Although Green Reaper is already the perfect game, by the end of the Utah October Jam, some of the team had a vision of an even perfecter game; thus, we (Julian Liechty, Grayson Spencer, William Erignac, Peter Sweeney, and Patrick McHenry) stuck around to refine the harvesting experience. Over the span of a little over a month, we’ve made a lot of changes to the initial project and decided to publicize them (even though they haven’t been pushed to the project on itch). Here is our progress:
Pretty Pixels
Despite being conceptualized and created in the rapid frenzy of the initial game jam, our dev team was excited about the glow in the dark pixel art style that The Green Reaper had taken on. Though happy with our art style, we understood that some assets would need some updates.
This meant looking at all the sprites, deciding what should stay, what should go, and what needed to be reworked.
The first piece on this list was the happy little corn sprites. While the original sprites were a good starting point, we felt that there was plenty of room to improve. The most apparent addition we decided upon was including the entire corn stalk in the sprite. Initially concepted to be much more clumped together and with a solid backdrop, the corn stalks had no base. With the more open view this was a necessary addition. We tried a few designs which are shown below, iterating from a more cartoony, exaggerated style to a more realistic, reserved depiction.
Once we found a design we felt happy with, work began on idle and harvest animations.
From the feedback received from players, we realized the next asset that could use revising was the tileset. In layman's terms, these are the sprites that form the background of the map. Our original tileset was binary, which created a hard line between dirt and grass tiles. We decided a gradient would both feel much more natural for the background. To do this we crafted a rule tile, which looks at the position of the surrounding tiles and adjusts the sprite accordingly. This way we can make organic, procedurally generated shapes that have gradients on all sides.
Additionally, after revising both the corn sprites and the rule tile we found that the dirt tile could still use some adjustments. Through alternative patterns and color schemes, we found a texture that felt much more natural without overcrowding the screen.
Our final update for this sprint was to work on some minor house keeping items. This included a refined title screen, added shadows on objects, and implementing a rule tile for the fence system.
Nuts and Bolts
One of the most common criticisms we received from playtesters for Green Reaper was the short duration of the game (and the spontaneous ending, but that’s a topic for a future dev. log). With a small, unchanging map, Green Reaper didn’t offer much in terms of replayability. Hence our biggest development…
Procedural Generation:
Sick and tired of harvesting the same field over and over again? Introducing procedurally-generated maps!
Harvest all your favorite starchy and squashy vegetables in organic patterns of massive proportions:
Each map has a multitude of cleared-out paths that connect various regions for exploration.
The Small(er) Stuff:
Ghost Pepper Buff: the Ghost Pepper now lets the reaper move through corn without being slowed.
Without a doubt, the tier list for the on-release plant power-ups looks something like this:
It’s not that the Ghost Pepper upgrade was bad per se, it’s just that Exploding Pumpkin and FrankenZini were significantly more useful. Now, with the ability to ignore plant slow, the Reaper can speed through any part of the map, which is even more useful considering the dense corn patches of procedurally-generated levels.
Dynamic layering: objects lower on the field appear on top of objects higher up on the field.
On release, Green Reaper used static layers - the Reaper was always on top of the corn, and powerups were always behind the corn. This produced some jarring reality-breaking results, where an object that looks like it should be in front of another object is behind it. With dynamic layering, the rules of basic depth are restored.
Corn slowing hitboxes have shrunk.
To further sell that Green Reaper exists in a 3D world, the corn’s hitboxes for slowing the player have been vertically squashed, and centered near the base of the plant. Before, if the reaper made any contact with a corn sprite - even if they were only touching the tip of a plant - they would be slowed. This made movement through loose fields precarious, and felt unrealistic; if the bottom of the reaper sprite is touching the top of the corn sprite, the reaper isn’t really in the corn, it’s just behind the corn, hence the hitbox modifications.
When the Reaper walks behind corn, the corn sprite fades.
Now that the reaper can be behind corn, we decided to dim corn in front of the reaper to enhance the reaper’s visibility.
Corn plays an animation when hit.
There are many great mysteries of the universe: “What is the meaning of life?”, “Are we living in a simulation?”, “Do extraterrestrial creatures exist?”; but, all of these questions tremble in the wake of the Ultimate Unknown: “Wait, what corn did I hit?” Yes, whether you’re scything a large patch at a low level, or hitting a pumpkin, it can be difficult to identify which tiles of corn have been partially harvested. Hit animations mitigate this issue by highlighting the crops that are closer to cultivation.
Plant priority: the scythe now prioritizes which plants to hit during a swing.
One of the most irritating parts of the on-release version of Green Reaper was precision-harvesting (i.e. trying to harvest one plant out of a bunch of plants). This was because if the scythe touched multiple plants in the same frame and had a limited number of AOE levels, the plant(s) it chose to hit were, effectively, random. To solve this issue, we implemented a priority system, where if the scythe touches multiple plants at the same time, it will choose which plants to hit based on a predefined priority. Here are the plant priority rules:
Exploding Pumpkin > FrankenZini > Ghost Pepper > Corn
In the case of a tie, the plant closest to the center of the scythe’s hitbox is selected.
Tooltips.
Ever wonder what the funny pictures in the upgrade screen mean? Hover over them and now you will know.
For the Curious:
The Careful Crafting of Procedurally-Generated Maps:
First we run a Conway’s Game-Of-Life simulation with discrete tile states - white tiles are fertile, black ones are not:
Next we run a Gaussian Blur filter - this gives us a tile fertility spectrum:
Afterwards, we carve out the paths and circles for exploration - the paths are cubic Hermite splines:
Finally, we use thresholds to determine which tiles will have plants, and what kinds of plants each tile will have - a fence is added around the border to keep the Reaper in-bounds:
Note: Each picture is from a different map.
On the Horizon
Stay tuned for more updates, including enemies, obstacles, and much much more.
Note: Please ignore any and all green rectangles, they do not deserve to attract your interest and are not related to any future features that we may be prototyping.