The Gardener by GullynGames

Oh no! Interest rates are rising, and you can't pay your mortgage!
Those pesky debt collectors are going to take your house!
You do have gardening skills - maybe those will help?
Controls:
- WASD: movement
- mouse: to select tiles, build, etc.
Tips:
- There isn't a way to kill debt collectors yourself - you have to build turrets.
- Onions are rare and can only be found quite far away from the house.
- Onions also cannot be planted.
- Enemies come every day at midnight.
Music generated by aiva.ai
| Link | https://github.com/gullyn/ld50 |
| Link | https://gullyn.github.io/ld50 |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/the-gardener |
Ratings
| Overall | 823th | 3.438⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 600th | 3.457⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 803th | 3.196⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 919th | 3.457⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 1120th | 2.957⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 470th | 3.318⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 975th | 3.217⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 18🗳️ | 13🗨️ |
Edit: You fit procedual generation in there?!?! I am really impressed with what you managed to do for this game. Good job.
A couple of your design decisions that I though were really nice:
- Being able to restock your veggie turrets!
- Using the day/night cycle as a timing mechanism. This made it easier for me to gauge how much time I had between waves via the lighting level on the screen. I think I prefer this to a timer that I need to glance at!
I do think having the harvest option be one-click would eliminate a lot of fatigue. Or, maybe give the option to harvest with SPACE if you're close enough?
Overall, I really enjoyed your game. You managed to accomplish a lot in a short amount of time, and create a pretty complete experience, too. Nice job!
Shooting debt collector with vegetables because of mortgage, why nobody thought about that plot before ? It's fun and serious at the same time.
There are many types of terrain, enemies, resources and turrets. That's a fair quantity of game contents, which deserves more polished graphics. I guess you had no time to do more, but the plain squares representing grass, sand, water and rocks are really too bad.
There is a little annoying glitch : the tile just below a resource is empty, but is not passable. Sometimes I thought I could go between those two rocks, and not. I had to harvest them to pass through.
There is another glitch around the house. Some tiles looks empty, however we can't build or plant on it.
Unpassable zones are a good idea. You should add in the map some dense resource patches, to force the player to harvest them to pass throug. Also, you could circle an onion zone with dense resources. So that we would have more a feeling of accomplishment when we manage to reach these precious onions.
UI could be improved in some ways :
I was expecting a selected tile to be deselected when I reclick on it, but it does not work. The only way I found to have no tile selected is to click on a resource tile, then harvest. When I'm exploring or thinking about turret placement strategy, I feel better when no tile is selected (call me weird if you want).
As @Itskdog said : only one click on a resource should be required to harvest it.
Executing a new harvest should be blocked while a harvesting is currently being done. When I'm harvesting my dozen potato tiles, I often miss some of them, because I execute my harvests too rapidly.
Overall, a really nice and complete game, which gave me a great moment of fun. Maybe you should continue working on it !
Cool Concept, well executed, and somewhat fun.
My Only problems being the menus being long, and drawn-out, making progressing a bit annoying.
You move quite a bit too fast though, which feels weird, and it feels clunky harvesting resources, having to move the mouse to click a "harvest button", which is unnecessary since there is no other use of the resources anyway.
Otherwise, nice work!
