Wheat Master by nyxkn
Wheat Master
No instructions required. Hop in and play!
Controls:
- Mouse only
- P or ESC for pause/settings
Any feedback is greatly appreciated. Harsh criticism is welcome.
Will you become the next master of the wheat?
Much adventure awaits!
Devnotes
Software used:
- Godot 3.5.1
- Ardour and JFXR for sound creation
- Reaper for music creation, with:
- Vitalium synth
- Spitfire LABS Soft Piano
- FluidR3 midi soundfont
- Maestro Concert Grand soundfont
- Aseprite for all the pixel art
- Font is Abaddon by Nathan Scott
- Palette is Apollo by AdamCYounis
Source code available over at my Gitlab page.
Post-submission changes
- Fixed volume slider for music in the settings menu that was not working
- Fixed the end screen showing the wrong score
Ratings
| Overall | 31th | 4.024⭐ | 167🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 53th | 3.873⭐ | 167🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 263th | 2.951⭐ | 165🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 8th | 4.439⭐ | 167🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 63th | 4.076⭐ | 166🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 23th | 4.071⭐ | 163🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 181th | 2.619⭐ | 141🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 40th | 3.905⭐ | 160🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 38🗳️ | 71🗨️ |
- Music is good, easy to listen for a longer time.
- Graphics is well fitting, consistent.
- Game mechanic is a cool blend between clicker and ... tile placement, ... game. I like it very much.
- Surprisingly well balanced for a jam game.
- Thank you for the ? extra, ... I think I would have continued for much longer ... addiction
Congratulations! Very addicting game.
Windowxs version is working just fine ! Test in progress
Seems to be well balanced ! I will continue playing will coding our game :)
Great work !
@edit :
On thing that could be better, is the contrast of upgrade. Kind of hard to read on my screen
I'm using Edge (chromium based) 108.0.1462.76 (official, 64 bits)
If that can help :)
The game has a good relaxing atmosphere (both art and music are excellent), the game flow is well balanced and my only advice would be to reduce the initial amount of click (I always thaught endless clicking was bad design). I think harvest/plant tool drag mechanic would make the game more statisfying.
Anyway I had a great moment and it is a very good game ! (the end part was unexpectedly funny :) )
Play time : 22 mn !
Upgrades unlocked : 45/46
I like the music, and the sound-effects.
@feor I appreciate the thoughtful feedback! And thanks for pointing out the volume issue. Getting volumes right can be surprisingly difficult.
I'm a huge fan of idle clickers, so I found a lot to enjoy here. On point with the theme and everything looked and sounded great. The 6k yield upgrade seemed superfluous, but I'm a completionist, so I had to get it. Great game!
I love graphics and music, simple yet satisfying. I wish start would be a bit faster, cause I feel like the intrest curve is the other way around, cause start is veeery slow while later it gets crazy fast if you know what you're doing which is kinda oposite from typical idle I belive. I wasn't the biggest fan of the auto harvester, because it got more in the way of me harvesting my hand or planting by hand, but after all I really love the idea and simplicity and had loads of fun speedrunning it!
I really enjoyed this one! Amazing submission! :D
i'll send you the receipt of my next mouse :wink:
You may need to pay for my broken mouse：）
Overall very good.
Excellent game. Excellent atmosphere. Very well realized in every direction.
I love clicker/incremental games, and this one scratches that itch in the best way. Planting and harvesting are both very satisfying actions thanks to the sound and visual effects.
My only complaints are somewhat minor nitpicks: It's a little bit annoying that you can't harvest on a tile that is being auto-harvested, nor plant on a tile that is being auto-planted. Along with that, some sort of mechanic to reduce the amount of clicking in the late game would be very convenient. :)
This game is so peaceful, you did a really great job ! Congrats :)
I like how I can write this while playing the game and do other things at the same time. :)
The floating text is a nice attention to detail. I think the pace could be a bit faster.
Nice game graphics, but upgrades should have the same color scheme and style – currently it looks too unfinished because of that.
Good job! I finished the game btw :)
faster auto harvest,not faster enough,,my finger is better,
this ia the best one of all games I palyed today
You asked for harsh criticism, so:
One thing that did annoy me is that the auto functions prevent manual planting/harvesting. It gets quite annoying when clicking on a wheat at the exact moment it decides to auto harvest, so the click does nothing. That just doesn't feel good, and I don't see why we shouldn't be allowed to manually harvest that tile anyway.
Harvesting and replanting is effectively a single action - I just double clicked. Seeing as it's effectively one action, harvesting may as well auto plant so it only takes a single click. That would be easier on the fingers for accessibility, and wouldn't change the nature of the game at all.
Overall, a good entry. Clickers aren't original, but this was nicely implemented and fits the theme.
Your idea of unlocking click-and-drag is brilliant and had not occurred to me! There were quite a few complaints about this functionality missing, but I was determined that leaving it out had been the right decision. But having made it into an upgrade actually sounds like the absolute best idea!
Realizing you can double-click for efficient replanting I'd like to think is part of strategy discovery, but now I'm thinking that also unlocking it as an upgrade might have been ideal.
Thank you for your most valuable feedback my friend!
