Farming Combos by Doctor_Zeus
It's time to hit the fields and farm some points in this fast-paced action/puzzle game!
Plant and harvest matching chains of crops in quick succession to score points and build up a monumental multiplier. An array of difficulties stand in your way: field space is limited, your satchel of seeds is jumbled up, and soil quality can grant rapid growth or slow maturation to a snail's pace.
Careful planning just as important as good timing, and only a clever farmer can truly make a bountiful harvest from every field.
Features:
- High-Octane Reaping and Sowing: lay down rows of plants with just a single swipe of the mouse.
- Strategic Scoring: find ways to extend your chains of crops to secure the highest multiplier possible.
- Gold Stars: just like in preschool days of yore, get rewarded for a job well done with gold stars! Even when there are no more stars left to get, you're free to compare your high scores with your friends and enemies.
Jump into the action right away if you're tired of reading, otherwise venture onward for additional information and occasional witticisms.
How to Play
Click the mouse, press Spacebar, or press 'z' to switch between Planting and Harvesting modes (represented by a green bag of seeds and a sickle, respectively)
Move your mouse over an empty field while in Planting mode to place a seed. Later, move the mouse over that field in Harvesting mode to reap the crop & score points.
Gameplay Tips:
- Crops can be harvested as soon as they finish sprouting, but the greatest rewards (both score and multiplier growth) come from harvesting ripened crops.
- Harvesting several of the same crop in a row (a "Chain" of crops) exponentially increases your progress toward the next level of multiplier. There's no direct difference in score because of a chain, but reaching a higher multiplier is essential for achieving high scores!
- The crop combo multiplier will decay over time. Planting a few crops can stall the timer temporarily and harvesting plants of any quality might help. Harvesting fully ripened crops is the only surefire way to refresh it, though.
- Planning ahead is your greatest asset - check the list of crops at the bottom of the screen for the order and count of each type that will appear in the level. The three crop-badges on the left side of the screen change dynamically show the next three crops that are ready to be planted.
Credits:
Farming Combos was created with the Godot engine in 72 hours and includes original code, sound, and art. The full team included: - @doctor-zeus - lead designer, programmer, misc. goalpost-moving - @NBumgardner - designer, programmer, composer - Alex Mullins - artist, created the harvest / plant symbols and crop-tile graphics - Tom Bumgardner - artist, made a painting for the thumbnail / menu screens
NOTE:
The lovely pixel-art tileset used for the background of the levels was purchased in an asset pack: 7Soul's RPG Graphics - Tiles - Grasslands by Henrique "7Soul" Lazarini - @7SoulDesign
And we also relied upon the Roboto font, created by Christian Robertson
Given their external source, please don't consider them when rating our team's artistic work (the rest of which was made within the confines of the jam).
Feedback Wanted:
This Ludum Dare entry features original art, music, and gameplay, and we are welcome to all kinds of feedback, especially related to how fun Farming Combos is to play!
You can also check out the open-source code on GitHub (gaze upon our spaghetti, ye Mighty, and despair!)
| GitHub | https://github.com/SamBumgardner/ld-52-harvest |
| Link | https://nbumgardner.itch.io/ludum-dare-52 |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/farming-combos |
Ratings
| Overall | 564th | 3.25⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 526th | 3.167⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 330th | 3.413⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 164th | 4.083⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 600th | 3.125⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 413th | 2.958⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 510th | 2.63⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 703th | 2.875⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 16🗳️ | 26🗨️ |
Having a high-scoring plot could be really cool - maybe it could be the sort of thing where the bonus it gives decreases with each successive harvest? You could figure out if it's more optimal to use it early as combo-building space or reserve it for a big payoff later.
I 100% agree about the score text - From the outset, I thought some kind of particle effects / special sound effect on the ripe crop harvests would feel nice + be a good way to give feedback to the player. Right now it's not terribly intuitive to tell how many points your harvests are getting you - you could mow over rows of young plants and get relatively low value for it, but it feels the same as setting up a well-timed chain of high-point crops. You can look at the score and see the difference, but that doesn't do much for game-feel.
I'm glad you liked Fast Food, it was pretty much the first thing that came to mind when I thought of the fast/slow tiles. Nice and satisfying, just gotta race around that track :laughing:
Also, the sound effects were really satisfying to me.
Fast Food was the first one that showed me the light. I immediately thought about Osu and I thought it was hilarious how I was playing a *farming game* but suddenly my mouse speed and accuracy was being tested.
Tortoise and Hare was a brilliant use of shapes and tiles. Ok well, a little creativity is required on the hare's depiction but the idea is there lol.
Scatter Plot was very very tricky to optimize. This is where I learned to really juggle my tools and "plant over" other plants in order to not accidentally cut them.
