Sowscraper

Long Live the Meritocracy of Lucido

INSTRUCTIONS

Meet government quotas by harvesting the correct plants
Grow your plants by keeping them under the correct conditions
Keep those weeds at bay
Decide where your priorities lie...

CONTROLS

Click to select an action from the hotbar
Click on the grid to action on that hex

Right/Middle click and drag to pan camera
Arrow keys to pan camera
Scroll to zoom

STORY

Welcome to the Meritocracy of Lucido where you are a valued member of the community. In an overpopulated world, you have been lucky enough to be chosen as the agricultural maintainer on one of the prestigious Sowscrapers. The position comes with a luxurious 2 bedroom apartment with a window for you and your family, as long as you can prove yourself to be an effective farmer.

Remember, your actions have consequences...

Long Live the Meritocracy of Lucido. Prosperity for All.

DEVELOPMENT

Code and foley by @ciaranw . Graphics by @teto . Code by @joesturge . Music by @naynay116 .

Jam number 7 that Ciaran and I have done together! This time, a couple of friends (Joe and Nay) joined us for the code and music. First time we've had people physically join us at our house which was super fun, although a bit busy!

The first evening, it took us a little while to come up with an idea that we liked and we thought would be interesting for us to make as well as for you guys to play! Eventually, we came up with the puzzle concept with a limited grid space in a world with limited space to grow produce. Initially, we wanted to do a nice, simple idea we could polish a lot since we hadn't all worked together before and we knew it would take us a while to figure it out.

We had a slow start on Saturday with Ciaran and Joe doing a lot of pair programming to get the foundations of the logic, Nay ended up with covid so was dying in our front room, and I was just generally unproductive and not liking anything I drew... Eventually though, they managed to work out how to split the work and I got more into things (Nay was drugged up on cold and flu meds). Joe spent a lot of his initial solo time working on the hex grid which he got working beautifully although, to this day, none of us have any idea how it works.

On Sunday, the simple puzzle game we had thought up somehow evolved into having a storlyine with a choice-dependant ending. As usual, we ended up doing something far more complicated than we had set out to! By the end of Sunday, we had most of the plant logic and UI in place, the foundations of the story engine done and all of the base plant graphics done. Nay had also been alive enough for a bit to write some great background music!

I'd also started on the day/night animation cycle although I no longer wanted to draw anything so, for a while, everything was a hexagon. Which was an upgrade from everything being the Godot logo as we normally end up with pre-graphics. As a tribute to the godot face being in all our games, for the first time, we included the logo in the final game as part of the ending.

The final day was very productive with a long to-do list for each of us but the looming deadline and sheer panic was really very motivating. Ciaran ran around the house in the last two hours running cardboard along radiators and generated some amazing foley as usual. We managed to pull everything together and included all the functionality that we had intended to, which I think may be the first time we have not had to cut features in a jam. Turns out, having a second programmer is significantly more productive!

I hope you enjoy our contrast of cute graphics and dark(ish) story!

Tools

*Engine:* Godot
*Graphics:* Krita
*Music:* Pro Tools
*Foley:* Audacity

Post release changelog:

- Tiny fixes just past the deadline: Final conversation was a turn late, checkboxes weren't visually checking, the tree rustling animation wasn't looping, some of the tooltips were a bit sparse on info.

THANK YOU FOR PLAYING!!