Harveeps by Raivk
HARVEEPS
Huh. Is this another farming game for Ludum Dare 52?
NOPE!
Is it Tetris? Nope...
Is it a Sudoku? Nope.
Is it a farming game? Nope!
It's HARVEEPS! Aliens are invading Earth... But YOU are the aliens, so it's fine!
A game about playing aliens that are harvesting humans (conveniently named "happeeps") by forming crop circles.
Crop circles, crop circles everywhere!
Hapeeps are hiding in their wheat fields. But it's no use against you marvellous technology.
You will be given shapes that you can use to draw crop circles in the fields, efficiently abducting the happeeps located where you're aiming.
Be wary though, as harvested lands will summon angry humans (angreeps). These pesky angreeps will launch their fork at you to try stopping your invasion.
Take your time and choose wisely.
When completing a line / column or one of the big 9-tiles blocks, you will reset the zone, removing any angreeps contained in it. And it will restore the fields, so more happeeps will be able to appear. That's nice, huh!
The more harvested tiles are on screen, the more likely angreeps will spawn. Choose wisely where you harvest!
CONTROLS
Click on things to do things.
And you can press R or use the mouse scrollwheel to rotate your currently selected shape.
IT'S HARVESTING TIME!
I'M A USELESS PIECE OF TEXT!
AUDIO / GRAPHICS / VFX : THOMAS LEBRUN (Raivk)
DEVELOPER : ANATOLE CHAUMONT FRELET (CharlieTU)
DEVELOPER : JEAN-CHRISTOPHE JOUBIER (eFrag)
DEVELOPER : JULIA MARINELLI (Donhadryel)
UI : CAMILA SUAREZ (Soulmakaira)
Together we're Teagher Studio : Teagher Studio




| Link | https://teagher.itch.io/harveeps |
| Link | https://teagher.itch.io/harveeps |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/harveeps |
Ratings
| Overall | 10th | 4.404⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 35th | 4.154⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 6th | 4.462⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 77th | 4.25⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 113th | 4.25⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 41th | 4.096⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 267th | 3.25⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 151th | 3.896⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 23🗳️ | 19🗨️ |

The input was very laggy for me on web + Firefox? A few times I tried to place a shape in one place but accidentally put it somewhere else because my click registered late.
The HTML version uses WebGL2. I only tested the build before publishing on the browser "Brave" (which uses chromium), and it looked fine to me, we'll make sure to test the build on Firefox soon.
In the meantime, if you want to give it another try, i suggest using a chromium based browser (like Chrome or Opera) 🙂
For the laggy inputs, we put the placement of a shape when the key is released, not when it's pressed, maybe this is what's causing an issue, we'll also investigate this asap !
Thanks again for your feedback, and have a nice day !
This is my first game I've played since the rating period opened, and what a high note to start with. Excellent work across the board!
Took one playthrough to understand what you're supposed to do. I like it :smile:
I, too, settled into the 3x3 meta that @titos2k mentioned. I'm thinking of game mechanics that would incentivize going for rows/columns -- maybe a bomb angreep that lasts for 5 turns and instantly kills you if allowed to live that long? I think there's a lot of room to expand this concept, possibly even into a full game.
Great work and good luck on the jam!
There are bigger combos, but these are WAY harder to do. Max is x8 combo, but good luck for this one!
Whatever, we're glad you enjoyed our game!
F Pressers pay you respect
F Pressers pay you respect
@optimist455 It turns out you can :) The WebGL build *should* run on *most* mobile devices...
The concept of mixing sudoku and tetris is really nice, and works well!
All the arts is blending nicely together.
Good work on that game, one of my favourite!
After the first play through I understood what was going on and decided to play it through one more time.
That being said, there is a ton of richness in this game.
### Game theoretic stuff I noticed
This game is strongly amenable to game theoretic analysis. I didn't play big enough to try and get a bonus, but my general strategy was just to kill as many angreeps as possible. Angreeps are the *only* thing that end the game for you, and as long as you're killing Angreeps, you're able to collect points.
On my first play-through I noticed that getting big fat slabs of lines was 100% not worth it. It leaves way too many spawn points open for Angreeps as you build up the chunk. So my second approach was this:
1. On a Happeep-only screen, pick a block that can be placed wholly inside *one* 3x3 square that grabs as many Happeeps as possible
2. On subsequent plays, use new blocks as efficiently as possible to clear out the 3x3 square that was adulterated in step 1
- If you can collect during Happeeps during this time, then great, if not, then no worries. The idea is to get rid of places where Angreeps can spawn
3. Once the entire map is clear of crop circles, go back to step #1.
In most cases (I didn't do the math) it seems like it's most advantageous to only work on clearing out your 3x3 square. E.g. don't use a cheeky final piece to clear out the 3x3 square **and** capture nearby Happeeps - it's nearly never worth it. If you clear out the 3x3 without touching other squares.

