Thanks for checking out and writing an extensive comment!

I absolutely agree tutorial/story/progression is missing. I just didn't have time. I had to cut so much planned stuff and I barely managed to finish the "main loop" (buy seeds, plant, extract, sell) in time.

and I think there's a way to communicate that kind of tutorial outside of a wiki page in the description

I didn't quite understand the statement. Did you mean I can write "mission list" on the game page as a "jam hotfix"?

I would like to see the YouTube shorts version of what it looks like to be really good at this game

At this stage it's too early to make videos about being really good at the game, since there are so many "big" components missing (upgrades, (on-map)shops, research, multiple drones). And even stronger statement: you can't be really good at the game yet, because the drone still misses a key component: camera. The idea is that drones should be able to see some tiles around them, and you could write map-agnostic algorithm, which would explore map and choose locations on its own (instead of using predefined ones).

I don't thing there is a fixed correct complexity level. Different people prefer different genres and complexities.

Thanks! How far in the game did you get?

Thanks! How much did you play?

Thanks! How much did you play?

I was unable to figure out how to output to the console

You do that with:

console.log(obj)
console.warn(3456)
console.error('qwer')

It will output in your browser console (not in-game console). There are some commented out debug console.log's in the starter code.

so I could see what types of seeds were available for purchase

Oh ... it's actually my oversight not to mention available items. I'll update the docs.

it was fun to try things like setting drone.inventory.money to billions of dollars

I had to make a special "view-component" for every component of the drone. I think the system should be safe, but I am not entirely sure as I was rushing.

I also think that leaderboards (perhaps dollars per second) would be perfect

Leaderboard would be cool, but quite low on a priority list. A few top priority things would be:

• Camera component
• Plants spreading onto nearby tiles
• Tutorial, story, progression
• Several drones
• Upgrades
• More UI
• TypeScript
• etc.

Oh, I had to cut so much!

Thanks for putting in the effort and I'm glad you had fun. Have you made any screenshots of your game?

True, game will take quite some time to understand :D

I know it's not a simple game. Do you have any questions I can help you with?

Thanks for nice words! How far did you manage to get?

This must have been a great effort to pull it out in just 3 days

I was actually busy significant portion of the first day, so I probably only had about ~2.3 days and yeah I was working non-stop (no food, only 3 hours of sleep the last night), barely managed to fit in the critical stuff (selling, planting, plant growth) had TypeScript compilation errors, which I managed to fix before the original deadline, but then had it not working on Itch, which took ~30 minutes out of the extended deadline to solve (turns out Vite by default assumes your site will be hosted at "root.domain", but Itch hosts at "root.domain/some/url").

but making a game that you play with javascript is on another level!

This is actually the simple part and one of the reasons I chose JavaScript: you just do `eval()` 😅 (with a bit of extra stuff to export necessary functions).
But for each part of the drone (like "Motor") I had to program the corresponding view-object (MotorView), which would only give you access to things you are supposed to have access to (you shouldn't just be able to change drone `position` arbitrarily, you should only be able to control its `force` and then once again - this `force` is capped, you shouldn't be able to set arbitrarily large values).

Thanks for sharing!

That's absolutely how it needs to be, but I didn't have time. Next priorities were to:

• Make plants spread into nearby tiles
• Add "camera" to the bot (so it could see the nearby tiles)
• Create Campaign=Story=Tutorial

Although, now that I think about it, tutorial should have been the #1 on the list.

Thanks for playing and I'm glad you liked it!

I really really like, that you can generate and edit your own world.

For most of the development I was actually planning to hide this functionality for end-player, but decided there is really not much reason to and just grouped it under "Map Gen" to take less space.

How far did you get?

Thanks for checking out!

but what would make it even better is if you implemented blockly

That's a really cool suggestion! I definitely don't want to get rid of "raw" JavaScript, as the real drone programs are expected to get quite complex (286 lines in the current starter code already 😅). But Blocky generates JavaScript code so it might fit in. Thanks:)

I had the idea to have some sort of "visual scripting" in game, but didn't have time to research available options or even to incorporate any.

Thanks! I subscribe to "make the games you want to play".

How far did you get?

I actually didn't know about "Dward Fortress" before (although I heard a name a couple of times). I hate console graphics, so I guess I'd wait for the Steam release.

My loose inspiration was https://timon-1.itch.io/farmdrone (largely unfinished at the moment). Half of automation genre seems completely unexplored:

• We have many games about automating building production (e.g. Factorio, Satisfactory and others), but
• No (or few?) games about automating behaviors

It was something I wanted to try regardless and the theme just happened to match perfectly. I was short on time, so ended up cutting a lot of content. Most notably, drone has no "camera" which would allow for fully automated farming with landscape consideration.

Given the theme, I hoped there would be more games in these genre, but I have only found one another one so far: https://kypello.itch.io/semi-automated-shipping-company

I chose JavaScript because of its easy "eval()"😅 and it being a decent language (unlike, say, Lua). I actually wanted to incorporate TypeScript, but didn't have the time to figure out how to embed it properly.

C# also has built-in functionality to compile C# code, but I am not sure it would be as simple to incorporate if I were to make this whole thing in Unity.

Thanks for playing and I'm glad you liked it! How far did you get?

Thanks for playing!

How far did you get?