Virus Harvester by Thoastbot

made by Thoastbot for Ludum Dare 52 (COMPO)

Welcome to your little Virus Farm!

This is your Virus Farm setup, used to "farm" Viruses to get data so antivirus companies can improve their software!

Every now and then there is a Virus spawning on your monitor. As long as it is blue it wont cost you to much to remove it. If it turns green you can harvest it and get payed for the analytic information by an antivirus company. But if u wait to long, the Virus may turn red, will be way harder to remove and therefore cost you a lot to get rid of.

Keeping your PC running while having those Viruses cost you a bit, but be careful, red Viruses cost A LOT more so it might be worth to get rid of them instead of feeding them your hard earned Blocoins!

Try to peak at as much Blocoins as possible or survive the longest.

The game will start slow, giving you time to learn and understand the game, at around 160 seconds in you will reach max speed and there will be a lot of Viruses on your monitor you have to handle. If u beat 300 seconds with this consider yourself good - anyone with way more needs to send prove ;P

Didn't had as much time this Ludum Dare as i used to - but i am really happy with what i made. It's easy to understand, gets challenging, has some potential of replaying and takes overall ~5 Minutes to play witch i deem to be perfect for a Ludum Dare game :D

As all my games this is again made in core Javascript no library's, graphics are made in Paint.Net, sound made with sfxr.me, and music with beepbox.co. You can play the game in browser on my website and download the full Data as a zip, have fun!

HINT - TRY THE GAME ONCE WITHOUT READING THIS!

Higher level Viruses take way longer to change to green and eat a lot of your Blocoins before you can profit of them - consider removing the high level Viruses early on as soon as they spawn (blue) to survive longer!

Even tho red Viruses might cost a lot Blocoins to remove, they also cost A LOT to just keep them on your screen. Its always a good idea to remove the red Viruses if possible.

You should focus:

green > red > blue

higher level > lower level

I hope with this you can reach a lot further than before :)

HINT END

Link	http://ld52.kimrubendavid.com/LudumDare52.zip
Link	http://ld52.kimrubendavid.com
Original URL	https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/virus-harvester

Ratings

Overall	314^th	2.85⭐	22🧑‍⚖️
Fun	277^th	2.9⭐	22🧑‍⚖️
Innovation	211^th	3.175⭐	22🧑‍⚖️
Theme	257^th	3.2⭐	22🧑‍⚖️
Graphics	289^th	2.9⭐	22🧑‍⚖️
Audio	257^th	2.528⭐	20🧑‍⚖️
Mood	310^th	2.474⭐	21🧑‍⚖️
Given		14🗳️	22🗨️

Feedback

Jellybean

08. Jan 2023 · 21:20 UTC

The colours picked for the viruses were really easy to spot, I feel like it notieceably made the game more comfertable to play, The game picks up really quickly at a certain point and I started targetting clusters of red and gree viruses as well as clicking messilly to thin out some of the blue ones!

John Gabriel

08. Jan 2023 · 21:25 UTC

Took me a moment to figure this one out, but the way you interpreted the theme is quite clever. There's plenty of mileage to the idea; perhaps you could have some way of influencing the way that viruses spawn, or slowing them down later into the game, when there's too many of them to keep on top of.

maymay

09. Jan 2023 · 02:24 UTC

Clever take on the theme! I enjoy the simple art style and colors that you used, and it's pretty satisfying to click away the viruses. I made it 86 seconds-- the difficulty ramped up really quickly

🎤 Thoastbot

09. Jan 2023 · 02:52 UTC

@john-gabriel Yeah i can see me adding a shop, and either upgradeable stats or randomly rotating items that help to regulate the spawn and other things.

LDJam user 315277

09. Jan 2023 · 03:51 UTC

I like how you picked blue and green hues close enough to make them slightly challenging to spot. Not sure if it would work for people with color blindness, but I like it nevertheless.

