Fun concept! Enjoyed playing it

Cool idea and nice graphics :) had fun with this one

A game after my own heart!
loved the idea, controls seemed a little odd.
Mushrooms looked great! great atmosphere.

Small bug: when replaying without restarting the exe, the collected count is the previous games count.

@brandann Thanks for the feedback! Do you know if I'm allowed to submit a small patch for the reported bug, or will that disqualify me from the comp?

Controls (especially the mushroom rotation) is definitely a bit janky -that I can admit :v:

I believe bug patches are OK.

Mushroom rotation controls were a bit wonky, but liked the game. The mushrooms looked nice.

I agree with the oddness of rotation controls (but 3D rotations are famously complicated to get right and I could still examine the mushrooms anyway).

I found another bug: on one level start/analysis phase (the 2nd one I think), the 2 mushrooms to examine were at the same position, so I couldn't click on one of them to examine it. Are their positions random?

Apart from that, cool idea!

@cagibi Thanks for the bug report. The positions are not random. I used a series 'Marker3D' nodes for the spawn positions, both in the Preview world, and the actual gameplay world.

Last minute, I placed a bunch more 'Spawn Position's, as I realized there weren't enough slots for longer play sessions. I assume I accidentally doubled up somewhere.

Hey, thank you for the game, it was a quite interesting idea! I liked the mood and lighting!

I ran into a few bugs, when I lost the game, it would not keep the state correctly for the first level, so I had to shut down and re-start the game from scratch. Also, accepting the mushrooms with right click, and rejecting them with left click took a while to adjust mentally.

Nice job! (and yes, bug patches are ok in Ludum Dare!)

Thanks for the feedback @caranha! I made a linux export, and fixed the bugs -I don't imagine you will be stopping by to play again, but maybe for the next person :)

This is a pretty good game! My only issue with it is that it ramps up in difficulty quite harshly, I didn't have that much time to get used to the mechanics before I already had to memorize numerous details.

Game loading could have used a loading indication, I thought it was stuck and almost gave up! Cool mushroom art!

The game is harder than it looks.

The mechanics is not super captivating though, maybe some walking around would add atmosphere.

The scenes and mushrooms are really nice. I liked picking up and viewing each mushroom.

It was harder than I thought it would be. The mushroom features are distinct, but there are so many similar variations that it's hard to remember exactly which flat green-capped tall mushroom I saw. I don't think that's a bad thing, since it was pretty fun, but I couldn't get too far.

I was terrible at this, but I enjoyed it!

The tilt was a bit wonky, I feel, and the "you got the right mushroom" sound seems a bit flat, but great idea, well executed.

Great idea! Mushroom detail control is a bit odd, but I know what a pain it is to implement good looking rotating by mouse :wink:. I love the level design though. However, quite difficult game for my brain after 3 days of coding :smile:.

Thanks @scolondev! If this was a 'real' game and not a 'jam' game, I probably would have tried to introduce features one at a time. i.e., first learn to memorize shapes, then cap variations, then stem variations, etc.

I originally had difficulty ramped easier, but I changed it so that every level always had +1 mushroom to memorize.

Thanks so much for your kind words @pincushion! I really enjoyed making the mushrooms.

Thanks for the feedback @christian-zommerfelds!

I didn't even consider adding a loading screen -although I'm aware the game is rubbish in the optimization department! I learned just enough about materials to be dangerous, but not enough to make anything optimized.

> The mechanics is not super captivating though

I originally planned on having you "rotate" around a fixed center (the tree), but ran out of time.

Thanks for the feedback @fromage.

Thanks for the feedback @karlo5o. I'm happy with my result, but it definitely feels like a "Jam" game. Given more time (and brain cells!) I would have loved to implement a more robust mushroom-rotation mechanic.

I loved your game btw! (link for the lazy: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/hector-the-apothecary)

Nice concept, even though I couldn't play the game farther than level 3 and didn't want to restart :) This idea could be used for some larger game in the future, good luck!

Also Right Mouse button and Left Mouse button swapped didn't feel logical to me, since Left Mouse button is "approve" and Right Mouse button is "decline" in most cases. I played 1.0.0 version, so I can judge fairly (maybe it's fixed in 1.0.1)

Thanks for the feedback @danmerey!

My reasoning for the mouse controls was that I didn't want a double-click to harvest a mushroom. In hindsight, maybe I should have used spacebar or something for the collection, and bind both mouse buttons to 'reject'.

