Goba Day

An interesting take on the theme! A bit sad and frightening, though, but it sets quite the mood so it's a plus :) Nice visuals and sounds! The tips appearing one by one are a nice alternative to a dull tutorial.

One suggestion I have is to make the goba spawning more intuitive. In my playthroughs, the always ended up stuck on the field's edge (where they don't grow well, as per the tips) and there seems to be no way to fix that. Maybe the player should be able to replant the fruits or select where newly planted fruits should go? The tips also say that they need some space to grow, but it's hard to see how much space exactly. Maybe there should be a square/hex grid of planting places, which would allow for strict planting rules and add a new interesting mechanic to the game.

Anyways, fun & well-executed idea, great job!

Goba!
seriously this game is so intense

All the Goba for all the lil goobers :) Yummy game to look at, listen to, and play!

Nice! Like the graphics, the sounds, and the general atmosphere.

At my first try it took me some time to understand that I could feed people, so many died after the first 5 years. Maybe having a tip before the first year would help. Then I had quite a lot of people at 70 and lost because I used every fruit in the farm: the tip about retiring at 70 made me think that I could use everything at 65… which was not the case.

At my second try I managed to win however… with 3 points.

Don't get fooled people - Its like in fallout 2. 95% chance is really 20%.

I got the similar idea. Hard dicisions always come after harvest, big or small. Well produced. Love it

Wow man, awesome game! Snappy interactions, cool sound FX, overall great game with a nice idea. Perfect for a gamejam, but it would be cool to see it grow to a final, polished game! Nice work, hats off

Fantasstic Work for my first try héhé (the two dead are by Hunger in my first years, befor i understand that they all have to eat)
Great game design idea ! music gives a lot to the experience! Art is great too!

Maybe a little too easy for fruit management part. I never really had any questions about which one to choose. But i like a lot the space management idea.

A bit too dark to my taste. And nice to see you in here @jonas-tyroller! Ate all fruit at age of 70, we were I think a population of around 7..8, regret nothing. Nice run, ha!

This game is super intense, and interesting gameplay. I absolutely love the graphics, probably the best graphics I've seen so far

@lisyarus Very fair points in your suggestions. Thanks for playing and sharing your thoughts!

@bardia-crunch Extreeeeme Gobagaming!!!

@fluri Goober always gets a Goba!

@loig Ah yeah the same thing happened to me once. I think you should just not be able to uproot the last Goba plant but we didn't manage to implement that in time.

@titos2k haha no seriously, we didn't mess with the chances, they're all what they say they are :)

@leoatopos Cool, I should test your game too then! Thank you for playing and for your kind words!

@zahkros Thanks! I think we scoped it pretty well for the jam :) A more intricate version would be nice but at the moment, we both don't have the capacity for it ^^ Feel free to steal the idea though, I also think there's still more potential here ^^

@roroto-sic Hey, that's a really good first result! Almost top marks :)

@lerg Thank you for playing and leaving a comment! Too dark in terms of visuals or in terms of content?

@flaming-aardvark Thank you so much! I'm flattered that you like my art :)

@yaen content, gloomy.

Ayyy 13 points !
Really great game, I got way more into it than I thought I would lol. At first I was a bit frustrated that there was no tutorial but then I realized the idea of bringing tips later into the game to increase replayability, I love that !
One small issue was that I was not able to take back a fruit from someone if I wanted to move it before ending the turn. Still very fun nonetheless, well done :)

Jonas and Yaen! Very happy to see you guys on here.

This was a very well-polished title. I enjoyed learning the first round by experimentation, which I felt the game allowed me to do without being too punishing or frustrating (the tips between years were also helpful). After the first game, my town was a bit of a horror. Poor Sora :( She's seen too much!

I realized that the game was balanced a little on the easier side, which I think was more than appropriate for my playstyle. Sometimes the RNG seemed a little harsh, but it seemed like anything higher than 80% was a pretty safe bet. I had no trouble keeping the field of gobas full. The animations, soft artwork, and music were all very calming!

I loved this game! Amazing job. Art was cool, and I loved the concept of trying to keep the villagers alive. Lots of ways you could expand too if you wanted to add more to the game later!

Great game! It gave me ritual/tribic vibes and the risk taking was fun. My score at the end was a 7.

It was pretty fun, the gameplay is cool, I love play with lives of people ^^. HOWEVER apparently I can't become a great farmer... (My score -8pts) :)))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))

Hi, congrats on making a wonderful good feel game. The music is soothing, the art colors are warm. Although the game deals with death so that is sort of contradictory with that. Nonethless it was fun to see how things will turn up. Gameplay wise , my suggestion would be to add more dynamics to make it different everytime.

