Love the non zombie survival! Good music too

Fast-paced, manic, and tense are not adjectives I thought I'd ever apply to a harvest moon lookalike. The combat/survival is excellently balanced such that I'm constantly trying to click somewhere and do something. Music's solid as well. Great work.

Nitpicks:
-it's not immediately obvious how to gather wheat/drink water.
-The screen size/resolution is hard to see on larger monitors
-if you don't plant something immediately, you're liable to start starving before any wheat reaches maturity. A day's leeway would have been nice (some food in crates/hunger is slowed for a day)
-After a couple of days, food stops being an issue and you're free to focus on combat, only occasionally dealing with farming or drinking. Since you're not constantly discarding your weapon, the combat becomes a whole lot easier and the enemy waves don't increase in strength at a proportional rate.

So ambitious for a compo entry, it's kinda terrifying. There's clearly a lot more depth here than I can get to at this time of night... I spent most of the first day drinking water wondering what was going on, then things ate all my crops until I starved to death. Deserves another longer look I think!

pretty cool game, view was kind of jittery but everything else was pretty good :)

I love the music and the artstyle, it feels so good to shot the gun, the controls take a while to get used too. but overall i love it!

Love the art style, and the game in so in depth.

I am NOT cut out to be farmer. Or at least some super-starved, demon-surrounded, can't grow seeds worth shit farmer.

Great game! Love the visuals, music was great if a bit repetitive. Reminded me of Diablo I oddly enough. You even had a day-night cycle! Kudos!

I bow to you, master!

Very solid, but the small scale makes managing your stuff very messy.
A further ammo/food mechanic and enemy progression would likely add more depth.

Brilliant! My favorite entry so far by far, I love the big chunky pixel art style, and the audio is fantastic too.

The controls are nice and intuitive, took me only 30 seconds to figure out how to play. Got to day 15 or something \o/

Cute art style ... but those poor, helpless bunnies! Camera can be shaky at times but this was really well made, awesome job!

I am not particularly good at the game but the aesthetic is amazing. So many cool and interesting features such as the day/night cycle. The music and art are fantastic.

Nice features. All of the multitasking makes me feel like I'm developing a game again.

Honestly my favourite game of the entire event so far. Great work!

Surprisingly fun and fast-paced. Love the art, the sound and music is moody. Died quickly in my first run but ended up surviving perpetually (?) on my second. The scrolling was very jittery, which was a bit irritating.

Great game really well done graphics, music and gameplay

Extremely good concept! Everything about it is pretty great, except the controls were hard to get used to.

I ended up playing this some more the day after first trying it (really compelling game) and survived for 30 days:
I moved my farming operation to the river for easier water access, but after a couple of days there my gun despawned when I threw it in the corner of the river. Normally it bounced off, but the one time it just vanished leaving me defenseless.

Other than that, if you just implement a couple of minor fixes post-LD this would be pretty much a perfect game:
-pathfinding needs to be improved
-add a piece of food or two in the crates so the player has a moment to figure out the controls
-resizable window
-make it easier to find the hoe and gun among the farm, visually. I usually ended up having to pixelhunt until the prompt came up.

It feels like you spent a lot of time balancing this game! At least I hope even you cannot bang out such a balance with the first try. It's a hard game, but things seem to be happening at well defined times. Just as I plant my first crops, the first rats appear, which I can kill just before they eat my stuff.

Just as I started to starve, the first wheat was ready for harvesting.

I've also never seen a game before where you had to survive but the "enemies" were not even trying to kill you. They just want to survive, too, but in the process hurt and eventually kill you.

The art style is pretty cool and unique rxi style, built on top of some of your earlier games. I like the constant evolution. The color palette reminds me of those old photographs of farms during harvest time. No idea what you call that, but you hit it on the head with this brownish-green tint. Very nice indeed!

I have two tiny suggestions, if you care to hear them:
On a 1080p screen, the window is fairly small. You might want to add an option to chose the scaling factor.
The music is great and the melody and arrangement fit the game, but compared to the rest of the game, it may be a bit too hi-fi. I know that sounds silly, but a slightly more lo-fi, chiptuny music might have improved this game even further.

