Probably the best game jam game I've played. Been playing this game for almost an hour now :)

Another excellent game! Lost a bit of time to this, but my lavender empire is complete! Impressive how much you all accomplished in the jam! Most of my issues I had was minor quality of life things like being able to remove things that were placed. I did occasionally find dirt tiles that could no longer be planted on, but it was pretty rare. There was also some y sorting glitches, but didn't cause any gameplay issues! I did get stuck in a wall once after placing it, but managed to wiggle out during dawn. I love how the friends all go to sleep during the horde night- I'm sure that helped out performance a lot too! I did get some performance issues near the end with the giant swarms... but I'm pretty sure that also had something to do with my silly base. All in all, outstanding entry! Definitely my favorite jam game I've played so far!


Really nice work from an excellent team. There are definitely a lot of small problems with the game, but it's impressive what you guys managed to create over the course of one weekend. I love the graphics, music, and sound effects, they tie really well together, although I felt a distinct lack of exposition the entire time I was playing. How the heck am I building stone foundations with lavender, why do the gnomes despise me and my friends so? Regardless, I *really* enjoyed the game (this is a seriously great base for a seriously great game). My game time ended with me surrounding the base with walls causing a pathfinding crash, oops!

Some thoughts:
- I felt no need to explore at all. I wonder how different the game would be if you had to explore and pickup the perks and upgrades instead of spending lavender on them.
- Eventually this felt like a "automate everything" game, but I never got to the point where I could place down enough towers to automate the gnomocide. Perhaps a buff to the towers was in order.
- Because I couldn't destroy tiles, I ended up restarting the game when I understood how things work so that I could create an optimal base.
- At first I was confused when I realized I could shoot as fast as I clicked, but I actually really like the idea! Especially for a small game where you'll be playing it for less than an hour, you might as well let the player have fun!
- Unfortunately the final build of the game has the hammer tool build menu open instead of the default tool view, so it took me FOREVER to figure out the controls. The first thing I figured out was "press R to draw gun" and I was thoroughly confused. _I'd really recommend putting the controls on the LD/itch page._
- Can we talk about how the animals are called "friends" instead of "workers" or "animals" or the like? It really tied the game together cuteness-wise. Whoever first called them "friends" deserves a metal or something.

Great game! I'm excited to see what you make next time around, too!

very nice work. I really like th vibe of the game.

I had a great time playing this game. Really love the overall aesthetic, and the strategy. Playing on a laptop made some of the controls a little tricky (especially the gun). Overall, once I got the hang of the controls and menus, I played for a while and I had a lot of fun! Great work! And I loved how you incorporated the theme while making a unique game.

Great entry! I managed to grow and harvest my lavender while defending it. Unfortunately i was unable to figure out how the building worked, but based on the screenshots others provided it looks really cool! Hope you see this before more confused people come along

An extremely fun game! The art and music are great, the palette choice of mostly purple in your base makes it feel really feel like a complete city and the cues in the music such as certain motifs playing in the day song when its near night was nice to keep track of time. Was a bit confused at the start since its not inherently obvious you can interact with the spire but eventually figured it out. One thing that felt was missing was a way to delete things you placed down. I sometimes accidentally placed roads in my farming fields and couldn't remove them. Also ran into a slight issue with the friend AI where they would till things on the other side of walls even if it took a really long time to get there. Overall though very enjoyable and a great entry

beautiful game, really like the music and art style, the combat feels as juicy as it should and I really love the attention to details. well done!

my feedback for this game is that I often felt like I had no purpose, the game doesn't tell you much about what to do so I found my self just waiting for gnomes to do some satisfying shooting but maybe that's just me, and also the resolution is way too large for my monitor (Web), you guys should aim for a smaller resolution so anyone with any monitor can play.

other than that well done, it's crazy how much you've done in 3 days while my teammate left me work alone and went to play roblox lol

Cute farm in the afternoon, and hard shooter in the night. great mechanic.

I didn't expect gun in this cute game :smile:

At the beginning I didn't notice bottom UI :sweat_smile: I suggest lower resolution and full screen button on itch.

Overall fun and relaxing experience. Great job as always!

