Escape From The Ostrobothnia by Tomssuli

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnTVV51J75U
Story
You are a farmer in Southern Ostrobothnia... Work is all you have and you never get to see your friends.
Farming is hard labor and there are beasts lurking around in the forest. Your shotgun is the only thing that can save your delicate crops from the hazards of nature.
Goal
To fulfil your life long dream of getting a helicopter so you can go visit your friends in the city.
Keys
Key| Explanation -|- WASD|Move! Don't just stand there... the crops are not going to plant themselves. E|Enter! Press this button to enter vehicles and buildings. Left mouse button|Click! To select items and place things. ESC|Escape! Escape menu with 'press if stuck button'. ENTER|Skip! Skip the tutorial. Been there, done that.
Hint: Defend your crops with a shotgun and place more fields for a better yield.
Tools used in this game:
- Clickteam Fusion 2.5 Developer
- Audacity
- Cubase
- Cakewalk By Bandlab
- Gimp
- Adobe Photoshop
- DALL-E (Cover image and Cutscene)
- Naturalreaders (Creation)
- Voice Changer (Modulation)

DOWNLOADS:
Escape from Ostrobothnia JAM Version This is the one to give ratings for
Escape from Ostrobothnia Advanced Edition This is post-jam edition with additional features and will still be updated
Advanced Edition features:
1.10 - Cheaper prices - Better value for foods - Takes less than 25% of time of the original to complete - Additional upgrade levels for capacity upgrades - Whole new character speed upgrade! - A new animal (is buggy, will be fixed later) - Descriptions for the shop items - Some polish and bugfixes
1.11 - Endgame event that activates shortly after you've bought the helicopter (And killed three kinds of pests)
1.12 - Fixed bug where resources were not reset after finishing the game - Replaced placeholder graphics for buttons and pointer icons
1.14 - Added timer to top left corner - Show complete time in the end screen
| LDJAM Entry - RATE THIS ONE! | https://www.blackenter.com/files/escape.zip |
| Post-Jam Entry - DON'T RATE THIS! | https://www.blackenter.com/files/escape_adv.zip |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/escape-from-the-ostrobothnia |
Ratings
| Overall | 405th | 3.5⭐ | 45🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 465th | 3.279⭐ | 45🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 549th | 3.07⭐ | 45🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 243th | 3.965⭐ | 45🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 654th | 2.884⭐ | 45🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 263th | 3.465⭐ | 45🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 292th | 3.195⭐ | 43🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 458th | 3.372⭐ | 45🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 37🗳️ | 81🗨️ |
@initialposition Yes the first shotgun is ok if you are content on just scaring the animals, but if you want to go on a rampage (and at a point you might want to ;), the upgrade helps you.
@cievers Did you get the next level resources after the carrots? New shop items are unlocked after every new resource found ;)
I do feel like there should be something to let you walk faster as well tho, it was quite slow when the mower broke.
And their is a bug with the last upgrade of the mower, the amount of your hand doesn't change when entering or exiting. Just makes the game a little bit easier, not that it really matters at that point.
I see you didn't play it for very long if you're saying that... Or maybe you were doing a pacifist run.
Either case, you must have missed the next level resources and the endgame content.
I'm sure there's upgrades to make the game feel faster and less tedious, but I didn't feel hooked enough to keep playing. I do want to say that I love the music, the game matches the theme perfectly, and the controls felt smooth. The cutscene at the start was nice too.
+ Motivating upgrades
+ Well used mechanics, such as the player being slow so you HAVE to rely on the harvester even if you do not harvest the crops. But also not too annoying.
+ Soundtrack. Chill but not bothering
+ The stuck button. Missed that in other games (including my own one) as well.
- I did not play until that long unfortunately as at some point unloading the wheat at the silo did not work anymore.
Awesome that you enjoyed our game!
Could you tell more about the bug? Did the wheat not come out of the harvester or did it not go in the silo? Did the harvester fill level still show full or was id bugged as well?
EDIT: I tried lots of stuff and couldn't reproduce the bug for the life of me and also no one of our team has encountered it. If it occurs again to anyone, please report the circumstances so we can fix it!
Wow! Thanks of taking to time to finish the game!
Over 2 hours though :O ...we should have been testing the full playthroughs while playtesting. I would have right out taken at least half away from all the prices if I'd realized it will take that long.
@multipixels @noeloskar
Thanks for playing and honest reviews! After reading all the comments it is very clear that we put the steps of advancing in the game too far apart... "So begin the grind" from the intro is now being too literal. And yes, there is more to this game than farming carrots :deer:
Everyone: I'll put an advanced edition up soon, with faster advancement pace (cheaper prices) and new upgrades to shop to make gameplay nicer.
Or not. Probably it is just some usefull staff and get shit for free.
Anyway. Congratunaltions with nice entry!
But despite the sad ending, I actually had a lot of fun with this game! The grind is very slow, but it's satisfying. The music, sound effects, and graphics all work well to create a fun little farming sim. I would suggest maybe increasing the pace of the game somehow, since it currently takes way too long to complete.
Thank you for playing and reviewing, so nice that you still enjoyed the game
I'm making an advanced edition at the moment. It has faster pace and I'll publish it in couple of days. I'll tag you when I post it here (as a separate download of course) so you can try it again if you are still around.
There is so much small details, like the fact that birds come to pick up seeds you did not have capacity of picking up was amazing. :trophy:
I really found it quite soothing and relaxing, I must have played for around 25-30 minutes.
Please tag me when you release the advanced version :smile:
So, I think I can say for sure that this game is a bit of a grind, taking at least 90 minutes to win and perhaps even longer than that. Now, I don't necessarily have anything against this. For a while last night I was just playing the game for a bit, as the core gameplay loop ends up being somewhat nice to just chill out and do for a while.
That said, I feel like there isn't enough feeling of progression to really hook me in for a long grind. The only upgrades I bought were the faster harvester, as well as a couple fertilizer so that I could make some plots closer to the shed... these upgrades do seem to be perhaps worthwhile, but the rest of the upgrades seem so expensive that I have to imagine that buying them will actually just make the game take longer.
