Wasteland Orchard is an idle/roguelike game for Android and iOS, and will be a free game, using rewarded ads for monetization. It is now ready for beta testers! (See bottom of post)
Description
The world is a barren wasteland, ravaged by storms and radiation. Can you grow an orchard to rebuild civilization?
Select your desired resistances and fruit attributes as you cross-breed more trees and plant more seeds! Explore more of the procedurally generated map each run to gather more resources and trade with townsfolk.
Your trees in Wasteland Orchard continue growing while your away so check back daily to harvest, plant, build, and explore more of the world!
Gameplay
Wasteland Orchard is an idle farming game with roguelike elements. The goal is to survive progressively more-destructive storms as you expand and grow an orchard of trees. Choose which resistances and other attributes you want for your trees by cross-breeding trees and carefully selecting the best seeds. Time passes and trees continue to grow and produce fruit while you are away in typical idle game fashion, with the world map and game events being randomized every run.
The play-style is to check on your trees, harvest fruit, and expand your orchard once or twice or a few times a day if you like, making use of the refilling time-warp feature which lets you fast-forward time for a bit. With various gifts, restocked shops, new trade offers, new upgrades, and new animals arriving at your orchard I hope that the daily check is rewarding and interesting for the player.
Collect rare golden seeds to acquire permanent upgrades that persist through future runs.
To-Do
The core functionality is complete, although the game is missing a few features, like:
- Animals that can come live in your trees and provide passive items
- Rocks that block growing areas until you clear it with a bomb (and collect drops from the rock)
- Balance Tweaks during the beta testing process
- A healthy amount of polishing, like rearranging some UI elements, adding some animation tweens, and updating some art
Development Notes
Wasteland Orchard was a side project for me this summer as I was preoccupied with some IRL stuff (mainly moving to a new place). It was meant to be just a few months break from my main project Order of Athanor but in typical gamedev fashion ballooned a bit to be several months more than planned. -_-
As a small project, in order to save time and money I decided to take advantage of some of the high-quality assets for sale over at itch.io, choosing for example some of itchabop's work for a most of the UI, and various other creators for other art, music, and sfx. I still did a lot of my own edits but just purchasing some premade art is a great and affordable time-saver if you're cool with the non-exclusivity of it. It can be difficult to effectively make use of assets if you already have a game partially developed and are looking for similar art styles but starting fresh by exploring the asset stores and seeing what options are available and what game I could make with my favorite assets makes the process much easier. (Probably worth it's own post some day!)
Monetization will be primarily rewarded ads to double the player's rewards if they choose to watch an ad, as well as a store to buy some permanent upgrades like golden seeds to speed up game progress but not break the game. Overall pretty tame options, and I hope to provide a game that is still fun without watching any ads or paying money, but I think most players will happily watch an ad to double a reward that is particularly rare or important.
Beta Testing
The game is available for beta testing if you'd like to provide any feedback! You can contact me at dustinaux@gmail.com and tell me if you'd like to test the Android or iOS version and I'll be happy to let you try it out and add your name in the credits.
