Galactic Garden: an Asteroid Space Harvesting Game.

The little crow sprites for the message pop ups are just, *chef kiss*

Cool take on the theme! The characters were very cute!

The game has a good vibe and not a bad idea. The spaceship looks like amongus, nice :D

Lovely game, quite challenging, but in a fun way. It would be awesome to have an enemy arrow that points of screen on the main screen to the direction of the enemy (just like you did on the mini-map) - I think it would be easier to navigate.

Good Job!

Really like the game. Good concept and well executed.
I would have expected different physics on the ship, but you get used to it quite fast.
Also I played like 4 times, and you die really easy at first. You really need to harvest something as quickly as possible so you can buy upgrades, else you get obliterated.
I really like the detail that your energy is both the currency and you health.

I like this one! Very fun game. It took me a moment to realize that WASD move my ship and it doesn't matter which way I am pointed.

It was a cool concept. I liked the idea of planting seeds and then harvesting them to upgrade your ship. It was a bit confusing at first, but I really liked the cute characters. Adding more upbeat music when fighting would have made the game more exciting, but I had fun! Thanks! :)

Played it 4 times and I was not able to finish it (I got places to be etc.). But I really enjoyed this game! This might be the best game I have reviewed! I really like the open world feel of the game, the complex features of the game etc etc. It had ok sound design, solid graphics, good controls and very impressive set of features. There was a strategy level involved in managing the energy and crops, but it was not too overwhelming as the enemies came in waves. I think best part of this game is the gampelay loop: Harvest seeds, fight, collect seeds, buy upgrades, fight, harvest crop... Only thing I really hated was the rotating asteroids and the short viewing distance. The asteroids were moving and rotating too fast which made them not very pleasant to look at and also it was rather difficult to keep track of them because some of them were moving so fast. Also the last few waves feeled really overwhelming, as next one came in before I was able to finish previous wave. I tried to use the nuke to destroy the Tree boss, but it was not very effective and instead drained the energy. I did not like the fact that the better weapons required energy (I can see what you were going after: some incentive to switch weapons). I think the game would have been better if none of the weapons would have consumed energy, and there would have been no option to switch to previous and inferior weapons. Thank you for making such a great game!

@martta Thanks for the detailed comment! Your thoughts are very interesting and yeah we struggled balancing things like weapon cost. It's hard to make and balance a game in 72h as I'm sure you know :) Also the scroll wheel zooms in and out btw! Forgot to put that on the instructions image.

Nice game, the tension between having to fly out to asteroids to grow/harvest vs sticking around the station to defend works really well. The biggest issue I had was the upgrade icons, it was pretty hard to tell what was going on. Having your money be your healthbar was an interesting risk/reward that was a hard ride to line, I was reluctant to get upgrades if I'd be left too poor. Overall very solid, gameplay, art, audio, and writing all very polished.

I only made it as far as wave 7, but I sunk a (relatively) large amount of time into this game. There's a lot of depth to the gameplay and I love that it's this harvesting tower defense. The humour was pretty great and the atmosphere was good. My only gripe against the audio is that once the later waves kick in, the sound effect of the crows firing gets REALLY loud.

I also appreciated the zoom options and the ability to boost was very helpful once I actually understood how to use it. It made the large map and slower movement seem like less of an issue.

I found it surprising that forwarding the dialogue was not entirely player-initiated. When I first played, the dialogue automatically proceeded too quickly for me and I do wish it paused until the player presses the button to go forward, especially since there's options to skip the dialogue entirely.

While I do appreciate the keyboard controls for pausing and skipping dialogue, I think having on-screen buttons for these functions would have made more sense given the mouse-based aspect.

Regarding the weapons, I appreciate that there were a large amount of upgrades in the game, but I do think they could have used a touch more balancing. One example that comes to mind is that I don't think the basic firing gun really needs to keep the lower tier versions as you purchase the upgrades and that they should replace them. There isn't really a need to go back to your good old single firing gun during wave 7, especially when some of the higher tiers don't really consume that much energy (or any energy at all).

Overall, I enjoyed this entry and had a ton of fun playing it. Let me eat my vegetables, crows!

(Also a side note: I downloaded the rebalanced version and played it out of curiosity, but most of the controls weren't working. I was only able to click to shoot and plant, but I couldn't move nor rotate my ship with the mouse. I can play the original without any problems, but the rebalanced seems to not have any working controls except for the left and right mouse buttons.)

