Where`s my Pills by colan 2020-04-23T22:54:37Z ♥ 1
The use of dynamic lights is a very effective way to make simple graphics feel more polished, and the character bobbing up and down and turning their head makes them feel restless, which fits the time limit nicely.
I had some problems with the controls. I felt like sometimes I would try to jump and nothing would happen, then a second press of the spacebar would work. It's quite frustrating when you think you're doing it right but a jump fails. When they work, the controls feel nice.
There's a bug in the third level, the one with the moving platforms. If you die, the platforms don't reset position, and it becomes impossible to complete.
Some audio would have been nice. It's always a bit eerie playing a silent game.
I wouldn't say this is very on theme, but that's mostly because it's a bad theme. This feels like a generic platformer with the pills tacked on. "Keep it alive" describes 80% of all games anyway though, so no surprises that many games aren't strong on the theme this time around.
I played for about 10 minutes. I had fun, apart from the frustration with the controls. Good job.
LD52 — Harvest (27)
Nesting by HypernoodleJon 2023-01-15T13:34:33Z ♥ 1
This is a cute little game! The wind flap sounds are simple but very soothing. You made Flappy Bird less stressful.
On its own it's very easy - perhaps too easy. But going back and trying to get a higher score helps, because then we can't avoid the harder to reach twigs. Perhaps it would have been nice if the later levels had made some of those platforming challenges mandatory.
Drake's Fortune by chompdev 2023-01-15T12:20:08Z ♥ 2
Some aspects (graphics, controls, audio) are obviously quite crude, but I had a surprising amount of fun with it nonetheless. Physics playgrounds are always fun.
I never used the breath because the fireball is OP. However, the fireball sometimes felt a bit weird because of the cooldown - it's not clear when it's ready, and if we click too soon nothing happens, which feels slightly broken. Perhaps some type of visible cooldown timer would have helped with this.
Human Harvest by Gregormack 2023-01-14T07:24:11Z ♥ 1
Fun little game that held my attention for 15 minutes - I got most of the way through the upgrades. The buildings are maybe a little overpowered? My strategy was to always simply harvest four buildings then fly up, so I wasn't really interacting with the people on the ground.
There are different types of people (and cows) and the game seems to count them separately, but it's not obvious to me if they have any gameplay differences. Are they worth different numbers of points?
The art is pretty. I love the little squishy feeling human animations, and those backdrop mountains are beautiful. The menu also looks very nice, although the visual style of the menu feels strangely different from the style of the gameplay.
9CELL by kylerhoades 2023-01-13T18:33:38Z ♥ 2
This is weirdly evil. Very dystopian, a little Papers Please.
I'm bad at it, I never made it past day 10. Well made though! It seems very well balanced, I never managed to accumulate more than $250 at once, it always felt very tight. The graphics are pretty, although the humans look like a slightly different art style. The game seems to get a little easier if you simply kill off two family members, because there's fewer mouths to feed - that's a little weird, because the gameplay is pushing in the opposite direction to the narrative there.
Homunculus by Iluvatar 2023-01-13T16:12:55Z ♥ 2
Beautiful art, a fun (weird) story, and some great audio - no bugs that I noticed. I liked how it didn't tell me exactly what I was meant to do, but I worked out the potions anyway. A very polished entry.
Catchy by danmerey 2023-01-13T15:58:27Z ♥ 1
The art style is absolutely beautiful! I would have liked slightly more contrast to make the wind and fish a little easier to see, but overall very nice. The game is quite relaxing to play, although I think that aspect of the experience would be improved a lot by audio.
The wind/sailing mechanic is neat. I liked the slight puzzle element of following the wind, although it never felt that interesting because I always felt like I was sailing aimlessly. I didn't have a sense of where I should go, so I simply wandered about. I didn't catch every fish type, because after a while the gameplay started to feel quite samey. There's a strong core here, and if the game had given me a little more motivation ("There's been a goldfish sighting off the coast of Gilligan's Island"), it would have held my attention much better. Navigation and movement would be more interesting if I had specific destinations to reach / problems to solve. Perhaps tides and currents would add another interesting layer.
With audio and a little more to do this could be a very relaxing cooldown game. A very impressive effort!
Combine Harv-racer by procrasteroid 2023-01-13T05:40:55Z ♥ 1
A really lovely execution! The flowers growing back in the trail was a particularly good touch. Technical execution feels very solid, and the art is beautiful.
A couple of small critiques: I had a very hard time seeing the bends coming ahead of time, so I crashed every other corner until I'd been around a few times and learned the track. It would have been nice to have either a visual indication that bends were coming, or perhaps a different camera setup that let me look further forward so I had more time to react. It's not possible to pick a sensible racing line if we don't know which way the next bend will go.
