Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD52 → Harveeps
By raivk, eFrag, CharlieTU, Donhadryel and Soulmakaira
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 10 | 4.40 | 28 | |
| Fun | 35 | 4.15 | 28 | |
| Innovation | 6 | 4.46 | 28 | |
| Theme | 77 | 4.25 | 28 | |
| Graphics | 113 | 4.25 | 28 | |
| Audio | 41 | 4.09 | 28 | |
| Humor | 267 | 3.25 | 26 | |
| Mood | 151 | 3.89 | 26 |
Lovely!! Really like the mechanics - took me a while to figure out based on the instructions but once I did I can imagine myself sinking hours and hours into this.
The input was very laggy for me on web + Firefox? A few times I tried to place a shape in one place but accidentally put it somewhere else because my click registered late.
Hi @binney ! Thanks for your feedback !
The HTML version uses WebGL2. I only tested the build before publishing on the browser "Brave" (which uses chromium), and it looked fine to me, we'll make sure to test the build on Firefox soon. In the meantime, if you want to give it another try, i suggest using a chromium based browser (like Chrome or Opera) 🙂
For the laggy inputs, we put the placement of a shape when the key is released, not when it's pressed, maybe this is what's causing an issue, we'll also investigate this asap !
Thanks again for your feedback, and have a nice day !
Absolutely great little game! The UI and graphics are absurdly polished for such a brief jam, and the gameplay is both interesting and new. Like your description says, it's not quite tetris, it's not quite sudoku, but it certainly evokes both games in the best ways! I liked the innately interesting decisions it puts on the players--do you chase points or try to clear field segments to banish angry farmers?
This is my first game I've played since the rating period opened, and what a high note to start with. Excellent work across the board!
The game was very fun and very well made, and the graphics combined with the audio make a really good mood in the game. I was initially slightly confused on what some of the characters do, but overall it was a really good game
Fun and fresh gameplay. Maybe the meta of clearing 3x3 fields should be more explained at the beginning. My first round was a disaster ;)
:laughing: this reminds me of our game. Very polished entry, I had great fun.
Neat style with nice music and sound effects!
Took one playthrough to understand what you're supposed to do. I like it :smile:
Fantastic sound design and graphics and a super innovative puzzle game! I like this a lot.
I, too, settled into the 3x3 meta that @titos2k mentioned. I'm thinking of game mechanics that would incentivize going for rows/columns -- maybe a bomb angreep that lasts for 5 turns and instantly kills you if allowed to live that long? I think there's a lot of room to expand this concept, possibly even into a full game.
Great work and good luck on the jam!
Thanks everyone for the kind comments! @poboy and @titos2k yeah the 3x3 meta allows easy plays, but the combo meta is where it's at. You get insane scores if you clear multiple zones at once. Try clearing two colums + two rows + one 3x3 block at the same time (that's a x6, it's one of the biggest combo we found yet) and you will get extremly high scores. It's a risky strategy, but a high paying one. However you will have to go back to the 3x3 meta after that to survive as long as possible, indeed!
There are bigger combos, but these are WAY harder to do. Max is x8 combo, but good luck for this one!
Whatever, we're glad you enjoyed our game!
Wow, so polished game, great submission.
Thanks for the game ! I liked it, great music, nice visual style, very cute little people) Nice combination of mechanics gives a full experience without feeling like something is missing. I would play this on my phone.
Interesting fresh take on tetris mechanics. Liked your game a lot! Would like to criticize something but I just can't. Good job!
F Pressers pay you respect
A very high quality game in such a short time! Great!
F Pressers pay you respect
Thank you so much for your nice comments guys !
@optimist455 It turns out you can :) The WebGL build *should* run on *most* mobile devices...
Awesome feedbacks, even navigating in the main menu feels fun! The concept of mixing sudoku and tetris is really nice, and works well! All the arts is blending nicely together.
Good work on that game, one of my favourite!
Ok ok ok ok ok. So I played the game the first time, and I was kinda confused. "Harveep and hafpeep, idk what's going on I'm just gonna click on stuff."
After the first play through I understood what was going on and decided to play it through one more time.
That being said, there is a ton of richness in this game.
This game is strongly amenable to game theoretic analysis. I didn't play big enough to try and get a bonus, but my general strategy was just to kill as many angreeps as possible. Angreeps are the *only* thing that end the game for you, and as long as you're killing Angreeps, you're able to collect points.
On my first play-through I noticed that getting big fat slabs of lines was 100% not worth it. It leaves way too many spawn points open for Angreeps as you build up the chunk. So my second approach was this:
1. On a Happeep-only screen, pick a block that can be placed wholly inside *one* 3x3 square that grabs as many Happeeps as possible 2. On subsequent plays, use new blocks as efficiently as possible to clear out the 3x3 square that was adulterated in step 1 - If you can collect during Happeeps during this time, then great, if not, then no worries. The idea is to get rid of places where Angreeps can spawn 3. Once the entire map is clear of crop circles, go back to step #1.
In most cases (I didn't do the math) it seems like it's most advantageous to only work on clearing out your 3x3 square. E.g. don't use a cheeky final piece to clear out the 3x3 square **and** capture nearby Happeeps - it's nearly never worth it. If you clear out the 3x3 without touching other squares.
ld52_harveeps2.PNG
Like in this picture. I've got one Angreep in the bottom-left 3x3 cell. Instead of trying to "build" a crop circle toward the nearest Happeep, I'm just going to clear out the bottom-left 3x3 cell.
ld52_harveeps3.PNG
Now that the bottom-left 3x3 cell is cleared out, I'm free to grab as many Happeeps as I can by adding a crop circle to one 3x3 cell.