After the Storm - so cool. IMO harder than the last stage since counting out how you're going to lay things out is very difficult. The final stage I mostly just blasted things onto the fast tiles.
I was kinda skeptical coming into this, but ultimately I believed in its title + the promise of fastpaced action. It delivered! I was tested on several skills I've never seen before. Quickly tracing my previous mouse movements, which still being themed as crop harvesting, was very innovation. And then there's the strategic side of it which is figuring out what the best things are to trace in the first place.
The different crops having different growth rates are a key to making this all interesting, otherwise it'd be all pure tracing routes. There are lots of great directions the game can go in, and from what I've seen from your creativity skills, you're more than capable of continuing to surprise the players.
Overall this is a very raw design, and I mean that in a good way. You went for a very novel gameplay and it's great to see a game pushing the boundaries. This is one of the reasons I do LD, to see what people can come up with on the cutting edge.
My goal when I made the levels was to make each one demonstrate some new idea or test the player's application of previous concepts in a new way. The way you describe interacting with the game (and the ideas you pulled from some of the levels) makes me really happy.
Like with Fast Food, I wanted to introduce the idea of fast-growing tiles in a way that would make their function very clear without making the level strategically difficult (I worried that complexity in other areas would interfere with the basics of seeing the accelerated timing of the tiles) so I went all in on the Osu-style mouse-accuracy side of the game. It could be a change of pace (figuratively and literally) from the planting puzzles that came before, and maybe reset folks' expectations for what could come later.
So yeah, the fact that you read my design intent so well from a players perspective makes me happy - there's nothing I like more than sharing these kinds of ideas with someone, all through play!
@guiti I am glad you liked the music! In the final build it plays the full version throughout due to my own time constraints. It was composed in layers with PxTone to eventually play more layers based on the game's combo multiplier.
Overall the different level layouts were good though and really dive deep into the mechanics and the optimization the player could try for.
I thought the plants grew up and died just a little too fast. Also it would help to give the "fully grown" plays some sort of particle FX - it was hard to understand when excatly they were ready and by the time i realized they were dead.
I wonder if it would also help to have a separate "planting" phase from a "harvesting" phase. Kind of give the player that mental mindset shift - ok here's how i'm going to plant the different crops and then switch over into the harvest mindset based on the "plan of action" you setup in the planting phase.
Overall a pretty good entry though.
Thanks for the feedback! I think you hit the nail on the head - the issues you're calling out are definitely the rough points of the game.
The finicky sort of mouse control was built into the game from the start for a couple reasons:
- From an implementation side, I had a real clear idea of how to make it work
- Lots of repeated clicking would be bad from a repetitive stress injury perspective
- Input can be very smooth (and hopefully satisfying!) when it goes well
But it comes with a pretty major downside - it's finicky, especially if folks have a sensitive mouse, a sketchy trackpad, or aren't too into that sort of input style.
Somewhat selfishly, I got the idea from my enjoyment of other games that involve finely-tuned mouse control. I'm not a big FPS player, but I enjoy the technical aspects of aiming. I think it's interesting sort of skill to build consistency with, but I gotta confess I find mouse control pretty boring to practice in isolation and I'm bad at improving in live competition.
So for me, I look at something like this as a sort of sneaky mouse-accuracy training exercise. I can work out a theoretical solution to the puzzle, then work on actually executing my idea. Maybe in the process I find something that works differently than I expected (or is straight up too hard for me to do), then I can go back to the drawing board and plan a new strategy.
The puzzle-ey aspect of the game could be totally separated from the mouse control execution part, though, and maybe that's the way to actually make this the best game it could be for the most people.
I definitely agree about the readability issue on fully grown plants - particles or other markers for visual clarity (give that good "harvest me now!" sort of signalling) were on the wishlist but didn't quite make the cut before time ran out. It definitely makes the game less approachable, which isn't helped by how fast the game is paced. I also think there's room to make the harvestable window more forgiving - I took my best guess at what would be forgiving enough, but it could definitely use iteration and feedback from lots of folks to find the sweet spot.
The idea of the separate "planting" and "harvesting" phase is interesting to me. I think the game's current core is built around the idea of flip-flopping between the two - figuring out the right time to keep planting (vs. waiting for a harvest to free up more space) is where a lot of the more interesting puzzles come from. If you had some ideas about how it'd work out, I'd be interested to hear it (no pressure of course, I appreciate the feedback you've already given).
Pretty neat little game! Took me a little while to understand how to get higher scores. The pumpkins in particular, I didn't realize I was harvesting them too early lol.
But once I got everything figured out, I was able to do the bigger stages and had a lot of fun with it!