When It's Harvest Time

porcus-pie 2023-01-14 03:13

**It's harvest time alright.**

I was initially confused as to why this game had no screenshots or images or anything, but I think I know why :sweat_smile: I'll try to review without leaving too many spoilers for anyone trying it out. I did quite like the bait and switch, it felt fitting but not out of place. You already had set-up some sort of absurd humour, and switching to more absurdity worked well, I was laughing. I found the mouse sensitivity quite low for me, I understand this is personal preference however it did get in my way a little bit. The game felt really smooth once I up-ed my personal sensitivity though, the movement felt really nice and I loved the sort of ps1-style low poly you were going for. I think with all the cash, and button pressing, it would be good to have a bit more progression or upgrades involved. I'm not sure if there was one but I missed it, but I ran all over the map searching. Speaking of which once it was harvest time, I did find that my game started to really run slowly, just as the spawning never really ended. Overall though this was certainly enjoyable, and I did find some humour in it well done

mohamed-dkd 2023-01-14 04:26

The humor is definitely strong in this one XD Just like the other person said "it is hard to not spoil the game", but I think you could still put the first picture of the game, but with no context XD

Also, it is almost impossible to use the cash, so it is better to rebalance the location to use cash

gubidubi 2023-01-14 15:47

Nice idea, good humour

mickxe 2023-01-14 16:14

I found it hard to get back to the "vending machine" to upgrade, but it was still fun even though I didn't survive very long. Good job!

djtequila 2023-01-14 16:15

If this is a reference to something, I didn't really get it. I might be uncultured though. The movement and shooting felt nice, and the music is pretty hype. Since enemies are always spawning, it was hard to collect any cash and get upgrades. Maybe they could spawn in waves instead?

fizzbark 2023-01-15 03:10

IT'S HARVEST TIME. Good fun, funny. As a couple of other people have said, hard to pick up the cash and get back to the vending machine, although that's hardly the point, is it?

3ggplant 2023-01-15 03:23

I really felt it when the game said "it's harvestin' time" and harvested all over everyone

Fun game, really wasn't expecting the change to an FPS after the buttons. Interesting spin on the harvest theme to make the player be the harvestee rather than the harvester.

animawish 2023-01-17 04:04

Great gag, perfectly executed. Nice job!

witchgf 2023-01-20 12:35

This game is true madness, hard to play, but fun

better-half 2023-01-20 13:21

This was such a surprising entry. Reminded me of The Stanley Parable and Half Life 1 in the best way possible.

The two main issues I had with it is the *incredibly* low mouse sensitivity (it took ages for me to turn around, which in turn meant that it was really hard aiming and escaping effectively. Having a mouse sensitivity slider would have helped tremendously), and the fact that there was (apparently) only one machine for upgrades with ridiculously tiny buttons, which were also very near to each other.

I didn't even realize I could buy upgrades until the 3rd or 4th run, and even then it was impossible for me to buy them since I didn't keep my score with me and going back to that central area once the world was flooded with "things" + the buttons being so tiny and hard to press meant that as soon as I would go in front of the machine and stayed there 3-4 seconds the things would catch up and it would be over. A sub-menu to select upgrades when you clicked on the machine/more machines laying around and a time-stop once you're inside said upgrade menu would be such a huge QOL fix to that.

Still, really fun idea and twist on the formula. The music was also really cool, did you make that yourself? Loved that *you* would be the harvested instead of the harvestee for once. And most importantly, loved the chicken.

hoichael 2023-01-20 14:13

@better-half Hey, thanks for the detailed feedback!

First things first, sorry about the mouse sens. The jam version actually has (very rudimentary) mouse sens options (Page Up/Page Down to increment/decrement) but it's never mentioned anywhere - I'm particularly sorry about that because the first comment we got actually touches on the mouse sensitivity issue and after reading it I simply forgot to add that piece of information to the LD description. I did now (apparently second time's a charm :P), so future players have you to thank for a somewhat manageable gameplay experience. So, yeah, sorry for that unnecessary inconvenience - trying to play this game on "incredibly" low sens sounds terribly painful :D

You're definitely right about the upgrade station being borderline unusable. The balancing in general is all over the place, in the end we just didn't have time to make everything work. On the time-stop idea: We're working on a post-jam version that employs a similar approach by structuring the game into waves, providing the player with some much needed downtime to tend to their upgrades.