In particular, I think it is rather frustrating that the only real way to advance in terms of money is to kill the pests, and they seem to spawn somewhat inconsistently... there will be stretches of time where the only pests that show up are on the edges of the map, and run away as soon as they touch a building.
OK, so I've talked about how the game is a grind. So what did I like?
Well, I think the core mechanic of the harvester is really great. I haven't played a ton of farming games with vehicles, so this was a bit new to me just in that sense.
But the game mechanic itself is also really neat. In particular, relying on the harvester to travel quickly is really cool. Like, there's a lot of gameplay revolving around getting in the harvester to go somewhere, getting out to shoot something, getting back in to go somewhere else or to harvest something... overall I think it's a really good part of the game.
The repairs also contribute to this--it was interesting whenever the harvester got completely destroyed, and I had to walk back to the shed to get the wrench. This was a cool mechanic as well, in my opinion.
One other thing about the harvester that I liked is that there was actually quite a bit of technique involved in driving it efficiently. In particular, exiting the harvester causes it to immediately stop, which means that quickly turning around, for example, can be done by hitting E twice and then accelerating. Similarly, whenever loading resources into the silo, I would basically hit E twice.
This braking technique made the harvester surprisingly fun to drive, as it felt like it actually took some skill, and it was fun to successfully execute the technique and drive the harvester more efficiently.
I think the other farming game mechanics were also nicely implemented. I especially thought the distinction between the planted-plants and the harvested-plants (and harvested meat) lead to some interesting interactions. In particular, whenever I killed an animal, I would try to harvest it even if I couldn't actually store it in the harvester, simply because that would prevent it from fading away.
The variety of interactions was also fun, and I think would be more than enough to keep me hooked for a shorter grind.
Although, I do think you should mention somewhere that selling meat is actually very important, because otherwise I probably would not have kept playing nearly as long... the other things are just so much worse in terms of money. I think the easiest way to fix this would be to just show all the recipes that are possible to unlock in the store, so that the player knows they should be trying to obtain a resource called "meat."
So, overall, a game with some very well-thought out and fun mechanics, just too much of a grind to play in one sitting. (Although I am keeping the game running on my computer... so perhaps I will finish it one day. :smile: )
We realized only after first players to play through the game that it was way too long. We playtested all the mechanics and stuff but not the length of the game :sweat_smile: In particular, everything is too expensive and the game drags on for too long. All upgrades actually contribute to faster gameplay in their own way, but I'm not sure if the price is worth the speed addition. Also, did you get to the next resource after meat?
Pests spawning is actually pretty consistent. The more plants crops you have growing, the more deer will spawn. The more harvested crops you have lying around on the ground, the more birds will spawn. You can bait the animals this way by having large fields and loads of stuff lying around. Also, if you just scare the animals, they will be back after a while.
Nice that you found out good ways to use our game mechanics, I myself like to buy the better shotgun and harvester speed then bait the deer with 4-6 full fields and drive near when the deer are swarming and rapidly click, shooting them all in the face (or rear, they turn around too quickly). Also if you get far away with broken harvester you can press the stuck button to get you and mr harvey home faster. Also the last upgrade before the helicopter speeds up your hunt alot. Also the sound of starting the harvester scares the animals in small range. You can scare them off by driving around and spamming E.
About informing the meat mechanics... We originally decided to do a surprise game where you found the next level resources by accident. So it would look like an innocent farming game before you accidentally harvest an animal. We thought it would be way funnier if it was a surprise. Too bad the game became too grindy so most of players didn't even get to that part.
Now for the good part: I've already made an advanced edition, the playthrough time is less than 25% of the original and there's some polish and small stuff that didn't make it into the game. I'm on the edge of publishing it (as a separate download) already, but there is one new animal to be found that is very buggy. Maybe I'll just publish it now and patch it later if someone even wants to play it ever again. (I've also planned statistics and achievements for the full game.)
...And just imagine what you could make with Fusion with more than 72 hours on your hands :slight_smile:
I did seem to notice that having crops growing resulted in more pests showing up, especially with the harvested crops and the birds... but I couldn't seem to make that good of use of it, as usually I could only shoot, say, 1 deer at a time even if 3 showed up. (Occasionally I could get more than 1 if they went to the same spot, but this was rarer than just getting 1 at a time).
I can see that having more fields could allow for increasing the possibility that the deer group up... perhaps I'll have to try it. I do think that the upgraded shotgun could possibly come in handy, but it's just hard to commit to any purchase. :sweat_smile:
Advanced edition v 1.10 is up now!
Featuring:
- Cheaper prices
- Better value for foods
- Takes less than 25% of time of the original to complete
- Additional upgrade levels for capacity upgrades
- Whole new character speed upgrade!
- A new animal (is buggy, will be fixed later)
- Descriptions for the shop items
- Some polish and bugfixes
[Download Escape from Ostrobothnia **advanced edition**](https://www.blackenter.com/files/escape_adv.zip)
also, that song at the end was legendary.
Advanced edition v 1.11 Featuring:
- Endgame event if you still play after buying the helicopter (should activate soon if you didn't do a pacifist run)
- Fixed bug where resources were not reset after finishing the game
- Replaced placeholder graphics for buttons and pointer icons
- Added clock
- Show complete time in the end screen before credits

Too bad I'm having such a busy day I probably don't have time to do any more reviews for this Ludum.