1. This game is fantastically feature complete and blessedly free of bugs 2. The pixel art is very very nice 3. The audio is just what I'd expect from this kind of game - not too fast, not too slow, but set at a steady pace that doesn't induce anxiety 4. The effects from little things like rotating blocks or the Angreeps throwing things at the health bar is endearing and shows how much care and effort went into making this game
I am extremely proud of this score, I wonder if anyone else had any different strategies?
ld52_harveeps.PNG
Thanks for the detailled feedback @therealjtgill ! That's so cool!! We are glad you enjoyed the game.
These are really valuable feedback and you're an absolute rockstar for taking the time to redact it this way. We are taking all of this into account for our futur games!
For the strategies, yeah the safe 3x3 strat is one way to survive as long as possible. It howevers builds up score really slowly. Combos are here to counter this. You can get extremely high scores quickly by playing risky and clearing multiple lines + multiple blocks all at once. @donhadryel from our dev team managed to get 15K by triggering a x8 combo. Here's a picture of the combo.
image_2023-01-11_175208328.png
However, this is a risky strategy and such a high combo leaves you with so few health points that you won't be able to survive long after that. But combining risky plays and the 3x3 safe strategy could lead to much higher score, I guess. Here's the score @donhadryel did by dying a few turns after the huge combo shown before.
image_2023-01-11_175402743.png
Thanks again for you valuable feedback, and thanks everyone for the kind comments! We are so happy to see people have fun with our tiny game.
THIS GAME NEEDS MORE RATINGS
@therealjtgill sent me and I'm glad I tried this one! So much polish on a cool concept I can't really remember seeing before. Very expandable, but also feels just fine as is. I love that the enemies directly attack the health bar. Sound design is also on point! Good stuff.
@kevin-barrios :heart:
Thanks a lot @therealjtgill for sharing our game! That's so cool!
Thank you @kevin-barrios for the comment!
A very outstanding piece of work! The game as a whole is very well done and the simple mechanics of re-expansion bring a special gameplay to this game. I think I had the same confusion as "therealjtgill" in the comments section when I first approached the game, I didn't understand what I was doing. But in the second round I basically understood the gameplay, but also got stuck in a strategy of just clearing within a 3x3 area, which left me bored for a while. And to add one last thing, I'm loving the minimalist retro game UI!
this game is absolutely incredible. i'll play it again for sure!
i mean, where to go first? the gameplay is a really good idea and combination of non figurative genres, i really love it. art is on point, sprites and animations are nice, sound is catchy.
~~to be honest the only downside to me is to have to click on the rotate button to rotate. if the rotation could be like with RMB, that'd save a little bit of time and feel good too i think.~~ edit: nevermind you can use scroll wheel to do that
but overall, excellent game, one of my favorites so far!!!
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A novel use of the theme indeed! There's a quite a lot going on in the game, I'm not sure if even a bit too much, so it's quite an accomplishment!
Im one of those monkeys that played a lot of Tetris while dodging studying for his exams... And there for i love this game and i want it to be perfect he, he, he, he, he, he!
So just 1 complaint and 1 advice :3... The complaint is that by the way the game is balanced ,and i might be wrong here of course, it seems that its best to just go around in squares. Cleaning one by one so that you dont receve too much damage while getting score. So the multiple cleans at the same time usually arent worth the health you lose. So finding a balance fix for that would be great, maybe healing if the player destroys more rows/squares at the same time? And for the advice, maybe add a scoreboard in the comment section its not much but for the competitive people its a great motivation to try hard a bit more! :))
Other than than, great and i really really loved it!
Thanks for your feedbacks peeps !
@amarokczukay Glad you find out about the scroll wheel shortcut :)
@kikiriki367 Yup, there are definetly improvements to me made about the overall balance of the game... At some point during the jam, we did consider adding "healing" mechanics : such as a reward for doing combos and having special 'peeps' spawning that would heal you when you clear them. There were also ideas about special enemies that would block the rotation system, or 'nerf' the draw system (ie you draw less pieces). But yeah balancing the game without those was already long enough for our jam time (we did not have much time to work on it the last day...)
However, this would definetly be a feature if we end up making a post jam update, just like the leaderboard ;)
this is great! The hybrid puzzle mechanic idea is great, and the level of polish is crazy! The graphics and humorous terms for people are also very cute. I'm definitely going to need to replay this to get a better handle on the strategy. At first I didn't realize I could rotate pieces, but once I did it made a lot more sense, haha. To be honest, I mostly just found myself focusing on 3x3 areas rather than making lines, since they were a lot easier to fill up with the tetris pieces, but maybe part of my strategy should involve lines as well for combos, hmm... :thinking:
This game is very well done! The level of juice and polish here is extremely impressive. Even the "How To Play" window at the beginning is nicely designed and has animated text. I love the sound, music, and subtle effects all over the place. @amarokczukay recommended your game [here](https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/$313769/what-are-some-of-your-best-games-so-far) and I can't believe I hadn't seen it yet!
The NPCs reacting to newly-placed blocks is really cool, and I love how much depth you've designed around the scoring system. There are also some really nice quality-of-life features like being able to either click the Rotate button, or press 'R', or even use mousewheel to rotate - that was really intuitive and I found and appreciated that right away. The tension between collecting humans and not leaving too many crop circles on the board at one time is great and always keeps you thinking a few steps ahead. Your whole team should be really proud of what you guys accomplished here!
Nice and polished game. I liked the simple pixelart. The artstyle was nice and clear. Mood was well done, music was nice retro style game music that reminds me of old amiga games :)
Gameplay was innovative, using tetris blocks in clearing instead of filling and doing combos. I played several times trying to find best tactics between clearing lines and squares.
All in all good balanced entry! Nice touch with the quotes in statistics screen btw.
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Congrats Harveeps peeps!
Thanks @therealjtgill !