The other small issue is that the cows have low contrast with the wheat, making them fairly hard to notice at speed. It would be good if they stood out more.
Well done though, this feels very technically polished.
Harvest of the Gods by jitspoe 2023-01-13T05:04:06Z ♥ 1
I didn't particularly enjoy the game to be honest, as I found the controls very hard and I wasn't able to get into the flow of it. However, this entry is less about the quality of the game and more about the AI experiment, which is very interesting!
The initial Harvest of the Gods pitch that ChatGPT came up with is surprisingly decent. Using it for code and actual development clearly isn't productive right now, but using it to generate ideas seems actually interesting. If you had been more selective about taking its good ideas and rejecting the bad (like the controls) then it could be useful as a creative partner of sorts. Much like with the code, everything it outputs needs to be checked by an experienced designer, but it's a decent brainstorming tool!
Overall a very interesting entry!
Super Plantoid by dans17 2023-01-12T06:59:03Z ♥ 2
Really beautiful! A very competent platformer implementation with catchy music.
Deep Harvest VII by Bloodfin 2023-01-12T05:03:03Z ♥ 3
Very impressive! This feels very filmic. Voice acting is great, and the writing feels very natural - not the cheesy writing you often see in indie games. It's not often a LD game gets me genuinely intrigued by the story! The atmosphere is perfect. The first 5/5 I've given for mood.
This reminded me a lot of Firewatch, in a good way - simple gameplay with a story playing out naturally, with characters that feel real. I would genuinely love to see this expanded to a full project!
Fallowtide by Jeremy Ryan 2023-01-12T04:17:36Z ♥ 1
Beautiful art! The animations are incredibly satisfying, I love the procedural wheat waving. All of the "juice" in this is excellent. The triangular grid is a very simple thing, but something about it is very satisfying. The ingame text is nicely done, and little things like the highlighted phrases make it feel very polished.
A card game with a geometric component to fitting together hands is a nice idea. A simple idea with a lot of depth, and potential for more. I like games that do "solve this puzzle as well as you can" without just gating progress on getting the correct solution. This sits nicely on the line between puzzle and management.
An incredibly impressive feat in the time! Especially for a compo entry! And built in PyGame too!
Aggro-Culture by Ategon 2023-01-12T03:40:55Z ♥ 3
Fun little entry, essentially a tower defense without a predefined path so you have to cover angles and adapt. Seems to run very smoothly, although some content is incomplete. The level of polish is impressive, and it's clear this could be a very solid game given a little more development time. An options menu is always impressive in LD!
It seems quite easy - I haven't managed to come close to losing a round yet.
Art is simple but effective. The banner image is great too! Music is also simple, but quite catchy.
Jumping Bean Harvester by therealjtgill 2023-01-12T03:26:52Z ♥ 1
Seems a little more like a tech demo than a game, but a good one. The physics engine seems to hold up well as far as I can tell. Nice work getting that done in the time!
Click On Fish by Pomo 2023-01-11T19:43:49Z ♥ 1
A fun idea that I'm truly awful at playing - an evolution on spot the difference. I feel like I would have enjoyed it more if it had a different theme - killing the fish felt unreasobly mean. I realise that that's ridiculously hypocritical if you look at my game.
The voice lines were unexpected and very funny! Art is simple but well done.
Wheat Master by nyxkn 2023-01-11T13:02:57Z ♥ 1
Lovely execution of a clicker game. I wish I didn't find these as addictive as I do.
You asked for harsh criticism, so:
One thing that did annoy me is that the auto functions prevent manual planting/harvesting. It gets quite annoying when clicking on a wheat at the exact moment it decides to auto harvest, so the click does nothing. That just doesn't feel good, and I don't see why we shouldn't be allowed to manually harvest that tile anyway.
Harvesting and replanting is effectively a single action - I just double clicked. Seeing as it's effectively one action, harvesting may as well auto plant so it only takes a single click. That would be easier on the fingers for accessibility, and wouldn't change the nature of the game at all.
Overall, a good entry. Clickers aren't original, but this was nicely implemented and fits the theme.
Grow Golf by torcado 2023-01-11T12:33:04Z ♥ 1
This is very cool! Feels very original. I thought that I'd got the hang of it and had a bit of a cheese strategy (a cluster of lots of balls, a couple of water, mostly regular) then the ground started disappearing and completely killed that strat. Perhaps the game could have eased us into the vanishing ground slightly more gradually, but that was a good surprise!
I had a couple of small issues, like the ball spawning underneath the UI at the bottom where I didn't see it. Apart from that, excellent and creative entry. An unusual interpretation of the theme, but a well justified one.