Like in this picture. I've got one Angreep in the bottom-left 3x3 cell. Instead of trying to "build" a crop circle toward the nearest Happeep, I'm just going to clear out the bottom-left 3x3 cell.

Now that the bottom-left 3x3 cell is cleared out, I'm free to grab as many Happeeps as I can by adding a crop circle to one 3x3 cell.
### Other things I liked
1. This game is fantastically feature complete and blessedly free of bugs
2. The pixel art is very very nice
3. The audio is just what I'd expect from this kind of game - not too fast, not too slow, but set at a steady pace that doesn't induce anxiety
4. The effects from little things like rotating blocks or the Angreeps throwing things at the health bar is endearing and shows how much care and effort went into making this game
I am extremely proud of this score, I wonder if anyone else had any different strategies?

These are really valuable feedback and you're an absolute rockstar for taking the time to redact it this way. We are taking all of this into account for our futur games!
For the strategies, yeah the safe 3x3 strat is one way to survive as long as possible. It howevers builds up score really slowly. Combos are here to counter this. You can get extremely high scores quickly by playing risky and clearing multiple lines + multiple blocks all at once. @donhadryel from our dev team managed to get 15K by triggering a x8 combo. Here's a picture of the combo.

However, this is a risky strategy and such a high combo leaves you with so few health points that you won't be able to survive long after that. But combining risky plays and the 3x3 safe strategy could lead to much higher score, I guess. Here's the score @donhadryel did by dying a few turns after the huge combo shown before.

Thanks again for you valuable feedback, and thanks everyone for the kind comments! We are so happy to see people have fun with our tiny game.
Thank you @kevin-barrios for the comment!
i mean, where to go first? the gameplay is a really good idea and combination of non figurative genres, i really love it. art is on point, sprites and animations are nice, sound is catchy.
~~to be honest the only downside to me is to have to click on the rotate button to rotate. if the rotation could be like with RMB, that'd save a little bit of time and feel good too i think.~~ edit: nevermind you can use scroll wheel to do that
but overall, excellent game, one of my favorites so far!!!

So just 1 complaint and 1 advice :3... The complaint is that by the way the game is balanced ,and i might be wrong here of course, it seems that its best to just go around in squares. Cleaning one by one so that you dont receve too much damage while getting score. So the multiple cleans at the same time usually arent worth the health you lose. So finding a balance fix for that would be great, maybe healing if the player destroys more rows/squares at the same time?
And for the advice, maybe add a scoreboard in the comment section its not much but for the competitive people its a great motivation to try hard a bit more! :))
Other than than, great and i really really loved it!
@amarokczukay Glad you find out about the scroll wheel shortcut :)
@kikiriki367 Yup, there are definetly improvements to me made about the overall balance of the game...
At some point during the jam, we did consider adding "healing" mechanics : such as a reward for doing combos and having special 'peeps' spawning that would heal you when you clear them. There were also ideas about special enemies that would block the rotation system, or 'nerf' the draw system (ie you draw less pieces).
But yeah balancing the game without those was already long enough for our jam time (we did not have much time to work on it the last day...)
However, this would definetly be a feature if we end up making a post jam update, just like the leaderboard ;)
The NPCs reacting to newly-placed blocks is really cool, and I love how much depth you've designed around the scoring system. There are also some really nice quality-of-life features like being able to either click the Rotate button, or press 'R', or even use mousewheel to rotate - that was really intuitive and I found and appreciated that right away. The tension between collecting humans and not leaving too many crop circles on the board at one time is great and always keeps you thinking a few steps ahead. Your whole team should be really proud of what you guys accomplished here!
Gameplay was innovative, using tetris blocks in clearing instead of filling and doing combos. I played several times trying to find best tactics between clearing lines and squares.
All in all good balanced entry! Nice touch with the quotes in statistics screen btw.
