Harvest Golem by NotExplosive
Harvest Golem: A Farming Deck-builder
One hundred years since the Calamity a lone Harvest Golem awakens in the wasteland. Its mission is etched into its Pumpkin-flesh mind: "Restore this forgotten Wasteland."
How to Play
Click on a tile to interact with it. Once a tile is tilled and watered you can select a crop to place there. Crops have special abilities and behaviors, so be strategic about where you place your crops!
FAQ
I don't understand the tutorial... How do I play?
The following spells out the mechanics for people who didn't quite get it at first (I don't blame you! it's really hard to tutorialize a game jam game)
- You can only plant crops on watered soil. Soil can store up to 3 "waters." Using your watering can fills all 3.
- When a crop grows, it drains one "water" from the soil.
- Crops have special behavior when adjacent (or not adjacent) to other crops. For instance, Collard gains you 5 energy if you plant something next to it. This leads to interesting combos and synergies.
- You can "Sleep" when you run out of possible actions.
- Harvesting Beets puts new cards in your Discard pile, so next time you shuffle your deck you'll get access to them.
How do I win?
- The end cutscene is triggered by fully growing a Pumpkin, which you gain by harvesting a Kohlrabi and then sleeping. Growing a Pumpkin requires you to plant crops next to it.
- Fully restoring the Wasteland should be considered a win condition, but nothing triggers when that happens. Sorry!
- If you've reached the point where you can afford a Kohlrabi, you've seen most of the game.
Why is that capitalized/spelled that way?
- I maed a fwe typos, oops.
| Link | https://notexplosive.itch.io/ld51 |
| Link | https://github.com/notexplosive/ld51 |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/51/harvest-golem |
Ratings
| Overall | 56th | 4.167⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 12th | 4.354⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 64th | 4.083⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 1029th | 3.065⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 482th | 3.771⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 124th | 3.957⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 477th | 3.023⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 276th | 3.771⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 21🗳️ | 28🗨️ |
1) An ultimate I'm trying to build towards. Like an ultimate plant i am trying to build towards. (or a final boss)
2) a way to remove cards from my deck. that way I can have a more focused build.
3) maybe a turn limit per day. It feels kind of wierd that I have to play all of my cards every day.
Watermelom + Carrots + Spinach gang.
There is a goal you're working towards, it just isn't very well explained:
If you get a Kohlrabi and harvest it, you'll get a Pumpkin seed. Once you grow the Pumpkin (through disposing cards) you trigger the end cutscene.
You can also play like @samkee00 and have your goal be to restore the world to 100%. Which is what the introduction hints that you're supposed to do. D'oh!
It was really fun... until I found myself softlocked with a pumpkin and then did some quick maths and went "oh no, I don't have that kind of time today".
I was at first thinking of tabbing out but when I was out of the screen it was still holding onto my mouse so I would have had to just stop using my computer for 10,000 x 7 seconds. :sob:
The music was absolutely amazing though. My partner, walking by, laughed at how I was just merrily head bopping while enjoying the game.
I'm trying to think of the "room for growth" comment and the only thing I can think of is that the top left corner popup is in the way of me seeing my tiles. Minor issue cause I didn't get to the point I needed to use it but there you go, constructive feedback.
Overall though, seriously well done. I would love to see this game developed more. Thank you.
I think I can disable the mouse being picked up while the window is out of focus/minimized (I noticed that too while I was developing it! very annoying!). I'll look into that for the post-jam build.
@ursagames Would you say you :sunglasses: "Shouldn't mix those"?
It feels like there isn't really much chance of failure, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. I think the most natural/simple lose condition would be a limit for how many days you can spend, but it would really stink to be playing for a good while and then get a 'game over' so it's probably better without it.
There were more types of crops than I was expecting. It was fun to see what sorts of effect combinations were possible in order to rack up energy quickly. If I had one criticism of the game, it would be that you don't really have much control over your deck beyond collards vs beets, which basically just provide you with cards at complete random. I think it would be cool if after every harvest there was one random option in the shop to give the player just a little bit more control.
Overall I thought this was really neat. Good work!
If you plan on further developing this game, I'd suggest taking ideas from other farming games. The classic upgrades like sprinklers to automatically water the soil or tool upgrades to spend less energy when working with soil could add some fun to the game.
Overall it's awesome, but I found the use of the "Every 10 seconds" theme quite weak.
It did crash for me twice on startup, and then it would restart itself, but seemed to be fine after that initial hiccup.
Really great job, loved the card game mechanics and trying out different combinations of crops, I could definitely see this being something bigger outside of the Jam as it honestly was a really fun experience.
I unfortunately locked myself out of the final cutscene because I wanted to rack up as much energy as possible before planting the pumpkin, and only when it was too late did I realise that it needs other plants to grow. The fact that it could theoretically grow without the other plants meant that the game thought I still had stuff to do, so I just had to Alt-F4 my way out of that.
Something else that I would have liked to have seen is some kind of indicator to show that a plant is ready to be harvested. The carrots in particular look like they still have some growing to do when they're fully grown, and it's generally not always obvious when it's done growing. I know there is a tooltip that would tell me that, but apparently I'm too impatient, and then I accidentally harvest the spinach in the centre of the carrots and mess up my whole plan.
Anyway, I had a lot of fun. Nice job with this!