Frib

09. Jan 2023 · 22:43 UTC

fun little timed clicker game! The difficulty ramps up really quickly, managed to last 91 seconds but it was just pure chaos in the end lol

LDJam user 318242

10. Jan 2023 · 03:33 UTC

Nice little game, the difficulty seems to ramp up super quick, it kinda goes from too easy to too hard fast.

euske

10. Jan 2023 · 15:50 UTC

The game design is excellent. I really liked the idea that you have to accumulate enough coins to withstand a larger investment? cost for bigger viruses. The game UI could be further improved by for example showing how long each virus takes to change the color. I got 12969 coins in 144 seconds.

LDJam user 244504

10. Jan 2023 · 15:51 UTC

Damn survived 117 seconds only lol. Good clicker game :smile: Good job ! :tada:

huozhedexiaoc

10. Jan 2023 · 16:08 UTC

survived 223 seconds. lol. This game is so fun that I keep challenging to get high scores.Got a bit confused at the start, but once I understood what’s going on, it’s rather good.

LDJam user 0

10. Jan 2023 · 16:25 UTC

Good idaa!
I like the game,I racked my brains to live longer.This game may be a little difficult for me,I can only live for 88 seconds.But I think it deviates from the theme.

Corporation

10. Jan 2023 · 19:36 UTC

Very fun game, I alway's been bad in this osu-type of games, but still enjoyed the experience. Writing it on core java is also a great challenge and achivement. Well done)

LDJam user 280509

11. Jan 2023 · 05:48 UTC

I really panicked when I was still waiting for the little things turning green, and suddenly a lot of them burst up! Cool game!

shimmerscale

12. Jan 2023 · 01:23 UTC

I like how the game starts slow and then just goes crazy, haha. Cool idea and fun to play :) I think it might make more sense for the smaller viruses to be a higher level since they're a bit hard to click due to the jitter, which I found to be a fun added challenge to the game.

Ninnec

13. Jan 2023 · 05:00 UTC

This is a really cool game. Its very different from the majority of games here. The difficulty scaling is done very well.

blubberquark

18. Jan 2023 · 11:12 UTC

I survived for 234 seconds, and I have a lot to say that you probably already know:
- The theme is a bit wonky. Not in the sense that it doesn't fit with the LD theme (so no marks off there), but more that the virus theme doesn't quite fit with the gameplay.
- The difficulty starts way too low, then after 2 minutes the game becomes moderately engaging, and then it gets really fast around the 200 seconds mark.
- The little critters often overlap.
- The way I assume this is *intended* to be played at high levels is to strategically let some green ones sit and remove some blue ones early. It's hard to gauge which ones just spawned and which ones have been around, so there is not much strategy to that strategy
- I really wish there was something to buy with my blocoins.

Overall, this is surprisingly deep for such simple gameplay, but I would *not* recommend that you make a commercial version out of this for the app store.

TerraCottaFrog

20. Jan 2023 · 05:08 UTC

I love the gameplay idea here. One of those really simple concepts that feel very naturally fun. I think it would make a really good phone game; I had a great time with it on my touchscreen laptop.

The difficulty was very low at the start and then became very difficult suddenly. When it did become difficulty, there were too many viruses relative to the amount of green ones there were. I think just lowering the amount of time a virus is blue would really help let the difficulty ramp up without viruses overlapping too much.

It would also be good to have more feedback about how each virus effects your blocoins, like text that appears and says what you gained or lost, or text underneath that shows their value (or a color that maps to that)

I love the graphics; the viruses are really cute and creative (I love the toast cat with all my heart)

Overall definitely worth a balance pass, since I think something really good is here which is dampened by the difficulty curve issues.

Overall nice work!

🎤 Thoastbot

22. Jan 2023 · 11:33 UTC

@terracottafrog Thanks for the feedback - the idea with some info for the blocoins gains or losses is great, i will consider making an updated version and i think i will include something that shows "last gain/loss".

Also i really have to work on the difficulty - after some testing with friends i found the "real" problem - and its in the code x.x I don't work with real time but with frames instead (well except for the timer, it works with real time) - so depending on how fast you computer is, the game can be waaay harder than anticipated ^^,
Play the game on a raspberrypi and it gets waaaay easier x)