And, to answer your question: Yes, the music is original! It was made by @williwiderstand - you can check out the soundcloud page linked in his profile for more of his work (including the soundtracks to our previous LD entries)

better-half 2023-01-20 14:20

@hoichael thanks for the reply! Adding a credits sections to the game/to the LD page would be perfect for these situations, def gonna check out the composer's work~

andidebob 2023-01-20 22:16

What a weirdly intriguing experience... I am not sure first person works best for this type of game, since you tend to run backwards into stuff, also getting to the vending machine got hard after a while. I wish there was a way to skip the "intro" as it was a bit tedious after the 3rd or 4th time.

All in all this was a super fun short experience! Well done!

romeromey 2023-01-20 23:03

Great job on this one. Had no idea what to expect going in and I kind of jumped a little when the office room exploded. Definitely would be great to have a better upgrade system overall. Maybe the game could be a bit easier too because once the initial surprise occurs it loses it's muster on subsequent attempts.

stormcat 2023-01-21 00:22

Cool game! I was very much *not* expecting the twist, but it was very funny. I did find the initial wave very hard to survive, it took until my third attempt to live more than a couple seconds, but the movement and shooting were a lot of fun as well. Good job!

hawkin 2023-01-22 02:45

What the literal hell was this?? XD Congratulations, you successfully subverted ALL expectations. The first moment when you broke the walls was blissful.

That was all a bit of fun. The gameplay itself was a little too unfair to last long. Having to collide with money to pick it up is maybe not the right choice, since that in itself becomes a challenge pretty soon. The spawn rate is just absurd, and before long it's hard to make it anywhere. Games like Killing Floor get around this by automatically giving you the money on kill. Additionally, even if I had the money, I don't think I'd ever be able to get an upgrade without being absolutely SWARMED haha.

Or maybe I'm just terrible at your game. Anyway, it was a hilariously unexpected time :)

foggydude 2023-01-23 14:43

Now that was unexpected! The music is really hype. Couldn't really upgrade myself because enemies kept on coming and coming.

ismael-rodriguez 2023-01-23 19:14

I'll just press the button forever next time lol good work

eleeve 2023-01-26 19:23

A masterpiece.

jokku 2023-01-26 19:25

Holy moly! that was fun. I was just thinking to myself that we need to see more boomer shooters :) Almost didn’t play it due to the lack of screenshots or info text. But I understand wanting to keep the surprise a secret. Maybe misleading gamepage could work?

justmars 2023-01-26 19:26

A masterpiece. Laughed so hard when the gameplay started XD. The one thing I would change would be remapping the restart-key to something other than R as it's often used for reloading and one can accidentally restart the game (on the first try at least), but other than that I r8 8/8 gr8 job m8(s)!!!!

kr4ft3r 2023-01-27 10:14

Probably the best induction I've seen so far. Graphics and the start of the atmosphere are great, makes me sad that gameplay failures don't allow it to go any further than that. So, my first problem like with everyone else was mouse sensitivity. After spotting your comment that it can be upped with Page Up, I gave it another try. Then came my personal problem with any jam-game FPS, no Invert Mouse Y option. For those who use it, playing like that feels as bad as if you tried to play with invert Y turned on. But I can put that aside and adjust if the game is not hard, but it is just way too hard, monsters are all around, too many, way too near, doing too much damage, taking too many bullets to die. Despite having AK47 I felt like a crippled mouse surrounded by cats, life expectancy 2.9 seconds. I can't say if this was done on purpose and the action part of the game is not meant to be played for longer than few seconds, if yes the delivery wasn't great. If no, well it's a common mistake of LD game ending up too hard. But it is a really cool experience for like the first minute (or less).