Crop Failer

GMTK 2023: Roles Reversed

Instead of building your own farm and making money to make more money, you are the forces of nature doing everything in your power to prevent profits.

The farmer is far from a victim here however. If they make enough money, the forest will be destroyed to make way for more farmland. It's up to you, the spirits of nature within the forest, to prevent this. At least, for as long as you can...

Game Tutorial:

"What do I press?": Arrow keys to select card / select targets. Z to use cards and confirm targets, and X to cancel a card. This should set you going but if you want an in depth guide, look below.

"What's happening?": When you first start, the 'farmer' will take their turn first. On their turn they can plant seeds, water growing crops, or harvest grown crops. They take 3 of these actions per turn. Crops grow when they are wet (darker tiles) and receive sunlight. The weather forecast is displayed at the bottom, where the leftmost one is the next weather effect. Rain makes every tile wet, and sun grows all wet crops, making them dry. The cloud is fair weather and does nothing. There may also be a special secret weather effect if you play long enough...

"What am I looking at?": On the left middle you have the end turn button. Below that are your orbs. These are like mana/energy, used to play cards. You can tell the cost of a card by the notches on the right side, and the colour of the border. On the right side of the screen are the farmer's coins. They get one every turn, and also get one per crop harvested. For every 10 coins they earn, they receive a random upgrade. If you let them acquire too many upgrades, its game over. At the bottom of course are your cards. Text will be displayed about what they do. When 'seeds' or 'leafs' are mentioned, it should be apparent which masses of green pixels they refer to. If it's nothing but green, it's a leaf.

"Am I playing it wrong?": No, the balance is quite weird at the minute. I only had time to properly playtest it after the submission deadline. Given that, I'm surprised that it was actually kinda fun to play. Target confirmation can be a bit finicky, where you can sometimes waste cards by choosing tiles they don't affect. If you try to cancel a card and it won't let you, you must use up all of its uses with Z.

"How was it made?": This is the first game I've made in the Pico-8 engine, and I rarely do pixel art so this was a struggle at times. A fun struggle. I spent 2 hours trying to draw a square dirt tile before giving up and going isometric... Anyway, the engine is intentionally very limited, making things like sound and animation more time consuming to add, the lack of which may cause the game to feel a little unresponsive and confusing.