechanics, it just feels nice driving the thing around. I didn't really need to upgrade the shotgun ever, I just used the two shots I had to scare off animals. Graphics are simple but don't hurt the eye and the music is nice and relaxing. Great game to relax for a bit.
This was for me the first time I've seen AI image generation in practice, and it makes for a really nice setup for the game! However, I do feel everything is just a tad too slow, and prices just a bit high
@hfsevans Thanks! We've actually been to ostborothnia and seen the process happen, so it's "based on true events" :D ...well, maybe not all of the "secret" endgame.
@initialposition Yes the first shotgun is ok if you are content on just scaring the animals, but if you want to go on a rampage (and at a point you might want to ;), the upgrade helps you.
@cievers Did you get the next level resources after the carrots? New shop items are unlocked after every new resource found ;)
I like the idea, the game is pretty cool, but i feel like it's just way to slow and too tidious, having to run back to the shed every time is just really time consuming and not enjoyable, yeah i can drive up there, but that's also slow and tidious, also the shotgun bullets should be faster, i can't hit the deer most of the time since they just run off, the story is AAA level though, and i really like the idea and the mechanics, just that the game should be less tidious
Great game!
The end credit rap is great! I think the game play and progression is a bit slow, and that's a shame because anyone who stops playing before getting the helicopter is missing out! In particular, after my first harvest of carrots I was a bit disappointed to realize that carrot cake and carrot juice are so low value (carrot cake sells for $10, but consumes 30 resources, whereas bread sells for $5 and consumes 15... making carrot cake not feel like a strong upgrade, even if carrots grow a bit faster). Anyways, aside from being a bit slow, the game has a chill game loop and great cutscenes!
Okay seriously, i spent too much time in the game :joy: just finished it after about 2.5h. But there was always something new to discover, some new mechanic to unlock. This might look like a simple farming simulator but is so much more. Great job guys :thumbsup:
I do feel like there should be something to let you walk faster as well tho, it was quite slow when the mower broke.
And their is a bug with the last upgrade of the mower, the amount of your hand doesn't change when entering or exiting. Just makes the game a little bit easier, not that it really matters at that point.
Fun and cute farming game. I like the story and its mechanics. It seemed that the character was meant to be that slow so we would use harvester more often. Unfortunately, I didn't have time to play until the end :(
Hello, I thought your game was really cool, extremely faithful to the theme, cool music, I loved the arts and the trucks, really fun. Ah, if you have a little time, enter our game and give your evaluation too (just enter my profile quickly, it's the first game I make). I advise you to play the downloaded version, because the Ludum one is not adapting the window correctly!
Cool game although the audio is a bit harsh, maybe turn down some stuff or replace some SFX with smoother ones.
Nothing crazy, but it's an honest farming simulator.
@offdutyextractors I see you didn't play it for very long if you're saying that... Or maybe you were doing a pacifist run. Either case, you must have missed the next level resources and the endgame content.
I liked the concept, and from what I'm seeing in the comments, there's a lot more to the game than what I got to discover. I got to admit though, the game started off to slow to motivate me to continue and see more. I didn't enjoy having to go to the shed every time I needed to switch to another item.
I'm sure there's upgrades to make the game feel faster and less tedious, but I didn't feel hooked enough to keep playing. I do want to say that I love the music, the game matches the theme perfectly, and the controls felt smooth. The cutscene at the start was nice too.
Hyvä effort capturing the Finnish spirit (or should i say sisu haha). + Motivating upgrades + Well used mechanics, such as the player being slow so you HAVE to rely on the harvester even if you do not harvest the crops. But also not too annoying. + Soundtrack. Chill but not bothering + The stuck button. Missed that in other games (including my own one) as well. - I did not play until that long unfortunately as at some point unloading the wheat at the silo did not work anymore.
@skopfy Kiitos for playing!
Awesome that you enjoyed our game!
Could you tell more about the bug? Did the wheat not come out of the harvester or did it not go in the silo? Did the harvester fill level still show full or was id bugged as well?
EDIT: I tried lots of stuff and couldn't reproduce the bug for the life of me and also no one of our team has encountered it. If it occurs again to anyone, please report the circumstances so we can fix it!
It's amazing that you did all this in a game jam, this already feels like a full game :D Driving around with the harvester felt good, and being able to harvest the monsters was a fun surprise!
@boxedmeatrevolution @zluca
Wow! Thanks of taking to time to finish the game!
Over 2 hours though :O ...we should have been testing the full playthroughs while playtesting. I would have right out taken at least half away from all the prices if I'd realized it will take that long.
@multipixels @noeloskar
Thanks for playing and honest reviews! After reading all the comments it is very clear that we put the steps of advancing in the game too far apart... "So begin the grind" from the intro is now being too literal. And yes, there is more to this game than farming carrots :deer:
Everyone: I'll put an advanced edition up soon, with faster advancement pace (cheaper prices) and new upgrades to shop to make gameplay nicer.