Great balance of risk and reward made this a good satisfying game. A tiny bit more individuality would've gone a long way to make me more attached to the people, there were quite a few repeated names in my villages. Now I just want to know what a Gobafruit tastes like?

Oh boy, this game really tested my humanity- No matter what I do somebody will pass as a result, and the point system encourages pragmatic players to re-evaluate their "survival of the fittest" approach via rewarding empathy.

Additionally, the minor details of the goba fruit's growth properties is really intuitive and well thought out. You guys need a separate "Game Design" category!

Of course the art and sound/music is spot on!
A touching, well thought-out game that was a pleasure to play! ^~^

Very unique game! Loved everything about it... The ambience, the lighting that switches every so often, the sound effects, all just tied together really well to create a beautiful atmosphere. Very relaxing.

As for the gameplay itself, at first, I didn't really know what was going on and what I had to do, but those cleverly placed tips throughout the game made me replay the game with the additional knowledge that I thought I had. I got an 18 on the 2nd try, and became curious as to whether I could just feed everyone as long as I space the fruits enough. I was wrong. Made me had to make more careful decisions, and having a lack of fruits really made it all the more difficult.

Overall, the nice unique and simple mechanics accompanied by the soothing atmosphere, this game is definitely up there in the ranks!

Really unique concept. First run didn't really understood but on second run i manage to survive with 7 people. Congrats !

I love that the game loop is simple but in the same time deep.
The player is forced to be strategic, which I love. The serious(dark?) atmosphere here is also fitting pretty nice. Juicy controls just underline the overall very enjoyable and fun game! Good Job! :thumbsup:

At first glance, this game is quite beautiful, so much so that I accidentally killed like 7 of my little dudes on during the first round, but love the god rays (or maybe just the lighting in general). Now that i think about it, the lighting is very well complemented by the dark tone of the nature of the game, a bit too soft (not in a bad way) for how many people i killed. I guess thats just what happens in a harvest, you gotta lose some.

wooooow

i just finished it and i have shivers. this game is really moving. One of the rare of the jam where i'm really invested in harvesting. this game is powerful, i'll have it in mind for a long time i think.

atmosphere is great, the music is awesome, how people and tombs age… i mean i can go like this for a long time.

in a nutshell: excellent job!

@adamsmccall Good score :) Glad you liked our way of introducing the game rules bit by bit. And hey, you can't just take fruit away from someone you just gave it to, that's so mean! :D

@hawkin Damn feeling sad for Sora now :frowning: We did try not making it too hard to have a satisfying experience and score, since in game jams, it's nice if you get to play through it and leave with a nice memory of your experience. You did end up getting an exceptionally good score though! And yet there's still lots of room up, I think the highest score I know of so far is 26 :)

@secrt101 Thanks a lot for playing and leaving such nice words for us :)

@classic-mushroom a score of 7 seems to be quite normal. GG! :D And thank you for playing, I'm glad you enjoyed the risk/reward aspects

@iesnihs Ohhh you're an evil one aren't you? :D Try to go below -10, you get another text result ;)

@vivek-sharma20 What is death if not a necessary part of life? Thanks for playing and for your suggestions! I agree that some more random events happening would make the game even more interesting for repeated runs. It's just that this time we really didn't want to take on another project and were committed to finishing everything in a polished state well within the jam time. I think that worked out pretty well for us :)

@fizzbark ah I agree, it would be great to have more individual costumes, hats perhaps, and of course can always have more names in the list. Kinda hard to come up with all those names. It's already over 100! :D The tricky part was to try to go for mostly gender neutral names so the reproduction system doesn't need to be more complicated ^^

Oh and a goba fruit tastes delicious and has a rich hearty taste with a juicy texture to it.

@pazzi Hey there, quite glad you chose to play our game too, as I did really love yours :) Your comment makes me happy, thanks for all the kindness! We had exactly that issue early on of there being no benefit to feeding the elders so we decided it would make sense to be kind and let them have a dignified old age. Score is an easy way to justify that ^^

Now that you say it, kind of strange that there's no system design category! Yours would certainly score quite highly there too!