Anyway, that's just nitpicking. In fact, I think you should further develop this game, add more features and even sell it? I'd pay for it!

one thing I forgot to mention; the lack of a mouse lock was really frustrating. I clicked outside the window a ton.

man, I really liked this game. The graphics, sound, music, idea, all were super great. Nice work!

I would love to see a second gamemode where it's more relaxed [peaceful / creative mode] where I can just spend my leisure time planting and eating, with no horrible creatures killing me haha, but I think what you presented was the better choice for a jam game. Hope you continue with this!

Super fun, and a perfect little ludum dare game, 5 stars! :)

phew

Game was initially difficult to get into. Basically, nothing is clear in the beginning, but once you give it time, some viable (essential?) strategies become clear.

On my first playthrough, I died before I even realized where the seeds were (in hindsight it's "obvious" though). Second time didn't go well. Third time went alright, and fourth time really quite well.

Once you get into it, the gameplay is extremely hectic, which is fun, but there are some minor points which I think could be adressed to make the game even more enjoyable:
1. the tiles are extremely small. The graphics are really beautiful, but when you have to do stuff in specific places (plant, till, pick up) it's kind of a problem. I was basically just frantically left/right clicking in a tiny clump of items and hoping that I selected/used the right thing in the right place. It turned out well in the end though I suppose.

2. the carryable items are a little too similarly colored. Once or twice I actually lost an item among the rest, visually. Lose the gun and you're gonna have a bad time when you're being assaulted by multitudes of wild animals. It also turned out well in the end however, but I think this is the kind of thing where, if you mess up your playthrough for this reason, you don't feel like it's fair. Stopping to look around is often not an option in this game.

Also, while the music is nice, it doesn't really feel like "ingame" music.

So, besides that huge text up there, I actually feel (as usual) the game is great. Nice graphics, nice sounds, and there's something very satisfying about relatively deep gameplay (given the time constraints) based on simple rules (simple inputs, simple relationships between the items ingame).

Loved it ! Too bad I'm getting an error pretty soon. :)
I will definitly play it again !

Pros:
This game is awesome and impressive for 48 hours. The pixel art is really fun to look at. The main character is dope. The animation is superb. Better than most by far. The movement of the camera and the physics are really good too.

Cons:
The game was overly difficult. I couldn't figure out how to craft the bread in time to survive. Also there doesn't appear to be a way to restart from the game over screen. A little more info on the title page would be good, maybe more instructions. I think the scale of the game took away from the details. It has a lot of potential with some fine tuning.

Had fun, it was hectic, but fun.

Couple suggestions, your controls were probably one of the hardest things about the game (for as far as I got), because I would always throw the hoe, or would try to pick up something while I wasn't standing on it. A couple ways to fix this would just make it so you don't have to aim to pick things up, just press e to pick up whatever you are above. Not sure of other methods, but I know there are some and that could improve the game a lot.

Your colors were a bit cluttered feeling, and I have a feeling that may either be a style thing (and I just don't like the style) or a color palette choice. Maybe different colors for tiles and pick ups. Your fourth screenshot and the wheat are a good example of what I am seeing.

Bug fix would be to prevent the water from eating your gun, or make it so you had to fish it out again. This is especially important since you throw your gun rather than set it down so its much easier to accidentally throw in the drink.

I really enjoyed the fact that the enemies (save the zombie) were not fighting you, but your crops. Maybe in a a post-compo version (which I think you should consider pursuing) you could make it so if you made fences, some animals would come and hurt your fences while doing non-destructive things, or in general portray the feeling of you against nature rather than you against fighting things.

Agreed with the other people, more leeway is needed in the beginning, while it would be good for a hard mode, its not great for a LD game where everyone are novices. I think the idea of putting bread or wheat in crates is a good idea, because it doesn't have lasting implications for the game (where as making wheat grow faster or your hunger go down slower would change the rest of the game).

