Herogatchi by WiredOverload
Welcome to Herogatchi! The Hero collector, raising and harvesting game (patent pending).
Note: Please read these instructions! This game is a bit incomplete, and has no win condition. If you manage to encounter and defeat the dragon, consider yourself a winner!
How To Play
- Herogatchi boasts TWO types of game modes. The "Tamagotchi" mode and the "Explore" mode.
- In the Tamagotchi mode, players can care for their Herogatchi by training it, feeding it consumables and harvesting it! - In Explore mode, players have the choice of two areas to go explore: "Forest" and "Swamp." Here, players will control their Herogatchi in the battlefield defeating goblin and skeleton enemies attempting to collect as many item drops as possible before they are defeated. Once explore mode is over, you can feed your Herogatchi the item drops you've collected to get them nice and plump for the Harvest!
- The hero will evolve and change weapons based on what items it is given. For example, feeding your hero lots of meat will result in the spear weapon being chosen. To start off with, the hero is given a random weapon.
- Once the hero is a high enough level, HARVEST them to take their stats.
Controls
- In Tamagotchi mode you can use the Z, X, and C keys to navigate the menus or click the lower 3 buttons.
- In Explore mode, arrow keys control the character, X performs a dodge roll, and C attacks.


Watch out for the dragon!

Credits
- @Alchemic: Programming
- @WiredOverload: Tamagotchi
- @Gizmolo: Art & SFX
This game was built with Godot, Aseprite, Blender, JSFXR and Lovely Composer.
Post-submission Updates (critical bugfixes only)
Provided for maximum transparency. Please take into consideration when voting.
| Link | https://github.com/WiredOverload/HeroHarvest |
| Link | https://alchemical.itch.io/herogatchi |
| Link | https://alchemical.itch.io/herogatchi |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/herogatchi |
Ratings
| Overall | 545th | 3.286⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 528th | 3.161⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 80th | 3.893⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 781th | 2.621⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 436th | 3.554⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 429th | 2.875⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 418th | 2.865⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 569th | 3.148⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 45🗳️ | 51🗨️ |
Early on I did find fighting outside the tamogachi mode difficult, it may be good to have a way to easy players into these fights to learn the controls better.
The bow was good, the staff seemed very slow. I understand that it hits more enemies, but by the time it fires I already need to run again, so my blast goes wide anyway.
Music is nice, chill. Pixel art heroes look cute :)

i think its cool if you wanted to implement a faithful recreation of tamagotchi, but for me personally, i think making that part of the game simpler would have been better. i understand tamagotchi is a sort of long-form experience, so its hard to adapt to a 5 minute game jam experience, but maybe something more like Hades, heheh, where you spend a bit of time upgrading / reconfiguring, then going back out to the fight.
Innovation: I found this game idea really unique and innovative. I love the idea of raising a hero and then doing little RPG dungeons with it. Very cool! One area you could continue to innovate in is the combat system, dodging and attacking are pretty common ideas so maybe try and include some of the Tamagotchi elements like happiness and hunger in the combat system (maybe as buffs?) to change it up a little.
Graphics: Both the Tamagotchi and Exploration graphics were cute and nicely done. I would've liked to see a more consistent style, or some consistent elements between the two however.
Audio: I didn't have any sound for the Tamagotchi section, so adding some simple button press noises would really improve that part of the game! For Exploration, the song melody was nice, but on the WebGL build it sounded very loud and distorted, which too away from the experience.
Loved the different characters! Nice work!
@tobius Hey thanks for playing! Those are all really good ideas that I'll bring up in our next post jam meeting :) Consistency of aesthetics between the two modes is great advice, we definitely had 2 different artists going at it - so we did what we could. We actually did have audio for the Tamagotchi section but couldn't get it in due to time constraints :(
@chase-of-bass Thanks so much for playing and for your kind words! :)
@lomby I watched your whole playthrough and I was dying laughing at a few spots haha! Impressed you were able to power up your Herogatchi strong enough to beat the dragon! Don't know if anyone else has done it yet. Also you encountered a few things we want to resolve in the post-jam version. For sure dodge roll shouldn't be impacted the way it currently is by raising agility, and there needs to be more clarity around stats and how your Herogatchi is improving. Also, at one point you referred to the game as "Hero Harvest" which is interesting because that was our original name for the game! We ended up changing it to "Herogatchi" during the submission window at the last second lol. Your "compendium" idea at the 6:11:40 mark is really thoughtful and that may just be something we have to implement! Thanks again for taking the time to play and giving us such good feedback! Cheers :beer:

Nailed it:
- The progression feels good. Especially when I force-feed my wizard enough books to reach level 20 and could shoot fireballs like a machine gun.
- The character art is all really nice, especially for the player characters.
- The environments are also very nice. I particularly liked the water and tombstones in the swamp.
- You nailed the Tamagotchi aesthetic with the goofy little animations (I'm particularly fond of the little ballet movement for agility training)
- You got a good amount of scope into the game --- the Tamagotchi minigames, the wave system, melee and ranged enemies, two different areas, a "boss", and three player characters that feel different. Impressive!
Room for improvement:
- I didn't really "get" the progression system at first, even after reading all the descriptions (I thought feeding your hero had immediate benefits in Explore mode). An in-game tutorial or help would have been nice, but you already had a pretty massive scope without it and game jams are always really tight on time.
- Certain parts were a little tedious. I think feeding the hero had some randomness in how long it took to feed, based on the position of the hero and the position of the food, and with an unlucky roll it was a little extreme haha.
- The "2D sprites in a 3D world" look is hard to get right. I think it might help wed the characters and environment better if you went all-in on 3D (like Ten Seconds to Midnight) or had higher-resolution 2D characters (like Paper Mario). That said, you played to your team's strengths and this still looks great for a game jam!
Overall, nice work for 72 hours! Looking forward to seeing what you guys make for next event.
I laughed to myself when I accidentally rolled off of the level, only the pits in the middle of the level seem to have invisible guard rails.