King of Veggies by LDJam user 274509
A minimalist arcade puzzler about harvesting cards.
How to play:
Drag cards from the right onto the board. When you plant a veggie next to another with the same number and type, you collect 1 from each in the matching group, which gives you points and reduces those cards by 1.

If you plant a veggie next to a watered border, the card's value increases by 1.

Basket cards are wild: you'll collect veggies from all adjacent groups matching its number, no matter their type.
Try to harvest as many veggies as possible before you run out of space!
Made for Ludum Dare #52 (harvest) by:
Knexator: programming Pinchazumos: game design Woffelson: sfx, music and extra pixel art
Most graphic assets made by Daniel Diggle
Thanks to the Paradise folks for their help and suggestions.
| Link | https://pinchazumos.itch.io/king-of-veggies |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/king-of-veggies |
Ratings
| Overall | 16th | 4.345⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 9th | 4.345⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 15th | 4.259⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 12th | 4.534⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 72th | 3.982⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 470th | 2.722⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 137th | 3.931⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 23🗳️ | 19🗨️ |
I feel like baskets shouldn't be tied to a number, they feel very restrictive and lifting that restriction would allow them to be a more reliable way to remove cards from the board again.
Drawing an "8" basket, when my highest number on the board is 6, feels like a very cruel joke.
Otherwise, very excellent!
art is lovely, sounds are very nice. i do also think it's very luck-dependent, but not to the point where it's crazy frustrating, something a balancing change could make better probably.
really great stuff :)
Edit: Managed to hit 188 but RNG killed me giving me 7s and 8s. Still, amazing game!
The game is really addictive. It got a 2048/Tetris kind of addiction. I'm not sure I can make a better compliment^^.
The sfx is brillant.
Good job !
It should be possible to build a completable deck of cards if you run the logic over the card deck.
Also could adjacent matching cards auto cascade or maybe the wildcard does not need a number match and will match to the most cards around it that have a matching number or the card it is dropped onto?
Do love pixel art :) and the card shake effects!
Good game had to play more times because you feel like you can do better every time . Before you know it your 20 min in.
I liked how the various mouseover sounds make up for the lack of a soundtrack :)
One thing that seems to be either a bug on the game or on the rules: it is stated that "If you plant a veggie next to a watered border, the card’s value increases by 1 for each side touching water", but this implies that on the top left corner the value would increase by 2 (as there's 2 sides touching water) but instead it only increases by one.
I know it's probably hard to define it properly but I wish there were some kind of chaining (for example, you plant a 3 near some 3s, then we reap those 3s and they become 2s; then if these 2s are touching *other* 2s, reap them and they become 1s, and so on)
Edit: forgot to screenshot but I just got a score of 152 :)
Okay now that that is out of the way...I liked the game it is fun the water making them higher value is a nice mechanic. The sound is fab. Love the pixel art. Yeah just the math thing. Also, space thing is only a problem if you don't want to have a "wall of doom" in your game if you want the player to lose at some point then it is fine. I personally find it a bit annoying if the game makes me lose but maybe that is just me.
All in all, a fun little game as long as you don't notice that probability is going to make you lose. Yip yap.
I too have made a minimalistic grid-based harvest puzzler that you might find a bit similar, but I went much more abstract.