Great work! The shooting and contrast between day and night in terms of mood is extreemely satisfying.
And the feeling of progression is good. I wish it to be more fast at the early game but the overall flow is still very natural and fun. Thank you for your game!

F Pressers pay you respect

WOW! thats awesome, perfect building system, combat looks nice as well, cute graphics, amazing work!

Awesome polished game, I had a great run. I closed the containment in the end after I won and I think your pathfinding flipped the beans as the game turned super laggy :D

I liked that you made a farming game with basic mechanics but took it even one step further with the minions doing different tasks. Great ideas with the different jobs of the minions and at the end it all came down employing raccoons again :) Also, roads were nice to have so getting around dont feel like a drag.

I would have liked to be able to demolish stuff too, as I misplaced roads, walls and shelters sometimes and they were blocking my way of shooting and walking. At the point were I could afford the moles, they felt very ineffective compared to the gnome flood at that time.

Great musics and pro-level graphics and representation. Masterwork as always!

There went my lunch break... Planned on playing 3-4 games. Not It was just one. But I had too much fun to stop. I agree with the comment, that there is no need to explore or anything. I never left the view of my tower, but I also didn't think that that was a bad thing.
I also encountered the pathfinding issue once I enclosed myself in walls. I expected something bad to happen. Maybe I expected something like Colony Survival that penalized you, when you surround yourself with wall, or maybe even just prevent you from building the last wall. I'm not saying that it should, and for a jam game I don't even expect soemthing to prevent that. Just pointing out, that the issue exists.

Also I sometimes had problems with the UI being stuck in the build menu or wouldn't let me select a building to buy something. But changing browser tabs solved that most of the time.

Probably my favourite game of the jam so far! I knew I'd love it as soon as I saw the main character walking around.

The music is really great and atmospheric and I like how well it's timed to the day night cycle.

I eventually had to stop as I surrounded the base with walls and the game started lagging out.

A great game in every way, how can this be done in 3 days? It's incredibly cool!

All 5s! Great fun little game

Wow! Very impressive! I had a bunch of fun playing this. Probably my favorite jam entry I've played across all LDs!

Fantastic game, nothing to add ^^

Awesome entry! And you've got quite some polish there. All the options menu and such were not really expected in a jam game. Kudos for pushing all that stuff in so little time.

I literally spent an hour playing the web version. The only problem I see is that I cannot save the game. I haven't tried the desktop versions, though.

I couldn't manage to remove the roads once placed. Is it just me or is that part of the design? Sometimes I just pressed 1 to dig but I was still in the build menu and I ended up placing roads were I once had a nice place to plant the lavender :smile:

Best game of the jam for me so far - funny, thoughtful and interesting, cute animals, like the shooting and I HATE THE GNOMES!

Found a few instances of them running through my walls - what advanced technology do they POSSESS!

Great entry - make this more please!

Best game i played today, really awesome, great artstyle, i like the Rabbits =D and the Mechanics for the player are really smooth and funny. Good Job!!!

Man you are really good to give this factorio-addictive-twist to games. I spend way too much time playing this than I originally planned to. And the finish didn't disappoint either!
Best entry so far for me congratulation

Only thing that could make the game better is the ability to remove stuff to rearrange the base (roads at least, walls if that's not too complicated)
Edit: Oh yeah and friendly animals shouldn't stop bullets I feel, _even walls if you want to let us play tower defense :smirk:_

You get sucked into the loop of the game! And it is unexpectectly dark.

Absolutely amazing game! Super addictive, art is just spot on. I loved everything about this one. I think personally the thing I loved most was the music. It was just so perfect, I wish I could put it on my spotify playlist. I aspire to be able to make a game like this within 72 hours. Excellent Job!

Nice game, though I couldn't use the shotgun so I never got to experience the gratuitous violence :cry: Nice retro graphics, great humour, good gameplay. Well done!