You were saying things on IRC or somewhere about the ideas you had for your game including traders and whatnot. I think that is a good idea, and think this game has a lot of potential. I really want to see where you go with this in the future.
Wanting to see a full game

Oh, and forgot to mention your music. You were getting pretty annoyed at LMMS, but I think you pulled the music off really well for being in such an annoying unfamiliar environment. Kept to your style and was interesting and dynamic. In playing it I didn't think the music was a weak element at all, so good job working around that annoyance.

Oh man, I couldn't grow something before dying of starvation! Darned vermits!

Great concept :) As others said, a little time before starving would be great so I have time to grasp the controls initially, and the ability to resize everything to be a bit bigger would be nice.

But overall, good job.

Awesome work!

I love the pixelart graphics, they look really nice! The music is really fiting and sets the mood really good.

Unfortunately I died on the third day of hunger. If you start without any explanation and need to figure out what to do by yourself, time gets really short (I could only harvest one single wheat, before I died). The enemies are a nice addition!

Well done!

This game deserve to continue to be develop, for real !

Can't raise any crops :/ I liked the graphics, though.

Nice idea!
Had to rewatch the video to understand how to plant seeds :-)

The camera feels a bit jittery and some of the more important objects (shotgun, hoe, etc) blend in with the environment too much to be noticeable at the start of the game.

Other than that, the graphics were really cute (always as expected from you, rxi!) and the music was very moodsetting as well.

It's an interesting take on the survival genre and the atmosphere is great. I kept dying but this game is good at sucking you in again :D

Like rnlf said I also think the viewport is kinda small for 1080p displays but it isn't bad enough to get distracting.

Do you use some specific engine to make these games or do you start from scratch each time? This and your last game have really similar physics/camera movement.

Pretty neat entry, good job. :)

Very nice game. Love the art style, the music and sound fits really well. And the survival works which makes for an overall kickass game :) Love the way you throw everything around

Looks really good! The controls are a bit weird. I would've preferred if I automatically pickup the item I'm standing next to, or that I walk to the item when I click on it.

Anyway, besides the controls the game is pretty solid. Though after a day or 7 (ingame), you've kind of seen it all and it doesn't seem to get much harder. But besides that, I really liked it. Great job!

This is brilliant! I loved EVERYTHING in it. Great job as always!

really nice entry. it's very stressful to operate though

I have LUA installed on my machine, which seems to be causing runtime errors when I try to launch the windows executable, any ideas? :S

This is the stderr.txt dump:
error: [string "init.lua"]:221: module 'config' not found:
no field package.preload['config']
no file 'd:\development\Lua\5.1\lua\config.luac'
no file 'config/init.lua'
no file '.\config.dll'
no file 'D:\games\ld34\ld34_rxi_win32\config.dll'
no file 'D:\games\ld34\ld34_rxi_win32\loadall.dll'

Really cool art and atmosphere but I couldn't really get the hang of it; those rabbits kept destroying my plants and I couldn't fend them off faster than they were multiplying. I really did think it was cool though and I remember blipseq from you which was equally neat.

Loved it. Probably my third favorite. What a gem.

All the resource management got too much for me that I starved irl. So addictive!

Very cool. I like the song. I starved to death. :(

A great game as always, rxi. I love the art and music, even though I know you're not happy with the bird and rat yourself. I think it all looks pretty great though, espcially because of the animations. The day/night cycle is also very cool.

I like the song and I think it fits the game quite well. I feel variations on it for the intro / end screens would be a nice addition to make the player more willing to have another go, but I understand there's little time for such things in the short 48 hours of the compo. If you do want to continue working on it, maybe some kind of audio signal (variation in the song? sfx? I dont know) for when enemies are approaching / eating your crops would also be a nice touch.

The game itself is fairly difficult, but I like that it's something different for a change. The game is quite a challenging balancing act, having to try to keep so many variables in check. How are my crops doing? Where is my gun? Am I thirsty? It's a little too much to handle, which is perfect. Having less to do would make for quite a boring experience, but having too much to do would feel impossible. I think it's balanced quite well!