Well, finally game where i am able to exchange money on shit. Cool!
Or not. Probably it is just some usefull staff and get shit for free.
Anyway. Congratunaltions with nice entry!
Aww man I played this for nearly an hour, but then I crashed my harvester into a tree, and got stuck inside the harvester. Clicking the "press if stuck" button reset me and the harvester, but the camera stopped following me. Since you need to click on the harvester to use the wrench, and the harvester was now off screen, that meant I couldn't repair it, and my game was over. I only managed to make $865 :(
But despite the sad ending, I actually had a lot of fun with this game! The grind is very slow, but it's satisfying. The music, sound effects, and graphics all work well to create a fun little farming sim. I would suggest maybe increasing the pace of the game somehow, since it currently takes way too long to complete.
@ale Oh no! I forgot cheat key for toggling the camera in the game :( ...You probably pressed F accidentally so the camera stopped following you... Pressing F again would have fixed the camera back.
Thank you for playing and reviewing, so nice that you still enjoyed the game
I'm making an advanced edition at the moment. It has faster pace and I'll publish it in couple of days. I'll tag you when I post it here (as a separate download of course) so you can try it again if you are still around.
I was surprised and delighted when I ran over a dead deer with a combine. I like this game
This is so cool the implementation of vehicles, weapons and all the other mechanics is super impressive for the amount of time that was given. I would absolutely love if you took this idea further and made this into a full release or updated it.
I have played quite a few of your jam entries before, and while all of them have been very cool; this one is my new favorite. Hauska peli!
There is so much small details, like the fact that birds come to pick up seeds you did not have capacity of picking up was amazing. :trophy:
I really found it quite soothing and relaxing, I must have played for around 25-30 minutes.
Please tag me when you release the advanced version :smile:
So far I've played this game for about 45 minutes or maybe an hour. With my current farm setup, in 15 minutes I managed to earn ~$500, which I estimate means it will take me another 45 minutes to get to the end of the game.
So, I think I can say for sure that this game is a bit of a grind, taking at least 90 minutes to win and perhaps even longer than that. Now, I don't necessarily have anything against this. For a while last night I was just playing the game for a bit, as the core gameplay loop ends up being somewhat nice to just chill out and do for a while.
That said, I feel like there isn't enough feeling of progression to really hook me in for a long grind. The only upgrades I bought were the faster harvester, as well as a couple fertilizer so that I could make some plots closer to the shed... these upgrades do seem to be perhaps worthwhile, but the rest of the upgrades seem so expensive that I have to imagine that buying them will actually just make the game take longer.
In particular, I think it is rather frustrating that the only real way to advance in terms of money is to kill the pests, and they seem to spawn somewhat inconsistently... there will be stretches of time where the only pests that show up are on the edges of the map, and run away as soon as they touch a building.
OK, so I've talked about how the game is a grind. So what did I like?
Well, I think the core mechanic of the harvester is really great. I haven't played a ton of farming games with vehicles, so this was a bit new to me just in that sense.
But the game mechanic itself is also really neat. In particular, relying on the harvester to travel quickly is really cool. Like, there's a lot of gameplay revolving around getting in the harvester to go somewhere, getting out to shoot something, getting back in to go somewhere else or to harvest something... overall I think it's a really good part of the game.
The repairs also contribute to this--it was interesting whenever the harvester got completely destroyed, and I had to walk back to the shed to get the wrench. This was a cool mechanic as well, in my opinion.
One other thing about the harvester that I liked is that there was actually quite a bit of technique involved in driving it efficiently. In particular, exiting the harvester causes it to immediately stop, which means that quickly turning around, for example, can be done by hitting E twice and then accelerating. Similarly, whenever loading resources into the silo, I would basically hit E twice.
This braking technique made the harvester surprisingly fun to drive, as it felt like it actually took some skill, and it was fun to successfully execute the technique and drive the harvester more efficiently.
I think the other farming game mechanics were also nicely implemented. I especially thought the distinction between the planted-plants and the harvested-plants (and harvested meat) lead to some interesting interactions. In particular, whenever I killed an animal, I would try to harvest it even if I couldn't actually store it in the harvester, simply because that would prevent it from fading away.
The variety of interactions was also fun, and I think would be more than enough to keep me hooked for a shorter grind.
Although, I do think you should mention somewhere that selling meat is actually very important, because otherwise I probably would not have kept playing nearly as long... the other things are just so much worse in terms of money. I think the easiest way to fix this would be to just show all the recipes that are possible to unlock in the store, so that the player knows they should be trying to obtain a resource called "meat."
So, overall, a game with some very well-thought out and fun mechanics, just too much of a grind to play in one sitting. (Although I am keeping the game running on my computer... so perhaps I will finish it one day. :smile: )
Pretty fun game, kinda impressed you did all this with clickteam fusion
@honey-pony Wow, thanks for the thorough review!