@random-storykeeper Thanks for the detailed feedback. The reason the crow sound gets really loud is that a TON of enemies spawn... Maybe we should have capped it. We'll keep your feedback in mind for next jam regarding dialogue skipping and UI. Weapon replacement is also a good suggestion. The rebalanced version seems to work for me... Not sure how to help you debug sry :/ Glad you had fun playing

Wow, the most complete game I've played so far at this LD. A lot to do and the loop of plant -> fly around -> harvest -> kill crows -> upgrade -> etc was pretty deep. I enjoyed it a lot.

I thought that the crop planting and harvesting mechanic was the most solid, the way that there were only a few slots per asteriods, and that the asteriods flew around so you couldn't find them. A good way to solve the problem that other LD games seem to have with similar mechanics. It also just felt really good, maybe it was the sounds and animations.

The shotgun was my favourite weapon for sure, nuke was also fun at the end to spam.

The combat wasn't as strong as the harvesting IMO. Fun because of the upgrades, but it felt a little off somehow. The lasers and crows were hard to avoid, they tracked you really close. But there also wasn't much of a downside to getting hit by lasers anyway (once you had enough energy). Also I thought the timing could have been shorter between waves... maybe more smaller waves or something. But the variety of the weapons and enemies well made up for it.

A well thought out game. The controls are nice, the background sound loop gives the vibe of the emptiness of the vast space(which contradicts a little bit with the humor from Mr. Crow, but it is a good mix), the game mechanics is well made(easy to plant seeds and picking up during harvest, enables the player to focus on the shooting instead of spending time and energy on repetitive sowing and harvesting, it is a great design choice), the upgradation system is also well made considering the time constraints of JAM. Really enjoyed :smiley: , loved the small details on the game design which made it stand out among others.

Wow, this was a blast. I loved generated sfx and the music. I liked the graphics. A good take on the theme! I'd prefer relative/tank controls but it was still very nice. It played really well. I was very eager to find out if I can defeat 'em crows :D I did not in 2 tries :bird: Good job, splendid!

What a good entry! I had a fun playing this and could see this evolving to a full game if you wanted to continue it. I found the difficulty to be pretty hard on the final wave (ultimately lost) but that's game jams for ya :sweat_smile: Impressive features you have in your engine! One thing I will mention is it is very slow to load that I thought it was frozen and started watching your video. After a minute or two the game popped up, thought I would mention it

Keep on making games!

@frozenfire92 Thank you for the feedback! What are your PC specs?

I don't have the fastest PC that's for sure, but I can run most modern AAA games on low with 60-100 fps

Nice twist in the theme: harvesting plus space. Controllers were confusing in the beginning. The disconnect between visuals and actual movement, the flame from the rocket idicats only the movement but not direction. The game is hard.

This is a solid game through and through. It actually even plays on Linux! Kudos to you for that!

The storyline kept me chuckling and the artwork over all is good.

I found myself, however, wanting more contrast between the background and the crow ships. The off-camera locators were really helpful but the ships themselves could be hard to see at times.

The ability to zoom in and out was helpful, but zooming out quickly became less helpful as the shapes began to fade into each other. I could still basically make out what was going on, but the objects blended a little much.

There were a lot of weapons, and I'm not really sure how I could unlock them all. Also, it was difficult to keep track of crops I was trying to bank on asteroids. I can see that that is part of the game, but I could hardly plan a bumper crop for defense.

Aside from that, I still had a fun time playing this game and think that you did a really good job!

i like that you have to choose between either getting less expensive upgrades that are more immediately useful or saving up for one of the big ones but leaving yourself more vulnerable

Love the idea and the intensity that it brings. I do wish that the camera was zoomed out just a bit so I could have a better idea of my surroundings, and as you said its hard to properly balance something in just 72 hours lol. Lovely stuff though and definitely something I can see myself spending hours on.

@antoniothereis Thanks for the comment! You can actually zoom out with the scroll-wheel. We forgot to put that in the instructions :/

This is a good game, the music also matches the picture, but the third wave is too difficult! So many planes directly surrounded me and then shot burst, played for a long time but did not pass the third level, I hope to change the enemy mechanism, I look forward to future updates!

I liked the dialogues, music and atmosphere, a solid entry!

Oh, nice! Having to plant on moving asteroids makes things quite interesting, it would be nice if there was also a way to keep asteroids in the same spot, like towing them around. I'd also like to see some more complexity, like subtle action from enemies stealing your crops, or asteroids having terrain that favors certain types of plants. Good entry!