Practising with the touchpad yesterday helped I think, because playing with a mouse today resulted in surviving for 7 days on my first try (I couldn't manage more than 4 on my laptop).

I agree with some of the comments about the controls, they could be improved. But the most problems I had myself was with the direction in which I throw my gun or hoe when I want to put it away. It always ended up in the middle of the field for me, instead of on the side, haha.

All in all a solid entry! One of the most fun games I played this LD :)

I played 5 runs I think:

The first I didn't understand anything and died from thirst or something.

The second I've managed to saw some seeds, died from hunger before anything happened with them

The third & fourth I was putting my fields where it is in your screenshots, that put me in a great position to have all my crops eaten. ded again :(

The fifth I decided to put my field near the water where I can drink without going far. One side effect was alos that I had less fronts to worry about, the other was that pathing got a bit bad and that's what happened:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/204076271/rxi2.png
(usually it was slightly better, that's an all time record of stuck enemies)
Also seen in the picture (day 28) is my agricultural empire (I stocked enough wheat for a famine or two).
Originally I wasn't so far in the corner (as I said, only one front was covered, but I gradually moved there as the game continued).
Seeing that I could continue pretty much indefinitely, I went and killed everything I could find on the screen, saw that I can still defend and eat ok and shut the game down.

Graphics are the classic rxi style we all love.
The sounds are great, could be nice to add a munching sound for when they eat your stuff. At first I thought music was superb, but it got very repetitive by day 12 or something similar (did I mention I got to day 28 yet? that means a month if it's february!).

As to the gameplay itself it's remarkably cool. Having to keep all the stuff huddled together and then frantically throwing lots of wheat into the air searching for your gun are a definite highlight.

As I couldn't really read the text because I was busy surviving (and since it's really spammy), the "day #" caption could be a static score on the screen.

Anyway, marvellous job!

I really love this game. It's pretty hard at first but you get used to the mechanics after a bit. Graphics and feel are top notch.

Loved it! This would make a perfect mobile farmer.

Very good game! Loved the apocalyptic mood!

Extremely well executed. I had some problems with the farming, but overall - superb!

Amazing. Best game I've played yet. Has more potential than most as well, I'm thinking growing trees for wood and fences, ammo constraints and you have to explore. Towards the end I stopped farming and just ate reserves, in days 7-11. Surprisingly intense and action packed for a farming game.

Also, what did you use to make this? I've been looking for something new and might mod it.

very challenging game, great artwork!

I'm onto you! You didn't use path finding for the AI, I'd recommend adding a quick patch to make them move sideways a little in a random direction if they haven't gotten closer to the player after some time. But awesome game never the less!

Great take on the theme, a bit slow and confusing, but once you get the hang of the controls and how everything works, becomes a pretty neat little game! Would love to see a expanded post-LD version of this.

Great mood as always, really liked the audio. I found this one quick difficult I have to say. Took me a while to figure out how the eat the wheat (twice I staved to death amongst a field of fully grown wheat!)
It was good and frantic once I figured it out though. Really nice polished little game

awesome little game, I was enjoying it until it throw me an error :( anyways, it is very creative, love the small pixel graphics, the cool concept, the sound was fitting and the controls are smooth, well done :)

so far one of my favorite game in this jam.

Fast-paced farming, interesting idea, works quite well, but i couldn't figure out how to harvest my crops and died of starvation. Great concept, though!

Interesting game. Very cool interface.

I like the simplicity of the survival mechanics, and how they all hinge on whether or not you can keep your wheat growing. The atmosphere and pacing work well to convey a sense of desperation.

Comments above have gone into greater detail about the mechanics, but I'll bring up my greatest gripe. I didn't like that I had to be standing right next to an object to pick it up. With point-and-click controls my expectation is that my character would move withing range of the item and pick it up automatically. So I wasted a lot of clicks being just slightly out of range. The pace of the game means that a bad click at the wrong time means death.

solid game - would have been nice to have some more lead up time before the critters come and take everything - great game

Sweet stuff! Gets really hard though, never before have I hated rabbits this much :P

Wow, pretty rad for a compo, it's almost basically complete. So kudos just on that alone :)

The gun to the crate thing wasn't immediately obvious. Also why can't you just throw the crate to smash it open?