Amazing game! The gameplay was awesome, and the graphics incredible. The music and sound effects were quite good too. Overall, this was an almost perfect entry. I did have a few minor nitpicks, though (at least in the Jam version, I didn't try the 1.2 one):

- It took me forever to realize what roads did. At first I thought they just prevented my animals from building where I placed them. Only after using it for that feature a lot did I notice the speed increase.
- It was also unclear what some upgrades did just from the name, especially at the beginning when I didn't really understand the game. A description would've been nice. But I really liked the Shotgun King reference :)
- Sometimes, when shooting in narrow corridors, the bullets hit the walls and disappeared before hitting the gnome on the way. This made narrow corridors kinda useless to block gnomes. Once I got the turrets, however, they became viable again (as bullets pass through turrets).
- The friends AI was a bit stupid at time: they kept trying to plant stuff outside the walls because it was technically close to the shelter. I ended up solving it by surrounding my base with roads, but it cost a ton of lavender and felt a bit weird.
- Speaking of shelters, I didn't understand whether they cost 10 or 0 lavenders. For the longest time I couldn't figure out why I couldn't build a second shelter, until I reached 10 lavender and it suddenly lit up.
- Lastly, the first spire upgrade claims to unlock rabbits and the second meerkats, but from what I've seen the second one unlocks both.

All in all, I really enjoyed it! Here's my final base:

@glaikunt Thanks so much! I'm happy you loved the music :) I probably won't be adding this to Spotify (it's tricky with the monetization aspect) but it's free to download! There is a link in the description. Not sure if you can still upload music from your personal collection to Spotify...

@digital-bacon Can you explain a little more in depth about being unable to fire the gun? Should be able to use either a mouse click or space. Neither of those worked for you?

As always: Great game! Music and art style are amazing! Same goes with the idea and gameplay :) Awesome job!

Also, who needs towers when you have insane CPS skills... and a shogun XD

Really pretty game, beautiful music, unfortunately I got stuck in a menu (building menu) but other than that it was a really solid and enjoyable experience.

@runicpixels Thank you!! Yeah unfortunately it's not clear, but ESC will get you out of that menu (and I think maybe 'Q' as well)

best music in the jam hands down

@seltzerfish Thank you so much. <3 Feel free to download the OST! There is a link in the description :)

Wow! Awesome game! Congrats :D

@cameron-paxton The gun worked the first time I pulled it out, but the second time it just refused to shoot (either mouse or spacebar). Tried holstering and redrawing the gun, but that didn't fix the problem.

Unless there's a reload mechanic I missed....? :face_palm:

Another great game. the shooting felt really nice and teh management aspects weren't in the way. But the UI was hard to read.

@digital-bacon Ahhh.... I'm not sure then! I'm sorry :\ This is the first instance I've seen of this bug. I will try to reproduce.

Excellent use of the main mechanic very cute art and sound, also I love the contrast between calm day and stressful night. Very addictive game, well done guys!

This game is just incredible! It absolutely feels like a finished product. Presentation is superb and there's an insane amount of polish. Art is adorable and music is great. There are so many mechanics thrown in and all of them feel good. Shooting is on point and the planting/harvesting is also very clean. I especially like the autocentering on a tile when working on it. Critters are adorable and the fact that they could get stolen added a lot more connection and made me care for them. Gameplay made sense but I thought it got stale quickly. I think maybe it's because of an overall lack of strategy/tactics. Planting/harvesting was very rote, and enemies shooting also was very basic as they all converged to the same point. Upgrades seemed quick at first but because of the increase in criminality it gets harder and harder to collect enough plants. Also resources being stole tends to feel very annoying in general, since as human beings we tend to be very loss-aware. I'd argue that losing resources as a mechanic is almost never a fun thing to add. Anyway, an extremely impressive entry that I'm sure will place very well, and with a bit more love to gameplay it would have been perfect!

I sat down to play some LD games tonight and ended up just playing this one for ages. Really cute, and lots of fun. Great artwork and audio and everything. Congrats on the game an thanks for the fun :D

Nice job! You've got some good stuff going on here, even though of course there's polish and stuff that could be done better. (Hint: Users tunnel vision on where the immediate action is happening, try to avoid putting important / undiscoverable UI elements elsewhere!)

I wish there could be a little more diversity in terms of how you approach the automation aspect rather than "just build more everything" but I understand there is only so much you can do in the 72hr timeframe. I just wish that in a more fully finished version there would be more of a shift in how the game plays.

