The Alphabet Farm by Hedgy

[raw]
made by Hedgy for LD 41 (COMPO)

Welcome to the alphabet farm, where we plant seeds and make money!

----Relation to Theme---- The theme was two incompatible genres, so I chose Farming and Text-Based gameplay together to make this.

----The Goal---- There could be many other goals you could make up, but the built in goals are: 1. Make 1000$ 2. Make as much money as you can in 365 days.

----The Gameplay---- Gameplay is pretty simple. Each day you decide what you want to do, whether it be planting seeds or going to upgrade. You have 4 options: 1. Plant Seeds 2. Buy upgrades 3. Skip day 4. Buy seeds Each decision is pretty self explanatory, and you can explore what all the different kinds of seeds are or all the different upgrades.

You start off with 8$ and 10 ABCDE seeds. Oh, and each day you lose 0.25$ for the farm upkeep.

----How do I get started?---- Simple, just extract the ZIP file using an extraction software (I personally use WinRar, but 7zip should work...), and then double click the GAME.EXE shortcut.

During the game, the text might be small, so i recommend right clicking on the window -> properties -> fonts, and then changing the size from there.

---- How did I make this? ---- I used C++ (using Visual Studio 2015, not sure why I used the 2015 version though) to make the game, using the blank Win32 Application (..I think!). Libraries I used were - Iostream - Every single piece of text in the code is from the iostream library - Array - For the different seeds, and inventory of the user - String - for allowing text variables

----How to I fix runtime error?---- Install this: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=52685 (both x86 and x64)

Ratings

Given 8🗳️ 5🗨️

Feedback

BitJester Media
23. Apr 2018 · 20:28 UTC
I received an error trying to download the extra file from Microsoft.
Tem
23. Apr 2018 · 20:44 UTC
I enjoyed my overpriced seeds very much, thank you kindly.
wsKilljoy
23. Apr 2018 · 21:53 UTC
Interesting game! Quite fun.
incobalt
23. Apr 2018 · 22:06 UTC
Whoops I bought seeds on the first day thinking I didn't have any >.< The game was very hard to read for me. Green text on light grey background doesn't have enough contrast! The theme didn't work for me on this one, but perhaps that's because I'm old enough to remember when all games were like this. Good job though!
🎤 Hedgy
23. Apr 2018 · 23:27 UTC
@incobalt Yea, I had a feeling that the text was going to be an issue! I should've added more... but when there was only 4 hours left I kind of just wanted to get the thing over with. Did you atleast change the CMD -> properties -> fonts -> size? Oh, and C++ is currently the only coding language that I have the most knowledge of :P
🎤 Hedgy
23. Apr 2018 · 23:59 UTC
For those of you having issues will a "dll missing", this (https://www.dropbox.com/s/xjwbxr7efm0gemx/TheAlphabetFarm%5BDLLFIXED%5D.zip?dl=0) should work fine. [Oh, and open the DEBUG folder and then the .exe if the shortcut isn't working.]
Langotriel
24. Apr 2018 · 22:45 UTC
Although it has potential for great improvement, it isn't that enjoyable as an experience in its current state. The best I can say is that it lives up to the theme very well.
PhilStrahl
27. Apr 2018 · 23:56 UTC
Hey, hedgy! I liked the combination of making a farming game with just text. It reminded me a lot of old mainframe games that were only played on an ASCII terminal or on print-outs. I found the gameplay fun at first, although a bit repetitive and cumbersome after a while. What would have helped me tremendously would have been numbered slots, because even with just a handful, I never knew which seeds I had planted where; and I would overwrite them. 49 slots are just waaay too many to process mentally.

I liked how you represented the different growth stages of the seeds; once I had figured that out I found it very straightforward that XYZ-seeds only take three days until harvest.

Oh, I had a couple of bugs, though. Once I was stuck in the buying screen, then the game wouldn't take any input, and on my first attempt I was able to plant an XYZ seed without even having one, meaning had -1 XYZ seeds in my inventory.

One last thing: It would have helped me also if the selection menus would always be selectable by number OR letter, as you type a number for a choice, a character for the seed type, and another number as a value, for example. I never grew accustomed to that.

But overall an interesting take on the theme! Good job!
PhilStrahl
28. Apr 2018 · 20:18 UTC
Here's a video of my experience, it might help you with finding the bugs https://youtu.be/UoxXOgp40t0