Little Friends by bearcage

The Game
Your little friends want to nurture and feed their seed, but they need your help!
Guide them to collect the tastiest berries and avoid the not-so-little not-so-friendly locals.
Controls
We used an RTS-inspired control scheme — think Warcraft or Command and Conquer.
- Left click to select
- Left click and drag to multi-select
- Right click to command the little guys around
- WASD/Arrows to pan the camera
- Middle mouse and drag to pan the camera harder (accidentally ignores bounds checks, oops)
Notes
Something seems to be off with the mouse in the embedded version of the game on ldjam.com. Please try the web player or one of the native links below instead!
The jam submission was build 2024.10.07.073
Licensed Content Credits
Each piece of licensed content is listed below, with attribution in the form requested (if requested) or generically otherwise.
- Godot Game Engine (MIT): http://godotengine.org
- Little Friends, Environments, Objects:
- Sprite Lands Premium (licenses/sproutlands.txt): Assets From Sprout Lands By Cup Nooble
- Hungry Things:
- Momo Mama Sprites (licenses/momo-mama.txt): by chiecola https://chiecola.itch.io
- Main Theme (CC0): Napping on a Cloud by congusbongus https://opengameart.org/content/napping-on-a-cloud
- Victory (CC0): Victory by celestialghost8 https://opengameart.org/content/victory
- SFX (UNLICENSE): Synthesized with: jsfxr by DrPetter, Eric Fredricksen, and Chris McCormick at https://sfxr.me
Ratings
| Overall | 528th | 3.571⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 704th | 3.214⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 500th | 3.357⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 162th | 4.143⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 444th | 3.2⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 423th | 3.65⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 10🗳️ | 23🗨️ |
It wasn't immediately clear to me how the reclassing mechanic worked. Originally I thought it was tending to the flower with a pitchwork. XD
There's a lot to love here. The overall mood is very nice and the little friends are adorable.
However, the game was a bit hard to understand at first. It took me a good while to figure out how to turn my units into axe men. There was no indication that the flower was interactable. Also, I think a minimap would help a lot. The view is kinda small and I got lost quite a few times after panning the camera too far away from the base. The vastness of the level was also problematic sometimes when I would hear one of my units get eaten but I would have no idea where that happened.
Once I figured out the main mechanics of the game I found the winning strategy to be using single units to lure the bad guys into spots where they would get stuck and then just roam freely with my workers. :grin:
The game also crashed for me once after cutting down the first big tree. Dunno really what happened. Everything froze except the music kept playing. :shrug:
Since you decided to use third party sound it would have been nice to have a few more audio tracks, but the one you went with was still good.
A few bugs(?):
- When selecting units it was confusing that the rectangular area that appears is the actual selection area, but the circles around the units would pop up outside of that area, making me think they were selected
- You can send one unit off to lure all the monsters to a corner where they're too big to follow, pretty much removing them from the game since they will never change focus.
- I think simply fixing this would have ruined the game for me, since it already took quite a lot of the same gameplay to harvest everything and win the game, and avoiding the monsters the way things currently are would have probably been pretty boring/tedious. I also liked that I was able to leverage my tiny size to outsmart the monsters, it added depth to the game's implementation of the theme.
- Camera pan interrupted me a few times in the middle of monster-luring. It thankfully didn't get my luring unit killed but was still jarring. I'm going to botch this description but maybe instead of freezing the game and moving your camera it should pop up a camera view taking up a minimap-size portion of the screen showing the growth with an arrow pointing to your base
- Things got a bit laggy (I'm on Firefox/Linux with an RX570) towards the end. Not really something I can complain about for a jam game but you might find it helpful to know you were pushing your engine limits.
Other than that, nice work! This was a fun game.