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A jam submission

Heather's Hectic HarvestView game page

Help Heather complete her harvest as much as possible before daylight ends!
Submitted by Topaz 'N' a Pod Games — 8 hours, 21 minutes before the deadline
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Heather's Hectic Harvest's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Jam Theme#133.2003.200
Gameplay#152.6002.600
Pregnancy Content#163.0003.000
Overall#162.9502.950
Creativity#213.0003.000

Ranked from 5 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

  • Cute art splash for the main screen! I liked the BGM too. It wasn't extremely loud, and it was smooth. Nice work on the character designs on the MC and the little helper bot that follows Heather!
  • The fabled Baby% speedrun itself. A fun if somewhat stressful little game all about maintaining your combo for bigger tum. I quite liked the various needs that popped up with larger sizes, necessitating more and more optimization of a route to not lose your combo, and the way Heather visibly had to shift her stance and adjust to larger sizes was a lovely detail! I wish there was a bit more time to really see the big sizes, or some kind of upgrade system to make maintaining and increasing combos a bit easier, but that's nitpicks, really.
  • A short but fun little game. Mechanics are simple yet challenging to keep up with. Pregnancy content wise we have the main character who is constantly growing while performing work. As she grows you have new challenges that appear that you have to maintain. Gameplay is a simple feed of growing plants and delivering them but also managing the various needs of the character. Creativity we have a 3D world were you can see the pregnancy of the character as she grows. Which leads into the progression where as you work you can actively see the characters pregnancy progress in real time. Nice game!
  • An interesting game that's simple yet "hectic". With a few tweaks under the hood to make timers a little more forgiving and adding in a "proceed to next day" mechanic, I could see myself playing this for an hour every so often to chill out.

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Comments

Submitted(+1)

Took me a bit to  figure out the gameplay loop, but it is pretty satisfying once you've got it. Love the style too! Would love to see more!

Developer(+1)

Appreciate the comment Impish! I definitely will look into clarity on our next version whenever that may be but we're glad you enjoyed it! I'll be sure pass the style comments off to RG! Thank you again!

(+1)

Short n sweet game, definitely could use some touchups and a quick tutorial after the intro might not go amiss, but overall a respectably polished game for what appears to be the dev(s)'s first game, and on the time limit inherent to a jam, to boot.

Quick game summary/kind-of-tutorial? for anyone who for whatever reason can't be bothered to play the game: basically a super simple farming sim that makes Heather get bigger the better you do. Took me until my third attempt to actually figure out how things work and what the proper way to go about things was, but once you figure it out it's not hard to get a rhythm goin. Bottom-left is the seed crates, grab one and shove it in the nearest plot in the bottom-right, do that six times (you have nine plots but realistically the plants grow fast enough that, with the speed that you can do a lap in, by the time you harvest plant 6, 1 will be grown again, so plots 7-9 go unused). Once you've planted your sixth seed your first fruit should be grown, pick it up, take it to the top-left truck to add it to the pile. Putting fruit in the truck is what increases your combo (shown in the top left of the HUD, not to be confused with the top-left of the farm), and keeping your combo, or streak as the game calls it, is the main objective. Take seed from the crates, put in farm plot, snag fruit from any fully-grown plant, run to truck, run back to seed crates. That's a lap. To keep your streak up, don't take too long between fruit dropoffs, and don't let the meters on any of your demands run out. Demands are difficulty increases, any randomly-chosen one of which will show up around halfway through the day, assuming you're doing at least moderately well: heat, a hunger for smoothies, and the urge to shit. These demands will appear as a green meter below your combo meter and will drain over time, and if they fully empty out, will break your streak as a consequence. In case of heat, hit the water station in the mid-left, and since heat in particular drains quick, do that pretty much every lap. For smoothies, take a fruit and shove it in the top-mid blender (which yes, does mean that you will have to split your fruit deliveries between the truck and your stomach if you get that demand). Finally the bathroom on your ship is in the top-left, so while it's a little out of the way, it's probably the easiest demand to handle given its slow drain alongside not having a resource cost like smoothies do. Assuming you can keep making deliveries while handling demands, your streak will stay up, and Heather's growth rate is pretty directly tied to the combo. Keep moving and keep delivering to make her big, since the game ends at sundown.

