Monkey Oolong Harvest Bop by PeachTreeOath
Description
Legend has it that there exists an Oolong tree so high up in the mountains, only the most trained and coordinated monkeys can harvest its delicious tea leaves. Hurl each other around as a coordinated squad in this accurate tea harvesting simulator!
How to Play
- Your goal is to gather as many tea leaves as possible
- Launch yourself with [Space], then grab onto the tree with [Space]
You can grab onto your monkey teammates to travel further than you could by yourself
[Space] Launch monkey
- [Space] Grab onto monkey or tree
- [Z] Change zoom
Dev Notes
We wanted to come up with a crop that wouldn't appear in other LD games. After getting some tea, a memory surfaced: monkey-picked oolong tea. Talk about exotic!
NOTE: the song is an original creation, but we did use sound effects from Donkey Kong Country so please only vote for the song when evaluating Audio!
| Link | https://peachtreeoath.itch.io/monkey-oolong-harvest-bop |
| Gameplay Video | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NJz2gQbBoE |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/monkey-oolong-harvest-bop |
Ratings
| Overall | 45th | 4.134⭐ | 43🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 33th | 4.163⭐ | 42🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 27th | 4.171⭐ | 43🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 348th | 3.793⭐ | 43🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 109th | 4.28⭐ | 43🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 47th | 4.077⭐ | 41🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 65th | 4.125⭐ | 42🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 35🗳️ | 53🗨️ |
I had a little trouble understanding when you gain energy, maybe some more feedback could help, like another counter for the tea leaves you got before the healing phase.
Monkeys are very cute and the music is good, it fits well with the mood. Your game is really fun! Great job! :)
I came here because I played your game 'study lady' from a previous ludum dare, but this game feels even better than that one in my opinion. Incredible job :D
I loved the gameplay depth you all created here with a mechanic that seems so trivial on the surface. But every move had the consequence of where you'd end up. This made me feel extra rewarded once I'd spaced out my monkeys into strategic areas of the tree, I could put them on a line that they'd collect a leaf, get caught by another teammate, and toss them back to their original position to not mess up my spacing.
The zoom out mechanic was an excellent addition to let us plan out the throws. My favorite ones went up first, then fell through a line of two or three leaves and ugh it just felt magical to pull it off.
My best score so far, but I'll be back later in the rating period.
As always, love the art style that this team brings. It has a great artistic touch, yet it's still able to convey what everything is perfectly. Hats off to you, this was a ton of fun.
The game flow seemed really hard to grasp for me. Moments when I can and can not grab the tree feel a bit unintuitive. Also I couldn't get used to aiming when boosting off of other monkeys. Most of the time I was launching poor things straight into abyss.
But the music and the visuals make the whole experience very chill and addictive, despite the fact that I was really bad at the game :sweat_smile:
Two things I thought about.
Because the first branches are a bit ways up in the tree getting well off the ground is actually one of the hardest parts of the game and where I spent a lot of the energy and it feels a bit odd to make the player face that right off the bat. So perhaps give the monkeys a bit of platform to start on or let them spread out in the bush from start...
Then the grab area for the tails could be a bit wider in the early phases of the game to make it more forgiving that way and shrink (possibly quite soon, like one or two leaf rounds) to the size it is now. That way we who are not that good get somewhere each time and makes you more invested to keep playing with a bit of sunk cost.
Great entry!
(The simple interactions might lend themselves to mobile :wink: )
I can see this being fleshed out just a tiny bit to maybe have the ability to control how fast the monkey spins in order to modulate how far they're flung (within a reasonable maximum since you'd still want it to require teamwork among the monkeys).
Nice work!
Game is great! I like sounds and visuals, gameplay is a bit challenging, yet exciting!
The gameplay is very easy to learn. Good work!
That aside, I think the game, aesthetically, works pretty well. I like the blend of Chinese paintbrush style with the cutesy vector monkeys. I think the clouds they sit on help to connect these two art styles together. I also enjoyed the simplicity of the gameplay itself. It's one of those easy to understand and difficult to master mechanics and I love the added addition of being able to chain throws and plan how to launch the monkeys in advance.
I wasn't able to get more than 2 leaves and I do suspect it is mostly because of performance issues. But I think the game overall is simple but well executed.
