It’s done! After a brief crisis towards the end, it’s a relief to see that it all turned out okay.
There’s a lot more that I wanted to do with this (mainly gameplay and audio-wise), but I suppose that’s normal for a Ludum Dare entry!
Hopefully everyone’s doing great with their own entries, both compo and jam.
I had some trouble getting things exported (I'm not used to HTML5 projects), but the game is up and working! The entry page is here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/crop-circle and the game itself is here: https://rulrite.itch.io/crop-circle
Good luck to everyone finishing up their jam entries!
It's been a a couple of days, now, so I thought I'd write up a post-mortem based on comments and criticisms of my game so far. There are a couple of things I'd change if I had the chance to redo it!
Perhaps the biggest issue I encountered in designing/developing this game were the controls, and deciding what the player should and shouldn’t be able to do. Players seem to be a little overwhelmed by the control scheme at first (and tend not to use the slow-down option at all, which I can understand), so I would refactor this if given an opportunity. Perhaps a one-button control scheme would be better, especially if I wanted to port the game to Android devices. I also toyed with the idea of allowing players to change direction when they like, and I think it’s an avenue worth exploring. Maybe two player characters could be a solution: one who can expand their radius, and another who can reverse their direction.
I should note that I failed to map the speed up and slow down commands to the arrow keys, meaning that you can only really control your speed with a mouse plugged in. This was a bit of an oversight, especially as someone who mainly uses a trackpad!
To better ease players into the gameplay, I’d like to introduce elements a little more slowly - and maybe even slow down the game speed as a whole. There is a small period at the start of the game in which powerups cannot spawn, but clearly this wasn’t enough. It’d have to be a careful balance, though, as a lengthy ‘introduction’ period would quash any potential for replayability. I think it’s important to maintain that arcade-y, straight-into-the-action quality and not risk hindering the pace of the game just to make room for new players.
A possible solution to the immediate difficulty is the reintroduction of a scrapped concept: separate fields with A) different vegetables to harvest and B) different gameplay timings and tweaks. The corn field could be a very basic, ‘starter’ field; a pumpkin field could introduce new powerups/hay bales to bounce from; a tomato field could focus on high levels of pesticide, etc. As well as offering separate difficulty settings via each field, the gameplay changes could be enough to increase replayability - especially with separate high scores, of course. They’d also allow scrapped items to make meaningful appearances (e.g. scarecrows would have acted like hay bales, but without the bonus crop collection).
Many players have described the game as ‘chaotic’, with ‘a lot going on’ - or, perhaps, just too much to keep track of. If adjusting the rate of powerup appearances didn’t do enough to fix this issue, I think a simple remedy would be to reduce the size of the field from 9x9 tiles to 7x7 tiles (essentially zooming in the camera and giving each tile more space to breathe). Some people have mentioned a lack of contrast between gameplay elements (such as the player character) and the playfield, which I agree with. I’d hoped that I’d done enough to make each tile distinct and not too confusing for the eyes, but I’ll chalk this criticism up to my lack of experience with the chosen palette. It’d be interesting to try experimenting with outline styles for certain objects - I had worried that white would be too distracting, but it may be worth revisiting. Maybe just cutting the number of browns for the soil from 3 to 2 would help to force it into the background.
An easy improvement to make would be to introduce actual hitboxes to each item. Aside from the hitbox used for the player character (or, more accurately, the player character’s tractor beam), each other object tests collisions against its sprite. This was helpful in saving time for the jam entry, but it ended up making collisions feel oh-so-slightly wonky. Many have said that the pesticide hitbox is too big (which it is, factually!), and I personally think that the hitboxes for hay bales are much too small. In an improved version/remake of this game, it would be nice to solve these issues alongside a proper implementation of layering: currently, some objects may appear to be in front of or behind other objects when they shouldn’t (again, I didn’t have enough time to fix it).
Lastly, I just want to give a big thank you to everyone who has taken the time to play Crop Circle. I’m overwhelmed by the response!