@sirlich
> My reasoning for the mouse controls was that I didn’t want a double-click to harvest a mushroom. In hindsight, maybe I should have used spacebar or something for the collection, and bind both mouse buttons to ‘reject’.

I think the best would be Left Mouse for picking the mushroom and accepting it as well (and the right mouse for rejecting). But only if you don't want to use buttons. Buttons would be much better solution tbh :)

@danmerey By 'buttons' do you mean HUD-space UI? like the 'Continue' button in the preview level?

@sirlich
> By ‘buttons’ do you mean HUD-space UI? like the ‘Continue’ button in the preview level?

Yeah, UI buttons. So when you click on mushroom you get 2 buttons under the mushroom (Pick / Reject), green and red one. Probably with icons, but it's not that important. It would be much easier for player to understand – and you don't have to think every time what button on the mouse to use (remembering there the left / right, reading the hints on 2 different sides of a screen etc.)

Love the idea ! I feel like there is a good concept to explore with that. The game is fun to play and has some challenges. Congrats !

Thanks @jonqs! I think if I were to do the game outside of a jam setting, I would definitely need to add a timed element, and probably player walk-controls to keep them engaged.

A good idea and its challenging!

i was expecting to have to explore the world to find mushrooms but even with that not being the case it was a very aesthetic game with a nice vibe. I never got past level 5 however because the difficulty was quite high.

Good to see someone else making a mushroom identification game!

I like needing to look underneath the mushroom as well and the mix of textures, its just enough variety in the mushroom that its a challenge to identify them.

I like the take of it being in a 3d environment, although it made it a little bit cumbersome to inspect the mushrooms at the beginning. It would also be good to have better lighting in all areas of the game to make spotting mushrooms at a glance easier, as it is the game feels pretty murky.

The game is very challenging with how the difficulty ramps up. It might be good to gradually increase the variety of mushrooms you can find, with them varying on more and more characteristics as time went on.

Really interested in this so when it was complaining about my graphics card not supporting vulkan and to try running with opengl drivers I decided to do that with a console command './midnight_harvest.console.exe --rendering-driver opengl3' which gets it to launch and continue button to appear along with some UI but doesn't work beyond that :( Seems like it does actually do something that requires Vulkan.

A super simple and fun little game idea. I like the visuals. It gets very difficult pretty fast, but I like the idea, and I had fun trying the game.

I am so impressed with this game! At first, I had some trouble getting it to run because of a Vulkan error, but after updating my drivers I was able to play it. I was expecting it to be a card match type game, but I am so glad it was something different. The idea of using a procedural graphics generation system to drive the gameplay is so unique and I can see it having a lot of potential for other types of games as well (you read a book to get the info about 3 mushrooms for a healing potion, then forage and cook up a potion.... then pray you didn't make a mistake). The audio was okay, it didn't detract from the game but it also didn't add anything. The game was very challenging, even when cheating (always take photos of mushrooms folks, it's never a good idea to take chances with potentially poisonous culinary delights), I couldn't get through every round. Overall, great job on this game and I look forward to seeing more from you in the future.


Thank you so much @hitchh1k3r! Especially since you had to update your drivers and everything.

Outside of a jam context, it would definitely be cool to play around with other gameplay loops -such as having the mushroom *described* to you rather than seeing a reference. Also more interesting movement mechanics, like exploring a spooky forest (first person) to find them.

I suppose you could even extend the gameplay by having other 'collectables' (like flowers, herbs, whatever).

At first I didn't know that I had to click on the "shadow" mushroom but instead I thought it was loading the game ^^U Other than that cool entry though I suck at memorizing! xD

I really enjoyed this! The gameplay is simple but the depth of things to remember when it came to the ways the mushrooms could vary was a nice balance of not too little not too much. Literally my only real complaint is with the way the mushrooms are positioned on memorisation screen, it took me a while to even spot the first one and realise I had to click on it because it was so poorly lit and in the distance, having them closer to the camera would make them easier to see. Well done!

I like the mushroom model and the atmosphere of the game, it is more like a test of memory game, unfortunately my memory is not that strong, which makes the game much more difficult, if you can add some new maps and music in the future would be better, looking forward to future updates!

:mushroom: :mushroom: :mushroom: :mushroom: :mushroom: :mushroom: :mushroom: :mushroom:

more seriously i wish there where more mushrooms if you just went all in on the mushrooms it would have been top mood

Fun concept! Nice application of the theme into an enjoyable (if not challenging) game. Started having trouble remembering everything around level 6-7 haha. The randomized mushrooms were well done as was the scene where they are growing.