Money grows on trees by Fluburbio
Invest your resources in carefully selected upgrades, and harvest tons of fruits as you attempt to get as rich as you can with your orchard.



| Link | https://fluburbio.itch.io/money-grows-on-trees |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/money-grows-on-trees |
Ratings
| Overall | 358th | 3.56⭐ | 60🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 456th | 3.293⭐ | 60🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 733th | 2.621⭐ | 60🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 146th | 4.119⭐ | 61🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 149th | 4.195⭐ | 61🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 351th | 3.037⭐ | 56🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 502th | 3.295⭐ | 58🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 79🗳️ | 108🗨️ |
@recursiveanomaly I wanted to check your game, but it slows my browser to a crawl before even fully loading :( It looks gorgeous though! Knowing that it's also a clicker makes me want to check it more, I'll try with an other machine.
I would have liked to have seen the game with the original prices for the fruits, but I completely understand shortening the game for the sake of the jam!
A tiny bit of feedback: maybe grey out buttons that can no longer be pressed as soon as this is the case. I always looked at my money to see if I hit the cap. Once you select a different button and get back to the previous one, it then is greyed out.
Overall, I really enjoyed the time. Thanks for this game.
Lovely art and addictive clicker!
I had over 185k at the end
Fun game!
@phillip-scott Wow thanks!! :D You actually beat my girlfriend's 147k score... You deserve a medal!! :medal:
Enjoyed playing it, was a nice and quick experience, good job :thumbsup:
@joshedev This is beyond awesome! :astonished: You deserve at least two medals! :medal: :medal: Your comment means a lot to me because it was exactly the kind of simple fun I was aiming for. I'm glad you enjoyed it! The bug you're mentioning happened occasionally during development but I couldn't uproot it before the deadline.
@koboldskeep I thought auto harvest, but decided against it because I thought it would take away from the "oddly fun" aspect of click-mashing and leave the player with nothing to do. But if there were more elements, like time limited bonuses or fluctuating selling price per fruit, or debt like you said, I think auto-harvest would fit. At the end of the day, I chose a simple direction for my game to avoid scope creep and have something that works reasonably well.
@xlores-liang Yeah, those arrows really aren't visible enough :( About planting more tree, I wanted to zoom out the tree and allow for way more, but my "jam" code would have crumbled under its own weight :sweat_smile:
@zluca, I thought so too, better to easy than too hard and frustrating! I love how the poor balance allows for "unreasonable" scores like joshedev's and pillip-scott's, I'm amazed how high it can actually go! But the balance could have been better, that was one of the hardest part for me.
@moonlightbomber Thank you! Everything but the text was indeed hand-drawn and colored in crayon by my girlfriend :)
A small issue I've found is that if you make the game fullscreen the timer disappears (I played on firefox).
As far as clicker games go, I enjoyed this one quite a bit! Nice job:)
@juxipolo My, you're right! I don't know how I didn't catch this until now... Thanks for pointing it out! I do hope your finger is doing better.
@gamebuilder wow, thanks so much for sharing this! Indeed a score of 53k is no joke, it's better than my personal best :D I'm glad you enjoyed it that much!
Congrats for the great work! I really enjoyed!
I also got a bit confused in the upgrades. It felt like sometimes I could and could not buy even if I had enough money. And it took a while until I saw that there were tabs and then I already had enough to buy all kinds of trees and max out the upgrades (or so I think because I could not buy more even if they only cost e.g. 30)...
One way to sort of prolong the game would be if each successive upgrade of a certain type cost 10x more than the previous. E.g. 6 > 60 > 600 on the apple upgrades.
Today I decided to play again and go all in on bananas, and because I didn't really want to spam the mouse button for 3 minutes straight, I just used an AutoHotKey script that lets me click automatically. I ended up with a score of 333,000, and I had several thousand bananas that I forgot to sell near the end, so I imagine my true score was quite a bit higher. :sweat_smile:
I think that making an incremental game centered on a high score system rather than on anything else is a very fun twist. It means that strategy actually really matters, unlike in most incremental games, where bad strategy just means that it will take you longer to get through the game. And, when playing through the second time, it was fun to be able to efficiently work my way through a small apple tree to quickly unlock the bananas. It is satisfying to execute well and waste little time.
The progression is kind of fast, however. Even on my first playthrough, I unlocked most of the upgrades pretty quickly -- and in that playthrough, I unlocked all the upgrades for every plant type.
On the one hand, this is fun, because it is possible to just blast through a lot of the early stages. On the other hand, it could be interesting to have some harder-to-reach progression stages, especially in terms of making strategizing (for those highscores!) more complex and, hopefully, therefore more fun.
I liked the hand-drawn art and the sound effects. The way that the plants sort of grew over time before you could actually harvest them was interesting, espe cially in terms of, again, maximizing score... it takes some real learning (or just spamming the mouse) to efficiently harvest the plants.
And, in terms of playing with an autoclicker... the sound effects are actually even more satisfying than they are in the game, somehow the way that the clicking lines up just makes it sound great. (My autoclicker clicks every 16ms if that's relevant). I think that implementing an autoclicker as just another upgrade that you could buy could be an interesting way to implement it directly into the game, because I think it is actually pretty fun to use, and the game could have it upgrade in multiple stages, perhaps.'
And, it is actually pretty tiring to spam the mouse for so long, so having an autoclicker built in is almost just a matter of preserving the player's physical health, maybe..? Especially for doing multiple runs in a row.
Overall, though, this was a fun twist on the incremental game genre, and it was fun trying to play through it to get a high score.
I think I may have preferred the upgrades to be on a side/bottom pop-out/panel so I'm able to harvest at the same time as looking at and reading upgrades sine I always felt the pressure to be closing it to harvest my fruits! Showing the selling price of each fruit next to the quantity would have been nice too just to get some context and be able to compare them. A single sell button to sell all would have been nice as well unless you were to add some kind of aspect to the game that would affect if/when you wanted to sell each kind of fruit as there's not really a reason to not just sell everything at once. Just me being super nitpicky here! Absolutely great as it is, just a couple of things that might add a bit to the polish to it :) and of course, it's hard to fit lots of extra things in the time too!
I did also at one point have no clementines growing on my two clementine trees and they just stayed empty which was very odd and I assume was a bug?
Overall, a really amazing game with a great vibe and absolutely beautiful too! Great entry!
@schmalex Thanks so much! I will start to balance it properly and improve it now that the jam is over. From your screenshot, I can see you were pretty close to discovering the hidden message I hid in the ending screen :) (So hidden that no one actually discovered it... oh well!). Thanks for playing!
@honey-pony I'm humbled that you took the time to give such thorough feedback. I'm so glad you could see what I was aiming for! I will take everything into account when reworking the game. About the sound effect, I wanted a popping sound because that's what I heard in my head while playing. It's a single sound effect file, but I used a random pitch between 0.9~1.4 each time its played to add a tiny bit of variety :) The next version will be (way) less tiring while conserving the scoring system. Thank you again!
@teto Thanks for your kind words! I'm glad you enjoyed the vibe :D UI was the least fun to make for me, I'm not used to it yet, and I'll take your input in consideration. And indeed, what you got with your clementine trees was a bug, the infamous "dead tree" bug that I couldn't get rid of before the deadline :( At the very least, I thought it would add flavour and force players to cut them and regrow them, so who knows, maybe it's a feature instead!