Oh! And descriptions for the different upgrade "perks" would be much appreciated, even if it's just only on the LD page!

This is my favorite jam game! I totally didn't play it for over an hour...

The only criticism I have is that the mechanics aren't THAT smooth. But I can really easily overlook that. Moving etc. is just a bit cumbersome.

I LOVE automation. And I love turrets. As soon as I saw turrets in the upgrade list I knew I was going to play for a long time. I made a long killing tunnel with turrets, I didn't have to defend.

Also I paid $300 to get rid of the gnomes, and then I picked shut up and let me keep playing. But then the gnomes were still there! What the heck lol. What would have happened if I picked give me something? Did I miss out?

Edit: my gf and I have totally not been playing this game for hours and hours. The only issue is it seems the amount of gnomes doesn't lag necessarily, but if you build complex walls their pathfinding lags? It seems if you build complex wall structures the game basically freezes up.

This game can definitely be released as a fully fledged game. My gf wants a switch release

Really nice work! Quite an expansive game for Ludum Dare and takes a bit more time than your average entry.

As always, bippinbits delivers a fun game that keeps me entertained for an hour at least. I always check out your entries as they are always amongst my favourites, and this game is no exception. I think its the systems you guys buid which keeps me coming back, the accelerated game loop is addictive and so satisfying to build your own system. Thank you guys for another excellent submission <3

Incredibly engaging game, it was hard not to want to finish out the game. I was on my way to 300 lavenders when I thought of the genius idea of seeing what would happen when I totally walled myself in... The game of course, totally lagged and died on me.

But I got a very good taste of the game leading up to that. Summoning the different animal friends was the best part. I actually liked how the automation was unreliable. I grabbed a bunch of raccoons and prayed that they would plant seeds but they tended not to. I think it's good to have that sort of imperfect behavior, because otherwise the automation would be TOO easy like Factorio. It wouldn't make sense for animals to be perfectly trained anyways.

Like many others, it didn't take too long to create a kill-tunnel for the gnomes to run through. It was super satisfying to blast down the tunnel and 1-shot everything. I think if they took multiple hits it really would've ruined the experience, despite that being the logical thing to do to up the difficulty between rounds.

Another impressive entry, and probably the one with the most longevity given what some of the comments are saying. Super good game.

Very well made farm simulator guys! The art is really nice and the music is AMAZING! it really ties it all together. I had a little difficultie understanding how to build my base, it wasnnt clear enough like the farming tools are. Maybe I'm a little dumb hehe but maybe this could be something you guys could make it so it's more intuitive! Clarity is always good no matter how dumb your players are haha. But seriously, great game guys!

Always a delight playing your games, Rongo! Congrats to the entire team.

Farming, especially in this jam, is always a bit tedious, but you've built a lovely atmosphere around it. An amazing amount of polish for 72 hours too, it feels very complete. I was happy to be reminded of Dome Romantik in some of the effects and animations, I think I could have recognized this team's handiwork even if it wasn't for the site notification about one of my followed users.

The image of the cute farming kitty blasting gnomes with a pistol at night is so viscerally hilarious that it carries the entire game on its back, to the top of the ratings, I'm sure.

This was lovely! I'm so blown away by how much gameplay is in this game! I ALMOST finished it (was up to like 130 lavender with two maxed shelters of animals) when I tested what happened if you fully enclosed your area and the game just like 100% froze on me.

I really loved my time with the game, though, and it was super chill to stream :D

Oh hey it's you guys again! I am in love with this entry, such a cute (and ridiculous) concept, and I haven't seen anyone do lavender harvesting yet! I found the game loop to be very engaging, especially for a jam game. Including automation and gnome warfare added so much to the gameplay.

I did find the farming/building UI swapping to be very confusing at first but eventually got the hang of it.

Also, after I got around 100 or so lavender my game started stuttering and when the gnomes came out it froze altogether :(. Bummer because I really wanted to see what happens when I Gnomicide!

You've got a great one here. I'd love to see this idea done on the scale of Factorio or Forager.