[Prototype] Sky Farm
Hey all, I made this for Isloation Jam and I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. So I thought I'd get some more local feedback before I have a bash at expanding it a little bit.
It's called Sky Farm and it's a management game about building farms on a floating chunk of earth. If you like designing things and optimizing systems, then this'll be right up your street. A lot of it is inspired by Mini Metro.
I've gotten a pretty good response so far, so I think the design definitely has some potential. So I'd like to expand the scope of the game and explore the design space a little more. But I'm also very weary of adding any more complexity. If I can, I'd like to find more systems that are easy to understand, but provide a lot of room for optimization and reward clever/unexpected designs.
I'd also really love to hear feedback on the UX, feedback and teaching fronts in particular, because I feel like that's where the game is currently failing the hardest.
The game is downloadable and playable in your web browser on Itch. I recommend a standalone build and a mouse for the best experience.
https://squidcor.itch.io/sky-farm
Thanks for playing!
It's called Sky Farm and it's a management game about building farms on a floating chunk of earth. If you like designing things and optimizing systems, then this'll be right up your street. A lot of it is inspired by Mini Metro.
I've gotten a pretty good response so far, so I think the design definitely has some potential. So I'd like to expand the scope of the game and explore the design space a little more. But I'm also very weary of adding any more complexity. If I can, I'd like to find more systems that are easy to understand, but provide a lot of room for optimization and reward clever/unexpected designs.
I'd also really love to hear feedback on the UX, feedback and teaching fronts in particular, because I feel like that's where the game is currently failing the hardest.
The game is downloadable and playable in your web browser on Itch. I recommend a standalone build and a mouse for the best experience.
https://squidcor.itch.io/sky-farm
Thanks for playing!
Comments
Also not really sure what the pen offered over a normal farm.
Interested to see what you come up with!
Huzzah! :D
And also after playing Clash Royale, I'm feeling like there could be lots of variation in speed, rate of doing things, etc, that could add a lot of emergent depth :)
Huzzah! :D
Stopped when I got and out of memory crash on web gl. Gotta love that web gl, huh!?! ;) Also in case I missed it, and invert mouse axis option is necessary for weirdos like me ;)
Love it, super clever, and optimising hard is definitely winning it. :)
If you're looking to give players an easier inroad, I think you could make the first map smaller and let folks get the hang of optimising within a smaller space. The more complex endeavours can come later. For easier at-a-glance understanding of crop growth rates, I'd like to see a watered, ungrown crop field be a slightly different colour to the grown ones. It's easier to get that reading well at all possible angles.
You also have the red squares to denote where you're about to place something, and I imagine that additional markers can come in context to demonstrate which tiles are affected by placement (maybe small arrows pointing in four directions for a pending tile of water, to make it clear which directions would be good placements for crops.)
I imagine that the safest avenue of expansion / complexity would be a limited resource for allowing new tile placement (ie food is stockpiled as a "build" currency). You can control the early parts of a game session this way and actually make it *less* overwhelming for new players because their economy has to be focused on a few tiles. Best results if you allow perfect buyback (Leap Day did this quite well) and make the overall challenge base itself around a time limit.
If you're willing to involve a paradigm of the world itself changing to throw curveballs over time, you could also have game events which adjust, remove, or add tiles (like there's an earthquake, and one tile moves down by one block, and it throws out a part of your plans so you have to demolish and rethink).
End of babbling. Great game. :D
This is something I've been thinking about a bunch. An endless mode is definitely a good thing (endless tinkering is fun!), but I wonder if some kind of time pressure or other adversity would be fun. A definitive end to each level (with the option to continue in sandbox mode) might make the experience feel more complete?
I guess should bump up the memory limit. The default of 256mb is pretty restrictive.
Ahhhh, of course. Duly noted.
Definitely not a bad idea. I don't newcomers to be overwhelmed by too much space.
I'll have to check with the artist about that one :P
Agreed. Much better way of teaching/reinforcing how the tiles interact with each other.
This is actually exactly how the game used to work. I was trying to use currency as a pacing system. I might've been able to do it better, but it was basically just adding frustrating waiting time up until you broke through the wall and currency became meaningless. So I scrapped it and just made everything free.
