So, it is finally over...

Farm Fortress 2

This was a bit of a convoluted weekend (moreso than an usual LD), I had basically only 1.5 day's worth of uptime for the weekend. Ended up having to submit the game for the Jam instead, even though I made the game all by myself (including art).

But anyways, it was an interesting take. I decided on remaking one of my old LD titles, all the way from #28 (sadly the host is deceased so you can't play it anymore, but the screenshots and jam page is still up). Here it is, included for your convenience:

The original Farm Fortress, from 2013

I took the core idea of a "semi-idle farming strategy tower defense", already present in the old game, and expanded it for a more interesting mechanic - multiple resources and production chains. I also wanted to expand the visuals and make it an overall more polished game, considering I wouldn't have to spend as much time prototyping as the original.

Original Gameplay

In the original, you would click a tile, and according to what was there, you could build a few different things. For example, on grass you can build foundations or till the land. On tilled land, you can water it, while foundations can be bought into buildings (towers and farms).

Each of those upgrades costs gold, which you gain whenever a crop grows. This original version had a lot of manual clicking to re-water and seed till spots.

Your income would be multiplied by the number of farms in the map.

In addition to this, to provide some challenge, enemies would sporadically attack you, possibly destroying your buildings. For that, towers had to be built to provide defenses.

Revised Gameplay

Gold has been split into multiple resources, and now each building consumes and produces some resource as part of its function. This adds a bit more depth as now you must match the impedance of your farm empire to ensure the best throughput.

Building placement has been reworked to move away from tiles, mainly because I thought they looked terrible. It also simplified implementation of the actual placement logic.

To still keep you engaged after setting up a nice loop, some buildings must be collected manually once their production is gone, before they go to your stockpile.

Due to time constraints I had to remove the building upgrades, but hopefully the resource split kind of fills the mechanical gap.

Polishing

This time around I spent a lot of time making sure the UI is reasonable, the game's presentation is clear and understandable, and overall finish up the game. The AI is comparatively much better, it will always unstuck itself if it reaches a dead end. The ingame UI shows all the information you need to play the game (I did not, however, manage to implement a tutorial screen).

There are still some glaring bugs, but overall I am personally very satisfied with this evolution.

Thank you for reading! If you haven't already, go play the game!