Medium-Sized Field Simulator 2019

Overall★★★★★★★★★★3.10
Fun★★★★★★★★★★2.58
Innovation★★★★★★★★★★3.16
Theme★★★★★★★★★★3.52
Graphics★★★★★★★★★★3.12
Audio★★★★★★★★★★3.13
Humor★★★★★★★★★★2.05
Mood★★★★★★★★★★3.06
Experience the thrill of tending to a medium-sized field. Can you turn your empty field (medium-sized) into a thriving ecosystem? Do battle with invasive weed species through strategic placement of beautiful plants like 'Tree'.

Tutorial (reading this is cheating):
Click on tiles to select, toolbar to perform actions on them (drop or extract water, place plants).
Press end turn when you finish.

Water management is important, parts of the medium-sized field will dry out if they don't have enough water. This looks awful and you will be straight back to managing smaller fields by the end of the year.
Use 'scoop water' to pick up water from sources, use 'water' to distribute around your medium-sized field.

Place plants to get your medium-sized field looking as it should, and to ward off weeds that might appear.
Different plants have different functions, but they must be watered and grown to maturity to perform those functions.

Blue plant: pulls and distributes water to its surroundings

Purply plant: drains water quickly from surroundings, good for depriving weeds of water and killing them. Also good for ruining the surrounding ecosystem.

Tree: defensive plant that can block water drainage when used correctly, prevents scrub from forming.

(you can read again now)
The medium-sized field is yours now. I made it for you.


Tools:

Unity3D

Pyxel Edit

Ableton

Outside Assets:

Background sounds: https://freesound.org/people/Luftrum/sounds/48983/

Font: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/2d/fonts/free-pixel-font-thaleah-140059

Pixel art is my own, but referenced: https://beast-pixels.itch.io/overworld-tileset-grass-biome

screenshot
Genres: simulation

Comments17

zenpj
zenpj7 Oct 2019, 04:34
Seems like the itch.io link is dead?
Sode
Sode7 Oct 2019, 04:34
doesn't work
Sode
Sode7 Oct 2019, 04:35
and sry for the activate windows my computer is broken and it comes the first time I boot my computer (resets every12h) please rate my game
Gold5Games7 Oct 2019, 04:40
Yeah, seems you took the page down?
RoboDoigauthor7 Oct 2019, 04:46
Link should be working again now
AppoxGames
AppoxGames7 Oct 2019, 05:01
Nice game, reminds me of game of life. Goodjob!
KeithSwanger
KeithSwanger7 Oct 2019, 08:36
Really interesting concept! Seems like there could be a lot of depth in this game!
Dominium118 Oct 2019, 19:32
Very cool! But the clicking and checking every plant is frustrating at times, some indicators above them would be great!
Kyle Bowman
Kyle Bowman8 Oct 2019, 19:38
Pretty cool. I couldn't figure out how to play without reading the tutorial lol.
Rodrigo Robles9 Oct 2019, 02:43
Very good, it worths to polish and launch.
carloso
carloso9 Oct 2019, 02:44
I am very interested in the concept, but clicking using a track pad made this game difficult. It might be more fun on a mobile device, though, given the touch screen.
GhostGoatsGames10 Oct 2019, 06:02
This was cool, I've never played a turn based farming game before. Biggest thing to me was that the ui for how watered a plant was didn't update after watering the plant. You had to leave and come back which was a little annoying. Overall great job though.
Taddl10 Oct 2019, 20:31
Interesting concept. Are the plants supposed to die after a certain number of turns alive? I think it would be nice if the plants would have a little more longevity (I am probably doing something wrong).

Chill little game.
anticdope11 Oct 2019, 00:35
I love this concept! A turn based plant growth sim is a great idea. Seem like it uses some sort of game of life algorithm for weed growth? It is very relaxing at the beginning, although eventually it became tedious to check the state of every plant.
Archimagus
Archimagus11 Oct 2019, 01:38
Well, this was different. I read the tutorial and went back to play again, still got overrun by weeds. Not sure what I need to do.
Still, an interesting concept.
RoboDoigauthor11 Oct 2019, 04:49
Thanks all for your comments, very helpful! There were definitely some balance issues with lifetime of plants and weed spreading that I didn't have time to play with before submission. Also definitely needed more visual indicators and UI polishing @ghostgoatsgames.
@taddl : the plants do die out after a certain number of turns alive, I agree I set this too low for most plants and I should have put a better visual indicator for that.
@anticdope : basically all behavior is to do with the water drainage algorithm, every tile leaks water to, or drains from, surrounding tiles depending on what occupies the tile. The weeds appear randomly, but they suck up alot of water which leads to scrub tiles which also suck up water. This ended up producing something a bit game-of-life like in the way that scrub spreads.
@archimagus : the way I set the tile properties up, the weeds can almost only be killed by completely surrounding with purple plants, again due to the way the water mechanism works. I agree that's a bit unintuitive!
sorlok
sorlok29 Oct 2019, 05:23
A neat take on the theme --I think making it mouse controls only made the watering kind of tedious (although I know I'm one to talk...). Seems like it could be a fairly relaxing kind of game. If reading the tutorial is cheating, then maybe having a log of everything that takes place in game? Or something else to figure out what does what.

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