1. There are no upgrades. 2. The view is too small. And, I'm on a laptop, so there's no scroll wheel. 3. There's no autofire option.
Author Comments
Space Harvester!
It's time to harvest the crops from all the planets. Gather it all and bring it back to the Mother Ship. But be careful, you might have to blast some rogue hexagons along the way.
This game was made for Ludum Dare 52, it's just a rough draft, future changes may come in the future.
Controls:
Arrow Keys or WASD - Turn & adjust speed
Space - Shoot
M - Mute the music
P - Pause the game
Mouse Scroll - Adjust camera zoom
Objective:
The objective is to collect as much wheat as possible from the planets. Once it's ready to harvest, just fly around a planet to collect, then head back to the Mother Ship (flying saucer) to deposit your harvest.
Beware of enemies, the red hexagons will kill you if you're not careful. Luckily your ship comes equipped with a blaster. Blast the hexagons and your cargo capacity will increase.
Tips:
- Fly backwards in order to take out enemies more easily
- Kill enemies to increase your cargo capacity
- Sometimes you don't want to go at full speed
- If you get lost, continue in one direction and you'll eventually be brought to the other side of the map. You can also zoom out a lot with the scroll wheel. (I plan on adding some sort of compass pointing to the Mother Ship at some point)
it does need some more work, but does seem like a nice little game. i would suggest difficulty settings, which could change how many enemies or how fast the enemies are (maybe also crop growth speed), a health bar instead of instant death, and more crops that have different values. maybe a shop for ship upgrades would be cool too, but i wouldnt see it as necessary at all, probably less needed than the other suggestions. still an enjoyable little game as is!
Not bad, but definitely in a rough draft state at the moment where it doesn't have a significant gameplay loop yet.
Flying around and collecting crops is pretty fun due to the nice classic Asteroids-esque physics, and there are some interesting subtle touches like how the crops grow up and even sway when you pass by them, as well as how you can get caught in a planets orbit if you stray too close, leading to a bit of risk if you just go full speed all the time which makes you think more about movement.
But at the end of the day, it just didn't feel like the game had much to it and gets repetitive and pointless rather quickly, as it is lacking any sort of goal, scoring system or time limit to give incentives to planning out a route efficiently or racking up combos with big hauls, lacking significant and varied opposition beyond the dumb chasers that can be easily avoided by always gunning the engine, and lacking any cool risk/reward mechanics to spice things up (like maybe hauling a lot of crops weighs you down, but gets you a better cash-out if you take the risk to do so).
It also didn't help that the game was very lackluster on the graphics and audio front, so there's no juice or satisfying punch to the game yet either.
Certainly could be good if it had some more work done to it, and I do understand how tough it is to make a game in those incredibly short game jam time limits, but I gotta grade it for what it is currently, which is unfinished, I feel.
i was intrigued at first. was hoping for a bit of an open world type deal with upgrades and stuff. but was pretty disappointed when some random red blob killed me instantly and ended the game.
Great, needs a bit of polish though. And perhaps allow something where you can shoot wheat behind you as a bullet? That way when being chased by the enemies you can choose to sacrifice some cargo for survivability.