I found that the annoyance of the auto harvesting blocking the interaction actually got worse as I upgraded the autoharvester, because it became more likely that it would jump into the wheat I was about to click. It's probably bad that the upgrade punishes the player in that way.
I like the idea that click and drag could be a multi step upgrade path - increase the maximum size of the dragged area. Another way to do something similar would be to have a big "brush" so that a single click hits a larger area.
Discovering the double click strategy is a small nice thing, but I worked that out within the first 30 seconds then played for 10+ minutes, so it wasn't a significant part of the experience. It could make the game less accessible or more frustrating to people with mobility issues or who are prone to RSI or similar, so I think personally I'd just have the single click work from the start. The very simple double click strategy discovery moment isn't interesting enough to justify making the game harder to play, IMO. An early unlock could work, but feels like it confuses things more than it adds value.
The orange colour that you use for selected tiles is quite similar in value to the green. I believe people with certain common types of colour blindness may have difficulty seeing that. There are online colour blindness simulators you can drop an image into to see how it looks to people with different types of deficiency. It's usually a good idea to try to pick a palette that works for all deficiencies, as about 5% of the population has some deficiency (and 8% of men). Ideally, the game should be readable when viewed in greyscale.
One other thing that I noticed was some slight balance issues. I invested early in automation, and stopped doing too much clicking after five minutes or so. The field size and grow rate upgrades were generally not that useful, because the automation was the speed bottleneck, not the amount of wheat. Even when the automations got very fast, the yield rate is determined by the balance between the plant and harvest rate, not by the field size. So by the end when I completed the game, I had a huge field and far more wheat than the automation could consume.
If you planned for players to keep manually harvesting all the way through, then that's absolutely fine. But usually in clicker games, the automation becomes many orders of magnitude more powerful than manual clicking, which is why I went in with the attitude that I should give up on that early on.
There basically was only one thing that I didn't like: the auto-harvester prevents me from harvesting that crop myself. That was a bit annoying. But appart from that, I really enjoyed the game. Thanks!
I think the auto harvest and auto plant upgrades should be a bit more powerful. I was still clicking like crazy right up to the end.
Choosing colors is always so difficult! I feel like I always get something wrong that people point out :D Your tip on ensuring the game is readable in grayscale is another little gem you've now thrown at me. I never thought about it but it seems like an excellent idea and I'll absolutely add this to my workflow. Thanks friend Sam!
A full run:
Everyone's already said it, but +1 to the auto tools blocking you. I just avoided them entirely until late game after my first playthrough.
"wow there's no reason this should be this fun"
"I don't want to buy freedom yet! It'd end the game!"
"Ooooh there's another upgrade after freedom!"
"Wheeeeee"
"I don't know why this is so addicting"
Great job! I loved this one.
One thing I'd like to see would be audio similar to Mini Motorways/Metro, where planting/harvesting has little musical notes. It would be very hectic by the end but I think would also add to the satisfaction of watching the score go up.
Really well done!
The only suggestion I can really think of, is let the player harvest a crop while it's being auto-harvested (or plant seeds on a tile that's being auto-planted)! Other than that, I really liked it!! Amazing for a compo submission; keep it up! :beers:
Good job!
great job!
But, for some reason the gameplay didn't quite hook me, and after a few upgrades I just left it idling until I reached 1000 points to win. I think it might have been that all the subsequent upgrades are just slightly bigger/faster versions of the first rank in that upgrade — the fundamental gameplay is the same whether you have level-1 auto-harvest or level-3 auto-harvest.
I also found that the plant/harvest loop sort of collapses when you realise you can ignore the planting bit by just double-clicking whenever you harvest. I think this works to the game's detriment, and it might have been worth doing something to prevent it, like perhaps giving the harvest action a half-second animation that has to complete before new crops can be planted in the same place.
These complaints aside, the game was good. It felt polished and complete and was generally a nice, chill experience.
But then clicked to start all over again because it is a very good, realxing, fun game. Very good entry, very simple and minimalistic, I loved it, congrats!!! Would love your input on my entry as well if possible!! :D
However, for the farming process is highly abstracted, the fun mainly came from the upgrading process. What's most interesting is that, the upgrade system kinda like a metaphor for capitalism: you constantly replace your plant method, harvest method, and growth with a faster one, squeeze more profit from it, and expand the field. In this process, player finally do not even have to perform the basic gameplay of planting and harvesting, and there will be no end, until you find an escape: Freedom(Quit). This means previous player has been slaved, by the never stopping growing number, and infinite desire for "upgrade", since the very beginning moment that player no more enjoy the process of sow and harvest.
Pretty like this game.
That was fun! The music was really great. Added a perfect chill atmosphere for the game. I liked that the automation helped, but I still felt inclined to do some clicking and cleanup.
Apparently I had one more upgrade... I figured that path continued forever ^_^.
One thing that was bugging me is that after auto plant/harvest locks on to a cell, I can't manually act on that cell. This lead to situations when the only one action I could perform was blocked and I could do nothing to speed it up. The problem eventually solved itself through speed upgrades though, so it's not that bad I guess.
Nice work.
I love it, good job :)