stalkachevan 2023-01-09 12:06
Very fun game, good luck to win!
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD52 → Farming Combos
By doctor-zeus and nbumgardner
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 564 | 3.25 | 26 | |
| Fun | 526 | 3.16 | 26 | |
| Innovation | 330 | 3.41 | 25 | |
| Theme | 164 | 4.08 | 26 | |
| Graphics | 600 | 3.12 | 26 | |
| Audio | 413 | 2.95 | 26 | |
| Humor | 510 | 2.63 | 25 | |
| Mood | 703 | 2.87 | 26 |
Very fun game, good luck to win!
This is a very cool puzzle game! I think the controls are well designed and minimize friction. I wasn't in much of a thinking mood when I played so I did very bad on the puzzles. I'm sure I could spend a long time thinking about them. Good work! I would give you all an A in a spring semester game design class.
The controls took me a minute to get used to, but it was very interesting to play once I did get used to it! I like the different mechanics for slow and fast growing tiles and how that played into the combos. I would have liked to maybe see quality fertilized plots too where you might plan on ending your combo of a vegetable with the high quality plots. Fast food was definitely the funnest level! (Also one of the only ones I managed to get a decent score on lol) - I think some floating text when harvesting would add a lot of juice to the game - letting you know if it was an early / perfect / late harvest etc.
@ursagames Thanks for playing and for writing up feedback!
Having a high-scoring plot could be really cool - maybe it could be the sort of thing where the bonus it gives decreases with each successive harvest? You could figure out if it's more optimal to use it early as combo-building space or reserve it for a big payoff later.
I 100% agree about the score text - From the outset, I thought some kind of particle effects / special sound effect on the ripe crop harvests would feel nice + be a good way to give feedback to the player. Right now it's not terribly intuitive to tell how many points your harvests are getting you - you could mow over rows of young plants and get relatively low value for it, but it feels the same as setting up a well-timed chain of high-point crops. You can look at the score and see the difference, but that doesn't do much for game-feel.
I'm glad you liked Fast Food, it was pretty much the first thing that came to mind when I thought of the fast/slow tiles. Nice and satisfying, just gotta race around that track :laughing:
@cactusdan Thanks for giving the game a play! I'm really happy that you participated in the jam, I'll be dropping some feedback your way too sooner rather than later. I'd tell you what grade I'd give you in a spring semester game design class, but I think you already know, eh?
I love this! I think it's very original and I love to play something faster among the simulators that most people have made. I also like the execution, it was very easy to play.
Also, the sound effects were really satisfying to me.
Nice! It took me a bit to figure out the controls but once I got it it was a fun experience. Loved the music!
This was a fun game to play! It was fun to play a fast paced precision farming game, and the intro levels quickly teach you how to play. Great job!
I can't believe how well thought out each level is. This is the sort of stuff you'd see in The Witness, where you're really thinking outside the box on how to explore the core concept. After the first few stages I thought OK, they'll probably just kinda increase complexity and strategy. But little did I know you were just teaching the player the basics so you could REALLY test them later on!
Fast Food was the first one that showed me the light. I immediately thought about Osu and I thought it was hilarious how I was playing a *farming game* but suddenly my mouse speed and accuracy was being tested.
Tortoise and Hare was a brilliant use of shapes and tiles. Ok well, a little creativity is required on the hare's depiction but the idea is there lol.
Scatter Plot was very very tricky to optimize. This is where I learned to really juggle my tools and "plant over" other plants in order to not accidentally cut them.
After the Storm - so cool. IMO harder than the last stage since counting out how you're going to lay things out is very difficult. The final stage I mostly just blasted things onto the fast tiles.
I was kinda skeptical coming into this, but ultimately I believed in its title + the promise of fastpaced action. It delivered! I was tested on several skills I've never seen before. Quickly tracing my previous mouse movements, which still being themed as crop harvesting, was very innovation. And then there's the strategic side of it which is figuring out what the best things are to trace in the first place.
The different crops having different growth rates are a key to making this all interesting, otherwise it'd be all pure tracing routes. There are lots of great directions the game can go in, and from what I've seen from your creativity skills, you're more than capable of continuing to surprise the players.
Overall this is a very raw design, and I mean that in a good way. You went for a very novel gameplay and it's great to see a game pushing the boundaries. This is one of the reasons I do LD, to see what people can come up with on the cutting edge.
