Sowscraper by Teto
Long Live the Meritocracy of Lucido
INSTRUCTIONS
Meet government quotas by harvesting the correct plants
Grow your plants by keeping them under the correct conditions
Keep those weeds at bay
Decide where your priorities lie...
CONTROLS
Click to select an action from the hotbar
Click on the grid to action on that hex
Right/Middle click and drag to pan camera
Arrow keys to pan camera
Scroll to zoom
STORY
Welcome to the Meritocracy of Lucido where you are a valued member of the community. In an overpopulated world, you have been lucky enough to be chosen as the agricultural maintainer on one of the prestigious Sowscrapers. The position comes with a luxurious 2 bedroom apartment with a window for you and your family, as long as you can prove yourself to be an effective farmer.
Remember, your actions have consequences...
Long Live the Meritocracy of Lucido. Prosperity for All.
DEVELOPMENT
Code and foley by @ciaranw . Graphics by @teto . Code by @joesturge . Music by @naynay116 .
Jam number 7 that Ciaran and I have done together! This time, a couple of friends (Joe and Nay) joined us for the code and music. First time we've had people physically join us at our house which was super fun, although a bit busy!
The first evening, it took us a little while to come up with an idea that we liked and we thought would be interesting for us to make as well as for you guys to play! Eventually, we came up with the puzzle concept with a limited grid space in a world with limited space to grow produce. Initially, we wanted to do a nice, simple idea we could polish a lot since we hadn't all worked together before and we knew it would take us a while to figure it out.
We had a slow start on Saturday with Ciaran and Joe doing a lot of pair programming to get the foundations of the logic, Nay ended up with covid so was dying in our front room, and I was just generally unproductive and not liking anything I drew... Eventually though, they managed to work out how to split the work and I got more into things (Nay was drugged up on cold and flu meds). Joe spent a lot of his initial solo time working on the hex grid which he got working beautifully although, to this day, none of us have any idea how it works.
On Sunday, the simple puzzle game we had thought up somehow evolved into having a storlyine with a choice-dependant ending. As usual, we ended up doing something far more complicated than we had set out to! By the end of Sunday, we had most of the plant logic and UI in place, the foundations of the story engine done and all of the base plant graphics done. Nay had also been alive enough for a bit to write some great background music!
I'd also started on the day/night animation cycle although I no longer wanted to draw anything so, for a while, everything was a hexagon. Which was an upgrade from everything being the Godot logo as we normally end up with pre-graphics. As a tribute to the godot face being in all our games, for the first time, we included the logo in the final game as part of the ending.
The final day was very productive with a long to-do list for each of us but the looming deadline and sheer panic was really very motivating. Ciaran ran around the house in the last two hours running cardboard along radiators and generated some amazing foley as usual. We managed to pull everything together and included all the functionality that we had intended to, which I think may be the first time we have not had to cut features in a jam. Turns out, having a second programmer is significantly more productive!
I hope you enjoy our contrast of cute graphics and dark(ish) story!
Tools
Engine: Godot
Graphics: Krita
Music: Pro Tools
Foley: Audacity
Post release changelog:
- Tiny fixes just past the deadline: Final conversation was a turn late, checkboxes weren't visually checking, the tree rustling animation wasn't looping, some of the tooltips were a bit sparse on info.
THANK YOU FOR PLAYING!!
| Link | https://ciaranw.itch.io/sowscraper |
| Link | https://github.com/CiaranWoodward/LD54 |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/54/sowscraper |
Ratings
| Overall | 298th | 3.841⭐ | 43🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 306th | 3.756⭐ | 43🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 230th | 3.793⭐ | 43🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 314th | 4⭐ | 43🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 440th | 3.838⭐ | 42🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 330th | 3.59⭐ | 41🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 630th | 2.764⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 396th | 3.731⭐ | 41🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 37🗳️ | 60🗨️ |
I can really see how you can expand on the core of this game!
I like it, very interesting and fun to play.
Thank you for your super entry! :smile:
@flying-butter-studio Thanks so much! We're definitely happy with actually managing to get all the planned features in for the first time in a jam!
would have been nice to see a little more polish, but it's nothing critical - there were a few times I ran out of seeds though, and that was kind of annoying. particularly the succulents lol.
good job overall :)
@equalenergy Thank you! I think we wanted it to be continuous with the weeks but maybe that would have been nice to be able to go back and try different choices. Hopefully, it's short enough that playing through again to try and hit quota isn't too much of a slog!
