CVC Presents: Roberto Farmermun's Horrific Planting Adventure 2023 by David Mason

[raw]
made by David Mason for Ludum Dare 52 (JAM)

Team.png You are Roberto Farmermun recent purchaser of an allotment. You naively thought you could make a quick buck from selling veg from your land, but turns out it takes a while for stuff to grow. So decide to borrow some radiated heavy water from your local nuclear waste dump to speed up the growing process. It has some interesting side effects, but the plants grow quicker at least.

Game loop: Hold space to dig earth, hold space to plant seeds and hold shift water them to grow crops (potato and corn). You will need to contiue to water the crop until it is fully grown. Weeds can grow on dug earth, weeds can be dug up by holding space.

Kill the crop with left click for melee and right click for ranged (only weedkiller damages at the moment). Killing a crop will give you food, with the amount depending on the crop. Weeds will also grow, killing weeds will not give any food.

Food acts as health and currency. At night you will need to buy new seeds, fatigue, water, weedkiller and ensure you still have enough food as health to survive.

Doing actions uses fatigue, if you run out of fatigue you will become slower and less effective.

Tutorial<em>1.png Tutorial</em>2.png

Controls: Left Click: Attack Right Click: Ranged attack Hold space: Dig / Plant (hold until the ground has changed) Hold shift: Water (only works when water selected) Q: Switch between weedkiller and water ranged attack E: Switch between potato and corn seeds.

Tutorial3.png Tutorial<em>4.png Tutorial</em>5.png

Main menu.png Pixels is a 2015 science fiction comedy film[3][6] directed by Chris Columbus, written by Tim Herlihy and Timothy Dowling, and produced by Columbus, Adam Sandler, Allen Covert, and Mark Radcliffe.[5] Based on the 2010 short film of the same name by Patrick Jean, the film stars Sandler, Kevin James, Michelle Monaghan, Peter Dinklage, Josh Gad, and Brian Cox. Combining computer-animated video game characters and visual effects, the film follows an alien race misinterpreting video feeds of classic arcade games as a declaration of war, resulting in them invading Earth using technology inspired by 1980s games such as Pac-Man, Space Invaders, Arkanoid, Galaga, Centipede and Donkey Kong. To counter the invasion, the United States hires former arcade champions to lead the planet's defense. Principal photography on the film began on May 28, 2014, in Toronto; filming was completed in three months.

Itch page contains a post jam updated version.

The update contains:

Added extra UI to make it more clear to the player what they are doing, the plants now have health bars and a bar shows how far through the digging and planting. Soil and plant details are now displayed in the top right of the screen and the day number is shown in the bottom right.

Basic sound effects have been added.

Some balancing has been done, however it is still very much not well balanced.

Ratings

Overall 816th 2.417⭐ 20🧑‍⚖️
Fun 817th 2.056⭐ 20🧑‍⚖️
Innovation 740th 2.583⭐ 20🧑‍⚖️
Theme 270th 3.917⭐ 20🧑‍⚖️
Graphics 645th 2.944⭐ 20🧑‍⚖️
Audio 453th 2.722⭐ 20🧑‍⚖️
Humor 450th 2.778⭐ 20🧑‍⚖️
Mood 768th 2.5⭐ 20🧑‍⚖️
Given 56🗳️ 10🗨️

Feedback

FullHeartGames
10. Jan 2023 · 05:35 UTC
Wish there was a little more direction, I was not sure what many of the between day buffs did. Really like the art and the music was relazing!
🎤 David Mason
10. Jan 2023 · 07:53 UTC
@fullheartgames apologies we haven't finished writing the description yet.
MangoWorks
11. Jan 2023 · 16:40 UTC
i did not understand the game at first but when i did it was fun
TildeCat
15. Jan 2023 · 10:17 UTC
Oh, very interesting gameplay idea! I like pixel art visualization.
Marton
15. Jan 2023 · 10:20 UTC
Why did you copy paste the Pixel movie's Wikipedia article to the game description? Is this a weird inside joke of yours? :D
PuttPuttTheTruck
15. Jan 2023 · 10:23 UTC
Really hard to understand, I reckon the game could benefit a lot from an in game tutorial.
Most of the time my digging, planting, and watering wasn't doing anything :(
Really nice sprite animation though
🎤 David Mason
15. Jan 2023 · 10:25 UTC
@marton See previous games for detail.
🎤 David Mason
15. Jan 2023 · 10:27 UTC
@puttputtthetruck Thanks for your comment. I think if we we're to do a post-jam build other than balancing, a tutorial would be the main thing we would work on.
Marton
15. Jan 2023 · 10:28 UTC
It is a very well done and feature rich game, I think that the control and all the things feel smooth. What would make it much better, if you added a pause menu with tutorial and made the days a bit longer in the beginning at least, so that it is not so stressful :D I feel like I do one thing and the day is over. Really nice job in the art as well! :v:
Martta
15. Jan 2023 · 10:46 UTC
This game was a rough ride. The learning curve was rather steep and I had to go back to the tutorial few times in order to understand what was going on. I think you should have made the game much, much simpler (or at least if you care about good scores, which are arguably irrelevant compared to the artistic process). I would have removed the different kind of attacks and plants (what was the point of them anyways?). I think there also is little to no need to ranged + melee attack, so melee attack could also be stripped away. If you would have tried to do less complex game, maybe you could have polished it little bit more. There were also lacking sound effects, which made me sad. :(

I also agree that the day was too short for a game this complex, I was unable to figure out how to get more money/energy/health.

With this game, less would have been more. The game has impressive number of features though and it is always more fun to add more features rather than polish and fix the existing ones.
🎤 David Mason
15. Jan 2023 · 11:06 UTC
@martta thanks for the comment, we made all the features we thought that would be required for the idea we had. I don't think in this case stripping anything away would make it better. But I agree it's not balanced and that we should have spent more time on that. We had fun making it and we're mostly happy with the end product, which is more important than the scores.
Andy-Link
15. Jan 2023 · 21:12 UTC
I have to admit that I wasn't able to really get the game, the days pass crazy fast and I get kill so fast haha! It took me some times to understand that I need to keep press the spacebar a few sec for the action to get done. But I really like the reference to "Christina's World" ;)
amarokczukay
16. Jan 2023 · 13:03 UTC
it was a bit hard to understand what i was doing, and the lack of feedback during the fights made me wonder if i touched the enemies or not. maybe you wanted to do a bit more than what you can do in a jam, but it's totally ok to me!

oh and i really liked the art style of the sprites and animations are nice!
Harmadillo
16. Jan 2023 · 19:21 UTC
I liked the art style but the game mechanics were a bit confusing. The short days made experimenting with the gameplay more difficult.
Unentokku
17. Jan 2023 · 22:21 UTC
Days are super fast! Art is nice. Combat feels weird.
givit-game-studios
18. Jan 2023 · 07:02 UTC
i really love the art well done.
Better Half
19. Jan 2023 · 23:46 UTC
That felt... really confusing. Sprites seemed to pop up at random, and I felt like I had no way to fight off the evil plant. Did the shovel do any damage? (the shovel animation was cool tho).

All in all, Roberto felt incredibly relatable.
Stone Pacifier
21. Jan 2023 · 03:20 UTC
That was difficult. But I can see the game is there and just needed gameplay tweaks like time duration of the day. We had that issue with our game and had no time to tweak/balance the gameplay by the end of the jam.

Music and visuals are great here. There is some innovation here as well. Good take on theme. Music kind of has a country meets post rock vibe I like it.