It might be worth revisiting, but I suspect an "economy" is only interesting if the player is making interesting decisions about how best to spend their money. At the moment, there aren't enough building options and there's no long term vs short term rewards to consider either.
I am intrigued by the perfect buyback and time-limit idea though. As long the player always has something to do, it could work.
Someone in the office mentioned something I thought was interesting... Why not be able to place things on the underside as well? Building a farm all over a vaguely spherical cube might be slightly more compelling in terms of theme, in that it would be more like a small floating moon... although I guess you wouldn't want spherical gravity... in any case, I think I'd feel more satisfied having covered all the surfaces (it might feel more magical I think), and as peasants and crops can stand sideways I feel like some things facing downwards wouldn't break the world... And I suspect there's some extra problem space to be found there (although I don't know whether this would improve the game).
And visually, I desperately want waterfalls falling into the abyss (and, as a stretch goal, a visual indication of how the water moves away from the springs that produce it). It's fluff, but why have a floating island (or planetoid) without the beauty of waterfalls cascading over the edges?
The main thing I'd love here is more things to build, more machines made up of peasants and other moving parts (being me, I'd love for the peasants to have more character, like peasants have needs and buildings/systems can help serve those needs), so long as it maintains some of the elegance you've achieved so far!
Building on all the surfaces is something we discussed but quickly dismissed as being out of jam scope. I do like the idea though, I think it would be immensely satisfying to cover an entire floating object. But it does present a bunch of other design problems.
The fact that water only flows downwards is one of the core components in the current design. I guess the world could be mostly cubic and each face could have its own gravity direction? But then what happens at the edges between gravity faces? irunno. Another very deliberate thing is the distinction between the tops and sides of blocks. Being able to place a market on the side of a block would rob the game of one of its most interesting constraints.
I'd love to hear some of thoughts on these kinds of problems because a fully rotatable world is very appealing if it can me made to work with (and enhance!) the game play. If I do keep a single gravity direction then waterfalls off the sides are an obvious must. This is the direction I'm thinking of expanding in. At the moment, all the levels are the same mechanically; they just exist to give the player a long term goal. I'd love it if playing new levels unlocked new mechanics too. For example, one thing I had in mind was a water wheel that can take water upwards. Then you could have a level where all the water sources start on ground level.
I do really like the simplicity of the game, and I don't want to over-complicate and over-scope by throwing in a bunch of new mechanics. So I'd probably have a subset of all the potential buildings available for each level. Thus allowing interesting constraints to design around by combining mechanics rather than having a globally optimal strategy.
I really don't want to expand the scope too much beyond something like Mini Metro though, I think that game is perfectly scoped, and making a game of that size is very appealing. Plus I also already have a potentially large and complex management game with floating islands to work on already! Yes. Need to think hard about the farmers. At the very least they should be more interesting visually, and provide animated feedback when they are doing something (harvesting crops, delivering goods etc.).
Gaaaargh! Need more time to work on this. I miss my job!
Game is also aesthetically pleasing, except the white light in background hurt my eyes,
zooming seemed a bit to fast or abrupt. Wow those purple clouds look amaze balls.
Took me a while to figure out how to farm the animals, since it only worked from the top and when farmers walked on the side to touch the animals in a horizontal or perpendicular angle.
I also wanted to place the food bowls for animals inside the animal fence, but understand why you did not do it. Maybe visually when a animal fence is placed next to it the art can include a smaller fence with opening to animal fence or something. Also took me a while to figure out the farmers put food into animal food bowls, and it doesn't have to be next to market. Maybe the market could have pipes link to such machines to add another layer of complexity.
Does seem like all you need to do is not allow farmers to walk far to optimise, played until I hit 1000+.
All the best with your game!
Thanks for playing @Boysano! I'm pretty stoked that it distracted you for two hours, that's better than my average of 2 minutes! Yeah, the pens are really confusing. Before I added tooltips the only way to understand the game was if I was standing behind them and explaining it. Some animation when animals eat, drink or get harvested would go a long way towards making the system more transparent. I also really like your suggestion of putting the troughs inside the pens, or at least visually linking them in some way. I think it's a bit more nuanced than that :P
Sill no idea how to get the 4000+ scores though...