The screen size is TINY leading to it being difficult to see and control. Especially since you have to click precisely on the item. I feel like the pickup shouldn't have to be precise control, you should be able to hit a pickup button to pickup the nearest thing (perhaps highlight the nearest interactable thing at all time)

Okay this isn't for the compo, but post compo you'll need more variety, but I don't think that'd be hard.

Can't believe you made Nuclear Throne Harvest Moon for LD :)

OMG this game is awesome good job bro :3.

Man, I am so depressed now.. Very cool game - found the grab/use mechanic a bit tricky at first (kinda assumed for some reason that you just walked over what you wanted to use then clicked RMB, as opposed to mousing over the object). I didn't survive for long! :)

Nice survival! Good music. The game keeps the tension. Excellent mood!

I got an error. Here's the stdout.txt:

Error:
.\lib/coil.lua:83: .\rxi/rect.lua:176: attempt to index local 'r' (a nil value)

stack traceback:
[string "init.lua"]:33: in function <[string "init.lua"]:30>
[C]: in function 'routine'
.\lib/coil.lua:83: in function 'update'
.\rxi/entity.lua:589: in function 'update'
.\rat.lua:72: in function <.\rat.lua:71>
.\lib/lume.lua:231: in function 'each'
.\rxi/group.lua:71: in function <.\rxi/group.lua:67>
.\lib/lume.lua:231: in function 'each'
.\rxi/group.lua:71: in function 'update'
.\playstate.lua:260: in function 'update'
.\rxi/game.lua:86: in function 'update'
.\main.lua:37: in function 'call'
[string "init.lua"]:77: in function <[string "init.lua"]:72>
[C]: in function 'xpcall'
[string "init.lua"]:86: in function <[string "init.lua"]:85>

rxi, i always love your stuff. :-) the camera was insessantly shakey and annoying. The rest, the music, the look, the feel, the items, the enemies, the panic, the crazyness, the surpise of OH I NEED WATER AAAAA WHERE IS THE WELL WHERE WHERE WHERE OH THERE IS NO Well. i'm going to diiiiee oh wait THERE"S A LAKE. *runs to lake* how do i drink how how drop the gun AAAHhhhhhhhhhh. *goes back to tending crops.* that's my experience. Cheers.

Pssst - you are featured in today's Ludum Dare to Believe! Check it out - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdfLy2MjNRs

Really hectic gameplay, but I managed to grow some crops. The gun can easily get lost between all those seeds and wheat. I'm not sure if there is anything more to it, I just let myself get killed after 6 days.

Fun game. Felt limited by the controls, but otherwise this was very solid and well-polished. Especially loved the art style.

Sorry but this game was unfun to me. Control was confusing to me that I ended up with clicking a wrong button a lot. I wished I could use a keyboard for picking/using items. When multiple items are placed at a close place, it's hard to see or handle them. Also the scrolling was jarring me that drains me quickly. It was a painful experience overall.

Very nicely polished game, lacking maybe some tutorial steps. The biggest problem for me is that it gets too easy / boring very soon. Maybe introduce additional enemies or obstacles? Force the player to move on elsewhere (though then you'd have to have some sort of inventory as well, or maybe a vehicle). Anyway, very well done!

Really amazing work as usual! The graphics were phenomenal and the audio was really nice. I felt like the gameplay was a little bit too fast paced for the core mechanics - juggling items felt frustrating to me. I also got really sad when I slipped up once and all my crops got eaten. I really want to play a more chilled out version of this!
Still, had a lot of fun! Great work!

Very nice graphics, very well made! I included it in my Ludum Dare 34 compilation video series, if you’d like to check it out :) https://youtu.be/jZIKMICuSkI

The file for the game doesn't seem to exist anymore, but I found it archived here: https://web-beta.archive.org/web/*/https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/36451301/ld/ld34/ld34_rxi_win32.zip