@greenpig Glad you got into the swing of it!
Would love to hear any tips for adding more polish too, or any specific bits you felt like could be improved. I love hearing anything no matter how small as it's often not something we necessarily notice or think of having stared at it for three days!
@maksimj Whaaaat?! It was definitely a totally original drawing of our team members... that happen to have blue skin...
@evilmurlock Thank you! Very glad we got to add the story to it otherwise it would have been much less interesting just meeting the quotas!
@pabloabraham We use the Godot logo for all our graphics as a placeholder before drawings are done so it felt about time we should leave one in for the final game! Glad you enjoyed the experience!
@alfred-clark Thank you so much for the positive feedback!
@lizz Haha that just means you gotta do a second run through to get a nicer ending ;) but yes, we did try and give it the contrast for that dystopian vibe but we definitely could have put more bits in the visuals to tie it to the story a little more!
@fatemperor Thanks! We wanted to try and not push the theme or make it too forced so glad it worked out!
@johnsensei Thanks for the more detailed feedback! Interesting point on the crashing Chrome, we'll have to find someone with a Mac to play test for us next time so we can try and fix the issue! You are able to zoom in and out and pan around which should solve the tile issue since we didn't know how big the grid would be when we implemented it (and also how I justified to the programmers that a tiny plant should absolutely be 400x400 pixels) but the default grid positioning was almost perfect in the end so you don't really need to move camera so you don't notice that you can! Until you need to kill some weeds at the bottom haha. Maybe would have been good to have some kind of indication that camera movement was an option! I will add it to the controls bit in the description. Thanks again for the feedback, it's super helpful!
every time I thought I knew how to play the game, another mechanic came and I had to plan everything again :)
great entry
The game played well, and I didn't notice any bugs or strange behavior. Feels quite polished. If I composed a wishlist of tiny improvements, including max yields in the tooltip for each plant would be the first on it. I guess it was a part of the learning process to have some plant die on you, so you could learn their maximum possible growth. But personally, I would prefer to know in advance, how much stuff I can get from a plant :smile_cat: A longer story with more side events would be a second.
I really liked the addition of mushrooms - felt awesome to get some use out of those dead plots that I felt bad for not clearing. All seemed to work out well for Daniel and his wife, as well as Jon in my playthrough :smile:
It was nice planting stuff and watching it grow, and learning from my mistakes to tend my garden better, but I did feel it's still a bit overwhelming. I played a bit of sandbox after clearing the game and wasn't really able to fill the space which was a shame, I was hoping as I got better at managing my time I could fill the garden entirely but it's pretty hard to do.
The interface and gameplay was pretty well explained and understandable, I think the objectives were very harsh but maybe that's intentional? Tooltips were pretty good but it would be nice to know if a plant is going to wilt next day, it's hard to keep track of them all.
Overall I liked it and it was a cute little game, great job :)
Yield for plants is a really good idea actually, we hadn't considered that but, of course, when you get your quota, you have no idea how many berries you get from a bush so I guess that does make it hard to plan. The mushrooms do actually harvest how many are on the tile but I guess that's the only one with an indicator.
Ooh I like the comment on the title! It's the first time in 5 jams where I haven't drawn the title from scratch (only added the little squares this time, tried to make them look like the buildings but not sure it quite worked out that way) due to time constraints, so will defo bear in mind for next time trying to make it more cohesive with the vibe of the rest of the game!
Thank you again for the feedback!
Lovely to hear you played around a bit after the story too! I agree some indication either visually or on tooltip would have been good to see whether you need to harvest imminently as it does get to be quite a lot to keep track of. Thanks so much again for playing and the feedback!
Sometimes I wished there would be some more information visible, like whether I can still harvest a plant next round or if it will die this round and maybe it could be a tad more forgiving, but this way it fits the story (the story also adds a nice nuance to the game, wished there were some more encounters with neighbors) Very fun game!
I also enjoyed that messing up once (I was short on flowers, whoops!) didn't immediately end the game.
This was really cool balancing everything! And I loved gardening as a puzzle game.
@cataclysmicknight Aww, so happy to hear you played for so long! I personally get frustrated and rage quit if a game puts you back to the start constantly so I wouldn't want to put that in my own game (but that's probably because I'm not very good at certain types of game :P ). Thank you for playing and enjoying our game!