I think I ran into a bug when I flung a monkey off a branch, picking up the tea leaf on the way off-screen. He respawned in his previous position, the leaf was gone, but the game didn't spawn new leaves. The situation happened again a little later, but then new leaves *did* spawn, so I unfortunately wasn't able to reproduce it.
The graphics are great for the vibe you're setting, and the monkeys are super cute. Part of me wanted more monkey animations, but it's a gamejam and *more* is usually not available. :D The music mixes traditional sounds and a solid drum groove well, a solid nice fusion.
All in all a fun monkeylauncher that I, unfortunately, am pretty bad at. :laughing:
Overall a great job!
The monkeys were cute, and they stood out very clearly against the lovely painted look of the tree and misty-mountain background. The music and sound effects complemented each other well too, the instrumentation and way different parts layer on top of one another wouldn't feel out of place in a DKC game, which adds to that sort of nostalgic kick when you hear those distinctive monkey noises.
The design of the game felt solid to me too. Making it (more or less) a one-button game is awesome for playability in all sorts of contexts (maybe a build for mobile devices isn't far off?). Keeping the goal simple makes it easy to jump in and start exploring the mechanics directly, and a smooth restart after the game ended got me jumping back in again and again.
As I played, a certain elements of the design stood out to me:
1. **Speeding up the monkey's team throw with each successive catch was a really cool decision.** On top of positioning mattering in a straightforward "I want to be able to catch folks around here", I engaged with the extra layer of sequencing throws to make long leaps across the tree possible. It really opened up the styles of workable positions while also adding some natural increase in difficulty for players pursuing trickier strategies.
To illustrate, in my early attempts I tried distributing monkeys evenly around the tree to middling effectiveness. By the end I was comfortable keeping just one monkey high up and spreading a net of others down below - and there are almost certainly better ways to play it, my poor accuracy was generally my worst enemy.
2. **Slinging monkeys off of the tree didn't really have a downside, which was interesting.** It's definitely off-flavor (the sad monkey noises signal it's a bad move to send them flying down the mountain, who'd have thunk), but in gameplay terms missing the tree just sends the monkey back to its original position. In some cases, I think this is a more desirable - if I start with a monkey that's occupying a key position I can throw them around the tree to gather as much as I can then send them off-screen as they gather their last few leaves. I got some tricky leaves and they end up back in their key position - it's a win-win for everyone (aside from the monkey, presumably).
I don't know if making a miss more punishing in a straightforward way would be a good idea - controlling the monkeys is already pretty tough. It would probably hurt most for the people who aren't abusing the mechanic strategically while cutting out an odd bit of strategy. Maybe missing the tree keeps the monkey out of the game until they come back into the rotation? If they climb back to their old spot as their next turn begins it could be a potentially useful maneuver, but not one without consequence?
3. **When I picked up the game, I'd often lose track of which monkey's up next.** In retrospect, I can see it's following rainbow logic, red-orange-yellow-green-blue, but it wasn't something that I picked up on right away. If it doesn't clutter things up too much, having some kind of reminder might be nice to have (a rotating queue on the periphery of the screen when you zoom out, maybe?).
4. **Monkeys always swing one another clockwise - I'd be curious to see the difference in play if they could swing in either direction.** I do think it's a fine limitation (especially so we can keep simple controls) but it made some kinds of moves feel especially tricky to me.
Under clockwise-only rules, you can't do an overhand pitch to the left, for example, and a lob to the right has to be launched from around the 9 o'clock position. To keep the simplicity of one-button gameplay, maybe it could be based on the position and velocity of the monkey when the catch occurs? Get caught by a monkey on your left while moving upward and you naturally get swung counter-clockwise. I don't think it's the biggest deal, but I think it might the way we route throws across the tree more intuitive (and add an extra level of precision to aim for if folks are really into it.
- A way to visualize the reach of the monkeys would be great. There were some times I thought they were within reach of each other but was wrong, and the difference between pulling off a great team throw and locking a monkey into a redundant position on the tree is definitely a painful. Alternatively, making their reach a little more forgiving might just "fix" the feel of it
- Some kind of reset button would be nice to have. Restarting after a finished run is super duper smooth (which really helps with that "just one more try" feeling!) so having to refresh the page to retry mid-run feels clunky by comparison.
