Aggroculture by primitive-concept

[raw]
made by primitive-concept for LD 41 (JAM)

Combines a Gradius-style shooter with a farming sim!

Shoot things to gather points in order to ascend to Elder Godhood -- but it'll take a while if you just kill thing. Better idea: Grow plants, water them with the blood of your enemies (or your own), and harvest the essence from them? Could work.

Controls: Movement: WASD or arrow keys Shoot primary weapon: Left click or spacebar Use selected item: Right click or E Select another item: Mouse wheel, square brackets, or Q Activate highlighted powerup: Middle mouse button or F

Shoot enemies to gather seeds and Ascension points. Each time you gather ascension points, a marker on your powerup bar (lower right) will increment. Use the highlighted powerup to increase your speed or primary weapon. Warning: If you die, you loose all your powerups.

Seeds can be planted in the ground (or enemies) by selecting them and then throwing them. Once planeted, you have to water them for them to grow! Do this by either killing a nearby enemy around that block, or go up to it and water it yourself by selecting your Blood item and activating it (Warning: Your blood is a limited resource -- use it all, and you'll die, because of course you would). You'll know your seed is watered if the block it's on turns reddish.

After each day, plants will grow if they've been watered. Keep watering them each day until they reach their peak growth (takes about three days), then harvest them by shooting them with your primary weapon for a much greater source of Ascension points!

Or you could just keep killing enemies. It's slower, but probably more fun. Reach 1000 Ascension points, and at the end of the day, you'll become the newest member of the Elder God pantheon!

Ratings

Given 5🗳️ 1🗨️

Feedback

OccultOne
24. Apr 2018 · 05:34 UTC
Good job with the retro aesthetic, I always am a sucker for good pixel art. Audio was solid. I had a bit of trouble with the farming elements, but managed to figure it out in the end. I ascended to Eldergodhood, and proceeded to slumber in my tentaclepatch, waiting eons to be awoken and share my sanguine unknowable nightmares with the denizens of far off worlds.

Constructive Feedback: Maybe add a slight pitch randomization for some of the sound effects to make them vary a bit. I find Random.Range(0.9f,1.1f) gives a pretty good result. I'd love some onscreen prompts to help teach game mechanics.

Good job man!
shohs
25. Apr 2018 · 05:54 UTC
Pretty fun game! I liked that I could kill an enemy with a seed, then the next day more enemies would die by running into the plant :D

One small feeback I have is that the audio, although very moody, got pretty repetitive. It also wasn't very clear in-game what the switching power-up on the bottom meant (or maybe I'm just bad at reading instructions...)

Other than that, good job!
Axe
25. Apr 2018 · 05:55 UTC
I liked a lot of the basics of what you have going on here but the gameplay left me quite confused and i thought it was pretty bland after day 6.

maybe you could have the level be impossibly hard and you have to grow plants on your that eat your enemies? wither way super solid and didn't crash. visuals were a bit blurry for my liking but they fit the crunchy low fi style of music really well!
Sibi
25. Apr 2018 · 05:55 UTC
Cool concept! At first I was focusing too much on shooting the enemies. But once I realised that I only need them for resources the game became a lot more fun. The enemies were quite fast and small which made it a bit difficult and sometimes the hitboxes were a bit unforgiving. I mostly watered the plants with my own blood because otherwise I had to really be lucky for the enemies to get close. I would have liked more feedback on which plants are watered instead of just the slight change in shade.
But still a really cool game!
Solrun
25. Apr 2018 · 07:10 UTC
The idea that you replay the same level over and over, but it changes based on your previous runs is a cool idea. It was nice to fly by and see the plants that I had planted on the previous run. The main mechanics of the game take some getting used to. I didn't really realize the controls until a few days in when I remembered there were other buttons and started pressing stuff. The upgrades for the weapon feel a little bit off. The weapon you start with feels a little too slow. A lot of times I would miss an enemy by a hair and then not be able to maneuver into position and fire again before he killed me. The first upgrade fire rate felt better. The fire behind you felt pretty useless and then the triple fire felt way too powerful. I found a good strategy was to just get to the triple shot as soon as possible, then you could just sit in the middle of the screen and mash fire and kill everything. I would have like slightly faster attack speed for the base gun and just more enemies to kill. Maybe less spread on the triple fire so it doesn't cover the whole screen.

I think throwing down seeds and growing them with the blood of your enemies was a great idea. The only problem I had with that was how hard it was to water them. I found it rather difficult to kill the enemies over top of a specific plant (It also seemed like blood from enemies in the top half of the screen wouldn't drop to the seeds). Mostly I would just try to cover the entire floor in plants to have a higher chance to get one of them to grow. I think having like double the amount of enemy spawns might help that problem a bit.

I didn't find the speed upgrade or using my own blood to be very helpful. The speed upgrade just made me run into the floor and ceiling more, thereby killing myself. And the blood sacrifice was too great of a risk of accidentally killing yourself. Both of which lead you to go back to using the basic gun again. I think blood sacrifice may have been a bit better if you lost blood when hit, but didn't immediately die. Then you would have more of your blood being spilt and a little bit less punishment (losing your upgrades).

The pixel art is pretty nice. The blood splatter animation is pretty satisfying and the parallax effect on the background adds some depth to the background.

All in all, I think it's a cool idea and it was fun to play.