Jack the Reaper
Overall★★★★★★★★★★2.85
Fun★★★★★★★★★★2.77
Innovation★★★★★★★★★★2.73
Theme★★★★★★★★★★2.85
Graphics★★★★★★★★★★2.90
Audio★★★★★★★★★★1.41
Humor★★★★★★★★★★2.32
Mood★★★★★★★★★★2.50
Jack The Reaper
Jack is a farmer who wishes to someday own his own farm.
This is an early 1980s arcade game (in the vein of Pac Man) starring Jack the Reaper a farmer who wishes to someday own his own farm.
Each plot of land needs to be tended to nine times to yield maximum harvest.
Avoid GRUMPY farmers. They will steal part of your harvest!
If Jack's hoard grows big enough he can buy a farm of his own!
Here is a the
HTML5 version on itch and the source code is over here on itch.
Credits:
Made in unity 2021 for HTML5 using the commodore 64 palette (sprites in Aseprite). Freeware font is
Arcade Classic by Glitch.
Audio:
Note: Audio didn't make it in before the deadline so there is no sound. I recommend cranking up the excellent 2021 Jimmy Barnes album Flesh and Blood (In particular the tracks: Flesh and Blood, Around in Circles, and I Move Slow). For some background Jimmy Barnes is the amazing Scottish-Australian classic rock artist who has one of the greatest rock voices of all time (he has been in the business 50yrs) and is also meme-known as 'The Screaming Cowboy'.
Brief Postmortem:
A part of me thinks I should have prioritzed audio differently but then something else would have had to go and I generally like where it ended up gameplay-wise. John Romero says to do the features to completion and from that perspective I would have put the audio in for the player as I added the player and the enemy as I added the enemy and so on and so forth. The other thing I would have liked to tweak is the UI because the font size and camera size too were a little off once I uploaded to itch. I fixed the most glaring problems in the last 15 minutes before the deadline. I intend to fix this game up or remake it soon because I like this game and think it has good bones. I made a mistake at the last minute: I had to change a debug value a few minutes after the deadline to make the game properly beatable. I feel silly for having left it in. I noted that in a devlog with both the before and after in zip attached to the devlog.
Comments25
I kept transpooting to other farms and finally found a good branched map with only one monster. I settled there and won easily, with no more new challenges.
Good work!
Good entry!
I also won on the first map generated, and actually didn't realize there were multiple maps until I saw the comments here. I played a few more and I enjoyed the variety of strategies, I would have enjoyed having to progress through the levels. The ones with more enemies were challenging, and would love to see maybe either faster enemies, or some change in enemy behavior or speed over time (maybe another nod to the pacman homage?).
Overall, well done!
During first playthrough I fully finished the first level and the game was over. I was a bit supprised because I expected there will be more levels. Then I noticed I can jump between different levels. The "n" key was effectively a "pannic button". It makes the game much easier because I can always escape from tight situations. I think it would be better not to cycle through ALL level but each next level should have more enemies. This way each time you press the panic button you need to take the risk that it will be only harder and harder. This would also require that every level has at least 2 enemies (so you can get trapped and be forced to use the panic button).
When it comes to mashing up some more classic games I though about bomberman. For example if the field is fully harvested (9) you can place a bomb on it, which can kill or temporarily disable enemies within range but also resets fields in range to 0 (so it has pros and cons and player needs to decide).
@owca Thank you for the positive and constructive feedback!
I appreciate you both. :)
BTW the keyboard mapping isn't 'correct' in that it doesn't use the physical location of WASD but rather relies on WASD being in the same place in the player's keyboard layout, so I had to change my layout for this game.
This is not too uncommon here but some game do it right as well.
@gotanod thank you! I thought about that qbert thing and am not sure why I didn't do this game that way. Probably for Jack the Reaper 2: Reap Harder ;)
Some more risk and reward would go a long way. Levels should probably get harder the longer you stay in them, and it should take longer than an instant to go to the next one. This concept has potential.
I have never used Unity but https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/UIE-Keyboard-Events.html might mean something to you:
> keyCode: The keyCode property returns a character key that corresponds directly to a physical key on an input device, such as a keyboard or joystick. The difference between the character property and the keyCode property is that keyCode represents a physical key, while character represents the entry of a specific character. For example, both a and A return keyCode=KeyCode.A during a keyDownEvent.
I liked escaping the mean farmer. It seems in the win state you can "stash" endlessly by pressing n.
Right now, it is super easy to win, as we can just continue to the next farm when getting into a tight situation. I kinda enjoyed this aspect though, it makes the game more relaxed than it has any right to be :D
Some audio would've indeed gone a long way for this game, but it's fine the way it is. Did you know you can opt-out of categories for rating? Would've been advisable to do that for audio in your case.