Game Maker's Toolkit Jam

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A jam submission

Berry FarmView game page

Short arcade about planting and harvesting berries. Made for GMTK Jam, July 2017

Submitted by chionic — 12 hours, 8 minutes before the deadline

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Berry Farm's itch.io page

Results

Criteria	Rank	Score*	Raw Score
Feel	#209	3.182	3.182
Overall	#283	3.091	3.091
Innovation	#331	2.818	2.818
Aesthetics	#372	2.636	2.636
Theme	#385	2.545	2.545

Ranked from 11 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

How does your submission match the theme?
Berry Farm is a compact game that requires only the mouse to be played. The player plants and harvests berries to earn money. They can make the berries into seeds to make more berries or sell the berries for money to pay off a loan at the end of each week. The player can also buy more land to plant more berries more quickly. The game starts off slowly but becomes a frantic clicking game after a few minutes.

Third-party resources
Icon made by http://www.flaticon.com/authors/eucalyp Eucalyp from http://www.flaticon.com/ is licensed by http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ CC 3.0 BY
Icon made by http://www.flaticon.com/authors/madebyoliver Madebyoliver from http://www.flaticon.com/ is licensed by http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ CC 3.0 BY
https://freesound.org/s/144422/
https://freesound.org/s/393910/
https://freesound.org/s/384362/
https://freesound.org/s/335906/
https://freesound.org/s/321656/
https://freesound.org/s/239098/
https://freesound.org/s/208102/
https://freesound.org/s/191379/
https://freesound.org/s/144422/
Unity Game Engine 2D 5 personal edition
Gimp
Aseprite
Protools

Contributors
chionic
Olegkuv

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Comments

Jupiter_Hadley7 years ago

Cute game! I included it in my Game Maker Toolkit’s Game Jam compilation video series, if you’d like to take a look. :)

chionicDeveloper7 years ago(+1)

Thank you for the feedback and comments :) We're working on releasing an updated version that gives focus to just the relaxing elements (or just the frantic elements) depending on game mode/difficulty

Curtis Turpin7 years ago

This game felt very unique from many of the other entries, and it even started off very relaxing. However, as the end of the 1st week came and all throughout the 2nd week, it just felt like one giant wack-a-mole game. To make this game feel it's absolute best, I would slow everything down, the time it takes for plants to need water, the length of the week. However, I think if you left the amount of time it takes for a plant to wither the same, or maybe just a few seconds longer, and changed everything else, it would feel a lot better. I think the best "feel" for this game would be relaxing, yet slightly punishing. Even with a slower game, it would still be really easy to overlook 1-3 plants when a bunch of them go dry/grow fruit at the same time. And you could always adjust prices to match the speed of the game. Overall, I enjoyed the experience until it just felt like a hectic wack-a-mole. But good job making a game! :D

olegkuv7 years ago

Thanks, we will experiment with it some more, maybe add a way to choose how fastpaced you want it to be. :)

Olegkuv.

randomphantomSubmitted7 years ago

Think the mechanic wasn't very clearly communicated through the graphics (although understandably it was 48 hrs) and it wasn't intuitive that the berry needed watering every time the ground went light brown, even when it was in a single day (don't think plants die immediately if you don't water them multiple times a day). Once I got the hang of it though, it was a pretty fun frantic game of clicking. Agree that the relaxing BGM felt kind of out of place. Nice sound effects and game loop!

Submitted

chionicDeveloper7 years ago

Thank you very much for the feedback. Do you think a tutorial including the graphics of each stage of the plant would help in showing the player when it needs to be watered?

JunoStrikerSubmitted7 years ago

That was... surprisingly addictive! That gameplay loop kept me hooked for far longer than I'd like to admit! I like how we can decide how fast or slow to farm by choosing to sell or harvest the goods, leading to this balancing act of having enough plants growing, but not too many at once... At one point, the calm music certainly didn't fit the frantic clicking I was doing! You have a gem on your hands, even though it doesn't quite fit the theme! Good job!

Submitted

olegkuv7 years ago

Thank you! We will keep working on it ;)

KahzteinSubmitted7 years ago

This is quite a nice little game. It felt a bit slow paced at the beginning but it picked up the pace and was actually quite fun! I'm not entirely sure if this game fits the theme that well but that's alright. Overall good job!

olegkuv7 years ago

Thank you, any suggestions on getting rid of the slow paced start (especially on repeated playthroughs)?

Olegkuv.

KahzteinSubmitted7 years ago

I guess the best suggestion I can give is adding some form of preparation for the chaos that might ensue later. Perhaps having things such as sprinklers and auto-seed planters which could become fairly important later on. Also giving them their own issues such as the sprinkler needing to be watered multiple times, and the auto-seed planters needing to be reseeded.

However that's just off the top of my head, I'm sure by testing a few different ideas you could come up with an even better method.

Good luck! :)

narfolomewSubmitted7 years ago

I certainly wasn't expecting that from a farming game! I'm happy with what I got, though, as I have a short attention span. I found it amusing how the music quickly begins to sound completely out of place as the action heats up. It would be interesting if it dynamically changed to keep pace with the gameplay, although obviously that isn't something easily achievable in a jam setting.

I wanted to experiment with keeping every plant's growth synced for more efficient harvests, and had just cleared out my whole field in preparation when the game abruptly declared that I had won. Slightly disappointing...

Submitted

olegkuv7 years ago

Thanks for the feedback, since the day/night cycle is fixed, i could probably add music that gets more intense as the game goes on without having weird fades or music cutting off.on the you win, im considering adding an endless mode (with no loan repayments), on that note: were the loans you had to repay a important point to how you developed your farm? im trying to figure out how key the loan system is to the game, and if it would be better to just have and ever increasing field with no win (or loose) condition, apart from all your plants rotting.

Thanks you very much for the feedback.

Olegkuv.

narfolomewSubmitted7 years ago

I didn't personally have any trouble hitting the loan targets, but they were enough of a perceived threat early on that I didn't feel comfortable fully expanding right away.

I think you need some sort of ongoing goal to work towards to maintain at least a semblance of strategy, and the loan payments were perfectly adequate for that in a game jam scope. I was mostly surprised it wasn't already endless with an ever-increasing loan target.

olegkuv7 years ago

We are definitely considering endless mode, but i feel like the loans will be hard to balance since they cant be linear (x+2000 for example), they have to take into account the exponential expansion that happens especially in the early part of the game.