@peachtreeoath Wow, you sure do know how to make a designer smile, don't you? Thank you very much for the kind words!
My goal when I made the levels was to make each one demonstrate some new idea or test the player's application of previous concepts in a new way. The way you describe interacting with the game (and the ideas you pulled from some of the levels) makes me really happy.
Like with Fast Food, I wanted to introduce the idea of fast-growing tiles in a way that would make their function very clear without making the level strategically difficult (I worried that complexity in other areas would interfere with the basics of seeing the accelerated timing of the tiles) so I went all in on the Osu-style mouse-accuracy side of the game. It could be a change of pace (figuratively and literally) from the planting puzzles that came before, and maybe reset folks' expectations for what could come later.
So yeah, the fact that you read my design intent so well from a players perspective makes me happy - there's nothing I like more than sharing these kinds of ideas with someone, all through play!
@jaj I am glad you liked the sound effects! My focus was to make them sound good both alone or layered if a player swipes through multiple activities at once.
@guiti I am glad you liked the music! In the final build it plays the full version throughout due to my own time constraints. It was composed in layers with PxTone to eventually play more layers based on the game's combo multiplier.
The controls were a bit hard to understand / use. I understand why you made it so you don't have to click so much but often times that hurt me and i'd prematurely harvest something on accident while swiping my mouse around. Maybe i'm just old and not as twitch gamer as i should be for this.
Overall the different level layouts were good though and really dive deep into the mechanics and the optimization the player could try for.
I thought the plants grew up and died just a little too fast. Also it would help to give the "fully grown" plays some sort of particle FX - it was hard to understand when excatly they were ready and by the time i realized they were dead.
I wonder if it would also help to have a separate "planting" phase from a "harvesting" phase. Kind of give the player that mental mindset shift - ok here's how i'm going to plant the different crops and then switch over into the harvest mindset based on the "plan of action" you setup in the planting phase.
Overall a pretty good entry though.
@Rocktavious
Thanks for the feedback! I think you hit the nail on the head - the issues you're calling out are definitely the rough points of the game.
The finicky sort of mouse control was built into the game from the start for a couple reasons: - From an implementation side, I had a real clear idea of how to make it work - Lots of repeated clicking would be bad from a repetitive stress injury perspective - Input can be very smooth (and hopefully satisfying!) when it goes well
But it comes with a pretty major downside - it's finicky, especially if folks have a sensitive mouse, a sketchy trackpad, or aren't too into that sort of input style.
Somewhat selfishly, I got the idea from my enjoyment of other games that involve finely-tuned mouse control. I'm not a big FPS player, but I enjoy the technical aspects of aiming. I think it's interesting sort of skill to build consistency with, but I gotta confess I find mouse control pretty boring to practice in isolation and I'm bad at improving in live competition.
So for me, I look at something like this as a sort of sneaky mouse-accuracy training exercise. I can work out a theoretical solution to the puzzle, then work on actually executing my idea. Maybe in the process I find something that works differently than I expected (or is straight up too hard for me to do), then I can go back to the drawing board and plan a new strategy.
The puzzle-ey aspect of the game could be totally separated from the mouse control execution part, though, and maybe that's the way to actually make this the best game it could be for the most people.
I definitely agree about the readability issue on fully grown plants - particles or other markers for visual clarity (give that good "harvest me now!" sort of signalling) were on the wishlist but didn't quite make the cut before time ran out. It definitely makes the game less approachable, which isn't helped by how fast the game is paced. I also think there's room to make the harvestable window more forgiving - I took my best guess at what would be forgiving enough, but it could definitely use iteration and feedback from lots of folks to find the sweet spot.
The idea of the separate "planting" and "harvesting" phase is interesting to me. I think the game's current core is built around the idea of flip-flopping between the two - figuring out the right time to keep planting (vs. waiting for a harvest to free up more space) is where a lot of the more interesting puzzles come from. If you had some ideas about how it'd work out, I'd be interested to hear it (no pressure of course, I appreciate the feedback you've already given).
That was really ! Congrats! I wish there was more hints showing me when the plants is ready to be harvested. Maybe some highlights or particles. Otherwise this was a cool idea :)
(I barely got my rating in on time, and almost forgot to leave a comment!)
Pretty neat little game! Took me a little while to understand how to get higher scores. The pumpkins in particular, I didn't realize I was harvesting them too early lol.
But once I got everything figured out, I was able to do the bigger stages and had a lot of fun with it!