Now, the opinion piece: The game is extremely simple in its gameplay loop, and does have some issues and gripes, first of which is that while it would definitely be interesting to see a multi-day progression (or hell, even a story mode if the dev really wants to go wild after the jam!), based on the fact that you go to the title screen after the day is done, I believe it's unintentional that anything on the farm, including Heather herself, will be as you left it when starting a new day without fully closing the game, thus allowing you to spend a day effectively "prepping" the farm before a real run, and getting a headstart on Heather's belly between days. Furthermore it seems there's a "win condition", though I hesitate to actually call it that, because once Heather reaches a certain size threshold, the day will automatically end regardless of the time, and due to the aforementioned permanence of things between runs, that means that once you've "won" you have to close out of the game otherwise any subsequent days will just instantly end the second you start them. (I managed to reach a "winning" state in just two runs once I had a rhythm down, a lil bit proud of that.) Nevertheless, the models and general look of the game is super cute and well-done, the animation for Heather is pretty solid (especially with the attention to detail of actually including a modification to her walk cycle when she gets big enough) and none of the issues present are game-breaking in any real way. I'd give it a good 9 outta 10.

(Though I can't actually find the spot to provide an official rating for the jam rather than just an excessively-long-winded comment. Whoops.)

(1 edit) (+1)

Took a while to understand the main gameplay of the game but eventually I got a handle on it. While a bit slippery on the control of Heather herself on WASD, the game is a simple and enjoyable experience.

I do find it amusing that replaying the game after the day ends will keep the current state of the last run, which means at some point the day will just automatically end with you doing nothing. At the very least we get to catch a glimpse of what I assume is her final size though!

Developer

Thank you for the comment and playing!
I thought I had made sure on replay all values were correctly reset but looks like something slipped through the cracks! Thank you for letting me know! I will have to do a quick bug fix and release an update sooner than expected it seems, maybe while I am at it I'll look into the movement sooner than later!
Again I appreciate you letting me know about that last part and I thank you again for your kind words!

Few choice words of positive feedback;

- art style great and its awesome that its 3D and animated

- Remove the day / night constraint and put an option that allows the player to choose when to end the day

- Allow Heather herself to hold an extra pumpkin instead of one at time as it makes gameplay feel slow

- The streak itself whilst a cool element has to be slower with how floaty she is as you have to pick n rush to increase it

- Explain the blender does as It isn't at all

All in all Solid 7/10

Developer(+1)

Thank you for the feedback!
I'll be sure to pass along the art comment to RG, she worked hard on all the design and such an amazing job so I'm happy to see her getting praise here!
As said in other post, the movement and communication are things I will be improving with a next update. I wish I had time to improve that during the jam but time wasn't on my side.
As for the rest, I think moving forward I'm going to look into extending the daylight and changing how mechanics work to encourage something more long form. As is, I dislike how fast and short the game is and I can agree that some mechanics lead to frustrations rather then fun challenge. This does give me a great platform in which to bounce off of though so I greatly appreciate it! 

Very fun, would like to see it's fully finished state. I was able to reach the point the day automatically ends. I was able to figure out an ideal routing for maintaining my streak and handle the other functions.

Initially I didn't understand the different functions (temp, morning sickness, craving) but I was able to quickly figure it out. Will say Heather feels really floaty even when fully preg, but other than that it's a fun game.

Developer

Greatly appreciate you playing and commenting about your experience!
Judging from a lot of the reception we will definitely look into getting a more polished version in the coming months! No promises on when but it is on our plans moving forward!
Next time around communicating to the player will be a much larger priority for me so I will be sure to focus on that! Additionally, Heather's floaty movement is something I will look into correcting. Worked for what this version is, but I do also want to look into ways of making her preg heft realistic while still fun. I will be writing these comments down so thank you again for the feedback!

Submitted

I got to 28%. I like the game, but I do think it needs more polish. I am not really sure what the icons do. When the overheat icon got low I ran to the water, but I was not sure why. The music was nice. I hope to see this game reach its full potential. 

Developer

Thank you so much for playing! I definitely agree that more polish is needed, I would have loved to do much more but due to personal time restraints this is best I could do. There was intention to make pop ups that explain what each need is as they appear, i.e. morning sickness, hunger/cravings, and hot flashes, but with running out of time and limit work schedules for me that was sacrificed. If or when we update it I'll be sure to add clarity and more feedback! Additionally I should have clarified that a higher streak means you grow more.
Appreciate the kind words, and thank you again for playing!