All in all, a very cool game! The game's scope is well-selected for a jam, and the intuitiveness of play makes it easy to discover and engage with the emergent strategy that springs from these straightforward mechanics. And like I said before, the presentation is awesome - what an inviting way to pull folks into some strategic monkey-slinging action.
Thanks for putting together a great submission for the jam.
#1 an interesting thing I've observed is how strategy and execution co-develop in a player. At first the game is execution heavy until the player starts realizing there is strategy to spreading out their monkeys in certain ways. But funnily enough, that is actually capped by the player's own ability to throw monkeys far - so their strategy can only be as complex as their execution.
#2 that is totally a viable strat and I use it depending on the situation. The real reason I didn't have a larger penalty was because I didn't have enough time to explain it to the player. The UX wasn't quite good enough to show it I thought. A tutorial stage would've been better. So ultimately I said screw it, I'll let the players get off easy on that one.
#4 I learned something new the other day, that in Tetris, depending on the version you play, you'll either want to leave an empty column on the left or right side of the well. This is completely due to the different rotation behaviors across different Tetris versions.
The correct answer does seem to simply have a rotation-switch button, but I think it could be interesting to see what positioning strats develop as a result of how the tosses work.
The setting itself is great too, and it's amazing that this is rooted in real life - super interesting.
Now this great setup is multiplied by having a great game mechanic. Plays very easily and is super fun, with a mix of strategy and skill. Of course i try to plan my monkeys around being able to catch each other, and it working out is very satisfying. The only irritation i had was that monkeys are launched differently when held by a monkey vs. when jumping on their own. I learned it quickly enough and can also see that a) this is the only way it makes sense and b) it is actually much more fun to have a more difficult launch when held by a monkey. I noticed being caught by a second monkey very much speeds up your rotation. I'd either tone this down or omit it completely - as a player it is the best feeling when you can do a combo, so i think it doesn't need to be "balanced away" but encouraged.
Top game i easily see in top 10 in more than one category! I don't remember when i gave the last 5 star rating, a very rare occurence - this is one :)
The elements shuffle up well so that each situation requires some careful thought, which I really appreciated. I felt myself getting better as I played. One thing I really like is the wide, wide range of the effectiveness of a turn. The floor of a turn is utter failure, and it's common enough. But there are soaring highs on turns that I saw, and I can IMAGINE even much more. Nailing a buddy-toss into multiple pickups and then catching another monkey to spin back around and make ANOTHER pass, it's gold.
My first few attempts I was awful and lost a bunch of energy at the start, but then I learned "Don't be dumb, throw your first monkey halfway to their range so that it's easy to chain the next one!" And gradually I started getting better. I really don't know how that other commenter got fifty-three leaves?!?? I can't even get to twenty!
Since this game was so good, I want to point out a couple of ways that I felt like the game left a little something on the table:
- The ultimate high is chaining monkeys into many pickups and getting a LOT done with one turn (especially powerful after a few failed turns). But the wave-based spawning of leaves worked against this high, and sometimes left my rare great turn spinning with no next leaf to get, which was a downer.
- The z-zoom was of course valuable and necessary, but it was a splinter that I had to use it so much. I kept wishing for an arrow pointing toward offscreen leaves that somehow also indicated the distance, for example by scaling. I feel like if it exactly indicated both distance and direction, I could learn to play with much less of the inconvenient zooming. I also would have preferred the active-monkey be somehow indicated when I'm in Z mode.
And I wouldn't call it a problem, but I could probably have been more powerful if there was some minor graphical indication of what WOULD happen if I pressed space, for example the buddy monkey reaching out or seeing a little trail pointing the vector that I will launch at while spinning. Those things I learned by rote eventually, but there was an adjustment period where I kept being surprised to have grabbed the tree instead of my buddy.
Anyway, I really enjoyed this!
The art is also great, and had so many nice touches that made this feel really alive. The rolling fog, the subtle animation on the birds. Especially well-done was the tree: The leaves, which are decorative, blow in the window, but the branches, which are critical gameplay elements, are snapped stock-still. So smart. The monkeys and tea leaves also stood out really well against the background elements, with their relatively high saturation. And those face/tail animations! Monkeys had such great personality.
Really well done entry, hitting every element. Great job!