LudumData

The Harvest of the Corn Children by Tero Pulkkinen

[raw]
made by Tero Pulkkinen for Ludum Dare 52 (JAM)

There's constant rumours that the corn field is haunted by evil children. You take the role of our beloved hero, Uncle Donald, and your task is to find out what is going wrong. During that investigation, you'll encounter organ harvesting, grimreapers, farmers turned evil and of course the children.

cover4.png

Development Team: * Engine & Code & AI -- Tero Pulkkinen * Graphics & Music & Tiles & Player -- Henri Sundelin

Controls: * W -- jumping * AD -- movement * SPACE -- axe

Release notes: - Welcome to our v0.1 alpha - We really did run out of time, lots of enemies still to be implemented, as well as enhanced gameplay, multiple levels etc - Music was literally done in 15 minutes on Kurzweil PC3 - Plenty of bugs remain for this prototype - We plan to complete and release this minigame in appropriate forum

Change log: - fixed bug where during death animation, key-up events were not handled properly and buttons jammed because of that. - fixed bug where enemy corpses didn't turn to organs after rotting a while - fixed bug where health indicator wasn't linked to any activity - fixed memory leak where it slurped over 2Gb of memory in frame loop/crashed after 10 minutes of playing - fixed spinner animation in the engine to make wait times less burdensome - minor fix to the timers of the enemies/when new enemy appears, it's not deadly for short amount of time, so that player doesn't get suprise deaths simply because enemy appears on front of the player - a small fix to the level design, now its more difficult to accidentally fall off the stairs - axe hitbox location improved/now animations and hitbox are actually at same location

Link https://meshpage.org/441
Link https://meshpage.org/ld52.txt
Original URL https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/the-harvest-of-the-corn-children

Ratings

Overall 824th 2.208⭐ 26🧑‍⚖️
Fun 823th 1.783⭐ 25🧑‍⚖️
Innovation 819th 1.957⭐ 25🧑‍⚖️
Theme 735th 2.935⭐ 25🧑‍⚖️
Graphics 722th 2.304⭐ 25🧑‍⚖️
Audio 490th 2.364⭐ 24🧑‍⚖️
Humor 577th 2.435⭐ 25🧑‍⚖️
Mood 786th 2.37⭐ 25🧑‍⚖️
Given 27🗳️ 26🗨️

Feedback

Jeffrey Hwang
09. Jan 2023 · 21:52 UTC
I liked the gorey animation when they died! harvesting organ was a funny idea. nice job!
Brinegamers Productions
09. Jan 2023 · 21:56 UTC
Were you inspired by the book and movie Children of the Corn by Stephen King? In all, it looks good!
Riesyeti
09. Jan 2023 · 22:12 UTC
the enemies remind me a lot of the Lemmings 😄
🎤 Tero Pulkkinen
09. Jan 2023 · 22:47 UTC
Yes, we definitely had "maissilapset"(children of the corn in finnish) in mind when deciding how to implement the theme.
Vipaka
10. Jan 2023 · 00:47 UTC
There was a long wait time on the loading of this game, so long I thought it had crashed (heads up to other players, wait patiently). This game was definitely different for a side scrolling platformer, I got a lot of avante garde feelings playing it. I couldn't quite make the big jump, I think because the mechanics were a little rough around the edges. All around very interesting
LDJam user 287424
10. Jan 2023 · 03:49 UTC
This game is like a weird artistic meta commentary on games. Trump running around cutting down children with an axe and collecting body parts against this painterly background. I like how you almost always immediately die when you're dropped into the world. And insane numbers of the enemies spawn on those platforms so even when you can make the difficult to time big jump across, it's super hard to get on the platform cause like 30 of the little creepy kids are swarming all over the platform. Awesome stuff. A fitting tribute to the source material!
LDJam user 251967
10. Jan 2023 · 16:14 UTC
Great game!
Mantsje
11. Jan 2023 · 16:53 UTC
Well, that was not what I expected xD (but in a good way!)
The is game may still be in a rough state, but if you implement all of the things that you've mentioned on your page you should be able to make a cool game out of it. Well done guys!
megalukes
11. Jan 2023 · 23:04 UTC
Interesting idea, even though I think the controllers were a bit hard to figure out, not really smooth, hard to control. I found interesting that your source code is just one single txt file. Big effort. Congrats!
exofrenon
11. Jan 2023 · 23:11 UTC
That is a pretty badass title for a game, and I was surprised that uncle Donald was that Donald and not Donald Duck. Funny concept.


But the game is in a really rough state. Controls are unresponsive(feels like the player is moving in a grid, which is not ideal for a platformer), collisions are buggy (I was trying to jump on that tile on the right and it was jump falling through it). It kind of reminds me of games in really old portable consoles, like the Atari Lynx, Game Watch, etc. But I shouldn't be too harsh, because this seems like it was built from scratch and not on a game engine that has a lot of stuff already implemented, which is commendable.

I would like to see this idea fully realized after it spends some more time in the oven.
Rincs
12. Jan 2023 · 02:39 UTC
Controls really need to tighten up if you'll be sticking to the platformer format, and make the interactions with the blocks more consistent.
DzejPi
12. Jan 2023 · 06:06 UTC
That's kinda funny, I was thinking about the Children of the Corn when thinking about the this theme, so, interesting take on the theme here! The biggest issue for me were controls - if you stop holding the key, you should make the Donald stop right away. That jump on the right is frustrating, because he just keeps sliding off of it. Otherwise very interesting - seems like your own engine, that's always interesting, and interesting to see the source code in one file! And I realy liked the music. Great job, if you really spent only 15 minutes on it!
Hawkin
13. Jan 2023 · 02:52 UTC
Kudos for rolling your own engine. That is not easy!!

Vertical colliders would have been a good thing to add, but I know not everything can make it in, and at least it didn't break the game. I did find the platforming unforgiving, as there wasn't much leeway making this jump. For example, this felt to me like it should have landed.

![jump.gif](///raw/319/53/z/5654c.gif)

I did not seem to be able to get up to the top platform. Meanwhile, it seemed like an infinite number of children were spawning ad infinitum!

Good luck to you guys in the future! Keep at it, you obviously have coding skills! Next time you can add to it and focus on the kind of smoothness that help keep a game moving.
🎤 Tero Pulkkinen
13. Jan 2023 · 07:15 UTC
@hawkin: yup, it's more difficult than that. (hint, yoiu might want to try different blocks as the starting point of your jump.
Hawkin
13. Jan 2023 · 14:40 UTC
@tero-pulkkinen I did manage the jump in the gif eventually, just by jumping a little later. I posted the gif to show that the landing collider could be a little wider, in my opinion.

As for getting up to the top, I think I tried both blocks on the right .. hm..
🎤 Tero Pulkkinen
13. Jan 2023 · 23:15 UTC
@hawkin: the last jump is very difficult and you need to control the player correctly during the jump.