Vermin Attack by stevepixelface 2023-01-11T12:04:39Z ♥ 1
Incredibly simple gameplay, yet somehow addictively fun! I wish it went a little longer, I was in a good rhythm when I got to 100 and would have liked to keep going.
The instructions were slightly unclear. At first I thought that I lost lives if a rat came up underneath me and bit my feet, and didn't realise that I lost them for missing one. Once I worked it out, it clicked very comfortably.
Graphics and music are cute. Simple and effective, although not very tied to the Harvest theme.
I wish there was a highscore mode that kept ramping up infinitely.
Dream Harvest by Allan Urique 2023-01-10T14:32:45Z ♥ 2
~~I don't know whether the game is broken or whether I'm being a doofus, but I can't work out how to shoot. I assume I'm meant to aim with the mouse and click? Nothing appears to happen when I do that - although after a few minutes of fiddling about I did notice that I apparently had 3 dreams, so maybe something did happen.~~
I didn't read the description properly, sorry. It works!
The dreams are the white things that appear over the planet, and they have to be clicked to be collected. The gun unlocks after the first objective, which is 10 dreams.
Farm Flow by Szivacs 2023-01-10T14:04:38Z ♥ 2
Really nice idea! I don't know whether this puzzle design is original, but I've not seen it before and I really like it. Great theme adherence, too!
Sometimes it gets a little frustrating when there isn't a clear way forward. I can't tell if it was hard, or if I'm just bad at it. I expect that carefully balancing which "pieces" get generated at what times could lead to a little more fun, but I had a great time with this.
Super Hex Harvest by amkingTRP 2023-01-10T11:29:56Z ♥ 3
I spent 15 or 20 minutes on this one, had a lot of fun! The puzzles are great! The art is beautiful, although a little hard to read sometimes. There were a few levels where I frustratingly missed a mushroom or an egg somewhere because the sprites blend into the hedges a little, so a little more contrast may be good. The monochrome look is beautiful though!
The controls feel a little difficult. The combination of the grid based movement and the speed sections resulted in some frustrating situations where I pressed the button a fraction too early or late and messed up the run. I must have been tensely pressing keys fairly hard, because my finger aches a little afterwards and I had to take a break. It would be good to find a way to improve the accessibility somehow.
Overall very fun, one of my favourites so far for sure.
The Shameful Harvest by Dom De Re 2023-01-10T08:11:47Z ♥ 1
Great execution! The graphics feel very polished, and the receding fog is lovely. The fog did occasionally feel unfair when it punished me for running forward by only revealing a trap at the very last second. The movement feels good and I think the traps are quite fair, but they're very hard. I found it easier to get through some of the bullet sections by repeatedly trying to jump randomly than by trying to carefully dodge, which I failed at. The dialogue is fun, and adds to the polished feeling. It's a little tenuous with the theme of harvest.
Gummy Gobs by Kirsten-Lee 2023-01-10T07:57:53Z ♥ 2
Completely crazy concept, executed very well. Surprisingly hard - I had quite a lot of trouble avoiding the tears. Sometimes when I got hit it felt a little unfair, there wasn't always anywhere to escape to. The wobbly physics of the chainsaw is fun, and the art is great!
Danger in the Potager by Odey 2023-01-10T07:50:00Z ♥ 2
Great art, and surprisingly fun for such a simple game! I enjoyed playing for 10 minutes or so, but unfortunately I'm bad and didn't make it to the ending. Music is very catchy!
Harvest Space by GreatVV 2023-01-10T07:29:38Z ♥ 2
Well done pulling off multiplayer in the jam! Environment and character modeling are great. It's a fun scramble, but would benefit from additional ways to interact with other players.
Big Aussie Harvest by Enad96 2023-01-10T07:12:59Z ♥ 4
Fun theme and music. The controls are very floaty and hard to use, but I suppose that's intentional. The aussie stuff is ridiculous but fun. It's not a very close adherence to the "harvest" theme.
7 days to harvest by fallcresthero 2023-01-10T06:59:47Z ♥ 4
Fun concept! Music and sounds effects are good, and the character art looks great.
I did have a little trouble with the controls, occasionally finding it veering off in an unexpected direction. I expect that was user error, but the game isn't very forgiving of it. The way it moves in sudden bursts makes it quite hard. It would be nice if the controls were more generous about interpreting user intent.
Fields of Fire by Mololo 2023-01-09T21:48:01Z ♥ 2
Fun in the standard TD way, but I rather effortlessly become overpowered by unthinkingly buying things at the start and then it pretty much ran itself.