@no-whone Thank you very much! Your words are so kind, I was smiling ear to ear as I read your comment :)

@jonqs Thank you for playing & commenting! Glad you gave it another go after the first run :)

@the1 Thank you very much for your comment and for playing our game! It's interesting how some people interpret the atmosphere as relaxed and happy and others describe it as serious and dark. I guess it depends on how you play a bit

@infecsean Very thoughtful! It was important to us that saving everyone would be really difficult (though it is possible) Sad about those 7 people. Hope at least some were due to old age ^^

@amarokczukay Thank you so much! Your kindness warms my heart and I'm happy to read our game is having an impact :)

Great game! The visuals and the music are astonishing. Also I like tips. At first I was a bit clueless what to do and made many mistakes (spent too much gobas, then killed half of the people), but tips feel natural and teach game mechanics well. Overall, game looks polished and I enjoyed playing it!

That was kinda dark and intense, i love it and art is so good!!

Impressive Game,

Really good idea, it's a very hard topic but the rendering by its style and animations allow, I think, to manage this in a "kind" way.

Put name and age on people plus the fact that the tombstones are decaying make things more intense to me.

I think I would have turned the % into something else (dice or other) because our feelings about percentages are quite biased and can be quite frustrating (there is GDC on it if I remember well). But the game is already very very very polish ! :)

@smeljey Thank you! I'm glad you like our audiovisual presentation :)

It's cool how the tips worked well for many people. It's kind of like you make mistakes in the beginning of your farming carreer and then you learn from what people say about it.

@dorzhieva-yana Thank you very much! Happy you enjoy my art

@aune Thanks for playing and leaving a thoughtful comment. I would have loved to do even more to create this emotional intensity you're speaking of. Like what if some people had accessories like hats and stuff and then if they die, you see the hat or their favourite toy etc. on their grave...

The point about percentages is very fair. Not sure how else to show an accurate chance representation that feels more intuitive though. There's this 1:10 1:50 kind of representation but I don't know if people can understand this stuff better. I think whenever you roll a 1 with dice and every other number would have gotten you a win, that feels unfair too, just like when you lose in a 70/30% bet. It just doesn't feel like that's supposed to happen lol :D

Nice cute simple game! Maybe a bit too much luck base. I would have let the possibility to give multiple fruit to a single person! But the game is well executed and the mood is great! Congrats!

Ooh, very serious topic, but well executed and a great fit to the theme! Simple, but captivating. My biggest gripe is that the game only teaches you how to play after you've made several potentially devastating decisions due to just not knowing how it works, and especially with subject matter like this, it's a serious bummer.

Very impressive and strong entry, great work!

Fitting music, grim and interesting take on theme, great gameplay, very polished. I can't find anything to complain about, really.

Great resource management game! On my first play trough I thought: "Ha, I've got this. Just don't keep too much people around and you can get through the game easy". How I was wrong when I've got the final screen :sweat_smile: On my second playthorugh I've done a proper resource management, trying to keep every vulnerable villager well fed, and getting enough offspring to replace the old generation and managed to get on Ok ending :slight_smile:

Loved all the aspects of the game. Gameplay is interesting and unique, visuals look good and original and sound design is top notch as well. Good job!

THANK YOU for makeing it playable in browser.

Very interesting take on the theme. It really got me hooked once I got into it, and the points at the end made me wanna play even more.

You really knocked it out of the park with the atmosphere! The weight of deciding who to give a better chance of survival lay heavy on my shoulders, and all of the game's elements came together perfectly to create the grim mood that fostered that feeling. What an unenviable post to hold.

➕interesting interpretation of the theme

➕great sounds, music and graphics

➕"Wholeness". The player does not just make a few moves - he gets older, like the inhabitants.

➕You may feed Jonas

➖Hints are too fast, i missed half of them

Fan talk + shameless plug:
Hey so i guess you are doing another incognito jam, and i ran into this completely by accident :)). Ive been following Johans for some time now and wanted to say thanks for all the videos... :heart:
I would really love to ask you to check my game out, because well after making it and someone mentioning it i realized i took a bit of inspiration from islanders without knowing... So i hope it is fine with you since i maybe thought on working on the game a bit further! :))

Review:
Dont expect ill go easy on you just for being a fan!
I like the games mood as a whole. But i feel like adding some descriptions to the humans would go a long way here. Because if not, like this they are just reduced to numbers and percentages sadly. I dont feel the emotional weight behind it. I like the music and the art style, its really well done. And i really like the way you introduce the game mechanics one each day. Its a fast game so it makes us want to replay more, and god knows i did about 10+ times, but sadly my best was only 15.. :))

It was a real pleasure stumbling on this and i wish the best of luck to both of you on your new city builder game! :heart:

liked the game a lot very dark and polished game.

I really liked the game although sometimes leaving stuff to chance i find a little frustrating