Theme : Harvest

Harvest makes me think of fields and crops. While I would like to make a game about that, I want to avoid being one of the many game that does the same thing during a jam. So I chose to go with another take on the theme : The reaper harvesting the sould of people. I considered going for a really dark, creepy game for a while, but I chose instead to go for a joyful/coloful world and mood.

Art Style

I'm very used to making small villages, rock and trees. I have been making a lot of them for maps in Trackmania notably. I was able to make the 3D asset very quickly, given the amount I had to make. Items like garlands are the key to build environment that feels alive. As soon as there are a few of those extra details, it feels like people actually live in this world.

Gameplay

The player is The Reaper, and must harvest the soul of villagers. They only need to get near a villager to kill them. The goal of the game is to get all 3 stars at the end of a level. Stars are given based on how high the player's score is. The player can score more points by killing a villager right at the end of their expected lifetime, represented by a progress bar that fills up over time.

This creates a game in 2 parts, first the player explore the map and figure out which villager to kill first, then in the following attempts they trie to execute their plan.

Results

The game ranked 69th out of 424 compo submissions (1692 in total). It ranked surprisingly poorly, given it's one of my more complete/well made game jam submission but it perfomed well under my average. Some players seem to have been frustrated with not being able to get the perfect score from the first try (as there is missing information at first, you must play a discovery run to understand the level then try again with a plan). This is by design, but either it's not very popular or I should have made it more obvious.