We realized only after first players to play through the game that it was way too long. We playtested all the mechanics and stuff but not the length of the game :sweat_smile: In particular, everything is too expensive and the game drags on for too long. All upgrades actually contribute to faster gameplay in their own way, but I'm not sure if the price is worth the speed addition. Also, did you get to the next resource after meat?
Pests spawning is actually pretty consistent. The more plants crops you have growing, the more deer will spawn. The more harvested crops you have lying around on the ground, the more birds will spawn. You can bait the animals this way by having large fields and loads of stuff lying around. Also, if you just scare the animals, they will be back after a while.
Nice that you found out good ways to use our game mechanics, I myself like to buy the better shotgun and harvester speed then bait the deer with 4-6 full fields and drive near when the deer are swarming and rapidly click, shooting them all in the face (or rear, they turn around too quickly). Also if you get far away with broken harvester you can press the stuck button to get you and mr harvey home faster. Also the last upgrade before the helicopter speeds up your hunt alot. Also the sound of starting the harvester scares the animals in small range. You can scare them off by driving around and spamming E.
About informing the meat mechanics... We originally decided to do a surprise game where you found the next level resources by accident. So it would look like an innocent farming game before you accidentally harvest an animal. We thought it would be way funnier if it was a surprise. Too bad the game became too grindy so most of players didn't even get to that part.
Now for the good part: I've already made an advanced edition, the playthrough time is less than 25% of the original and there's some polish and small stuff that didn't make it into the game. I'm on the edge of publishing it (as a separate download) already, but there is one new animal to be found that is very buggy. Maybe I'll just publish it now and patch it later if someone even wants to play it ever again. (I've also planned statistics and achievements for the full game.)
@skvader-418 Actually we couldn't have done a game in this short time without Clickteam Fusion. I cannot code this fast with any other platform. Yes, Fusion might be old but it's very fast to use, it has damn good community and bucketloads of free extensions :sunglasses:
...And just imagine what you could make with Fusion with more than 72 hours on your hands :slight_smile:
@tomssuli I did not find the 6th resource... I honestly thought there might be one, just based on the size of the interface, but I had no idea what it might be when the birds just dropped meat same as the deer. Actually, the game is still running, so I looked around for a few minutes for it... still no idea, honestly. :sweat_smile:
I did seem to notice that having crops growing resulted in more pests showing up, especially with the harvested crops and the birds... but I couldn't seem to make that good of use of it, as usually I could only shoot, say, 1 deer at a time even if 3 showed up. (Occasionally I could get more than 1 if they went to the same spot, but this was rarer than just getting 1 at a time).
I can see that having more fields could allow for increasing the possibility that the deer group up... perhaps I'll have to try it. I do think that the upgraded shotgun could possibly come in handy, but it's just hard to commit to any purchase. :sweat_smile:
@honey-pony @simon-rahnasto @skvader-418 @petersanford @fuzzy-lobster @ale @parkuhrmd @skopfy @multipixels @pfannkuchen @zluca @boxedmeatrevolution @taikinaaa @noeloskar @cievers @initialposition @hfsevans
Advanced edition v 1.10 is up now! Featuring: - Cheaper prices - Better value for foods - Takes less than 25% of time of the original to complete - Additional upgrade levels for capacity upgrades - Whole new character speed upgrade! - A new animal (is buggy, will be fixed later) - Descriptions for the shop items - Some polish and bugfixes
[Download Escape from Ostrobothnia **advanced edition**](https://www.blackenter.com/files/escape_adv.zip)
Just played the update from start to finish, and loved it! This version is definitely much faster and feels less grindy.
also, that song at the end was legendary.
Updated the post-jam download link
Advanced edition v 1.11 Featuring: - Endgame event if you still play after buying the helicopter (should activate soon if you didn't do a pacifist run)
Advanced edition v 1.12 - Fixed bug where resources were not reset after finishing the game - Replaced placeholder graphics for buttons and pointer icons
Very good game I think guy can be walk a little faster, waiting for vote too
Great little game.
Cool small game. Well
good stuff! Felt very fleshed out for what it was, almost stardew-valley-esque not only in its contents but in its chill tone as well.
Advanced edition v 1.14
- Added clock - Show complete time in the end screen before credits
welldone.png
Love it! Theme was spot on! Great job!
i had to laugh, hearing the noises xD
Simple yet fun to play little farming sim kinda game. I like it! Visuals and music are appealing. Also loved the funny noises at the start :D Good job! If you would like to shred some zombies in slowmo, be sure to check out my entry, I would love to hear your feedbacks!
@hayricakir Thanks for the review, did you mean the sounds on the splash screen? Or the deer spawning sounds in the game? :D
Too bad I'm having such a busy day I probably don't have time to do any more reviews for this Ludum.