With a growing following and a rapidly closing window of free time, the team over here at Root Monster Studios made a final push for the release of The Green Reaper. This included many changes, varying from massive organizational and design changes to minor bug fixes and improvements. Through lighting overhauls, the addition of enemies, and our new quest system, it was important for us to realize the game we had envisioned and the potential our followers had seen in us. Below is a list of all the changes we made in the last month or so. We hope this game brings you as much joy and excitement as it does us.
On January 19th we released The Green Reaper, on Itch.io, iOS, and Android.
Pixels and Particles (Art)
Lighting
Ambient Lighting
To help build the depth of our Reaper’s quaint, littler farm, we have implemented lighting. This allows players to truly be immersed in the night, seeing the glow from the soul corn, the flash of lightning bugs, and much more!
Light Cycles
Like all great Reapers, The Green Reaper does most of his work in the dead of night. To help communicate this better we added day / night light cycles each round. In addition, during the night, fireflies will populate the map to further fill the nighttime air with life.
Lampposts
Though the Reaper works best at night, his eyes can still be fooled by the darkness. Good thing he erected some lampposts that help illuminate his crops. Whether to allow him to admire his shiny scythe or to reveal unwanted visitors in his field, these lights are sure to make you more comfortable harvesting through the night.
Particle Effects
In the initial build of The Green Reaper, we played around with adding particle effects to help communicate to the player when power up weapons were used. We later found that we were merely scratching the surface of a very powerful tool. Since then, and with the help of our new lighting, we were able to add fantastical particle effects in many aspects of gameplay.
Ghost Pepper
Youch!! Those ghost peppers are more than just pretty plants, they pack a punch. Watch as a stream of sparks trail behind your blazing feet.
Frankenzini
Zip! Zap! Zing! Those Frankezinis are shockingly strong! Light lightning across the night sky, those particles will arc behind your rapid swings.
Pumpkin
If the boom didn’t tip you off, the flames and smoke from these pumpkin bombs sure do flex their power.
Scythe
How does the Green Reaper operate his scythe? He clearly is not holding it with his boney hands. Could he have learned black magic to telekinetically harvest corn?
Animations
Root Monster Animations
With the introduction of the Reaper’s pesky garden pests there came plenty of animations. This included wake and walk animations. Now the Root Monsters will launch from their soily bed and chase after the Reaper, only to turn and flee with a bag full of corn tokens.
Scarecrow / Crow Animations
The Reaper grew tired of crows eating all his corn, so he has erected a few scarecrows throughout his field. Unfortunately, when he accidentally takes one down the crows see their opportunity and seize it.
Scarecrows
The tattered clothes of the scarecrow now flap in the wind, but with one swipe of your scythe they’ll fall and no longer fend off the menacing crows.
Crows
These darn crows hold a grudge and will do whatever they can to make you pay for keeping them from their favorite snack. They flap and fly around the screen, but are truly only an annoyance to an angel of death like the Reaper.
Corn Health Animations
While watching the heads of corn roll as the Reaper carved his path through the field with his trusty scythe was satisfying, we found harvesting stronger plants to be difficult to understand. To remedy this we have implemented health states and animations for all corn types.
Reaper Animations
The Reaper has a new occupation, so he must have the look to match it. As he becomes more familiar with the agrarian lifestyle, so should his apparel. The Reaper now becomes progressively more acquainted with his farming apparel as he progresses through quests.
Sprite Updates
New House
The Green Reaper has gotten some significant quality-of-life changes since the last update; no longer is his decrepit house made out of hay, now his decrepit house is composed primarily of wood. (Who knows, maybe in the next update his house will be made out of bricks?)
Updated Splash Screen
Zeros and Ones (Engineering)
Root Monsters
Beneath the ground, of which you sow,
Lies a being who dreams of dough.
He wiggles, shudders, trembles, and screams,
For your money he wishes to cling.
In the vibrations of the soil,
He senses your presence as you toil.
So maintain your distance, and hold your bread tightly,
Because the Root Monster dares to strike nightly.
Root monsters pop out of the ground when the Reaper gets too close to them.
If they touch the Reaper, they steal his money and try to run away.
These monsters can be defeated in too ways:
Run away until they die from corn token withdrawal
Hit them with the scythe and politely reclaim your corn tokens.
The amount of tokens the Root Monsters steal is proportional to the number of upgrades purchased.
The hit priority detection of the Root Monster is between the Pumpkin and Frankenzini.
Scarecrows
The scarecrows are the guardians of the corn who prevent pesky crows from laying siege to the fertile fields. Be careful not to tarnish such holy beings, as a murder of crows is nothing short of murderous.
Crows
When the wrath of the crows is unleashed upon the Reaper, they circle him for a few seconds, plotting an attack before they purloin his scythe.
The technical details:
The crows use a flocking simulation called boids algorithm. This creates a more realistic and interesting flight pattern.
After a short amount of time a single crow is manually controlled. This crow heads towards the player, steals their scythe, and drops it a set number of tiles away from the player.
Mobile Builds
The most impressive part of the mobile builds are that they exist.
The mobile versions of the game allow the player to save their progress.The game auto saves at the end of nights and in the upgrade screen.
Currently the game saves
Corn tokens
Quest Progress
Upgrades
Information regarding the amount the Root Monsters steals
The mobile builds also have virtual joysticks. The joysticks split the screen into two, the left side moves the player while the right side decides the direction the scythe will attack.
These joysticks are invisible until the player taps on the screen and depending on which half of the screen was tapped the respective joystick will appear at the position tapped.
This makes the joysticks less janky. When they were static the player would have to tap directly in the center of the joystick for movement to be registered.
Eventually this game becomes quite fast paced, and requiring precision finger taps on the joysticks became too cumbersome.
Pause Screen
It’s hard to imagine, but not everyone can be playing The Green Reaper 24/7; people just need short breaks to pick up their deliveries of The Green Reaper merch. Hence, our addition of the pause button in the top left corner of the screen. In the pause menu, you can leave the game, adjust the volume, or toggle the controls description for the start of a round.
Volume Slider
There is now a functioning volume slider for both web and mobile releases. It definitely shouldn’t have taken this long, but that’s how it played out.
Quest System
Added it so that the designers could make the game better. I didn’t have a choice, they held my cat for ransom.
Updates and Balances (Design)
Map balance
Corn now appears in roughly even amounts and in more interesting patterns.
All power up plants are now more common and you get more for each upgrade purchased.
Scarecrows and root monsters are now more common.
Root Monsters
Root monsters now steal an appropriate amount of gold from the reaper.
Root monsters are now much faster.
UI updates
Beginning and end of night screens added to display current quest and amount of gold collected.
Works well glad we stole the engineer’s cat.
Menu updates to improve readability.
Added controls screens so we weren’t throwing players in with absolutely no instruction.
Quests
Old one-goal system didn’t work well.
The one-goal system never fully explained what you had to do. While it was on the screen for each night you would constantly be playing the game and then all of the sudden, even in the middle of the night’s run, the game would end, sometimes in a very uneasy way.
To help remedy this and provide a more comprehensive quest system it was put in where each night you would receive a quest in a progressive way (it is an incremental game after all). Quests disappear when you complete them and some of them can be a real pain to complete (like not being able to harvest yellow corn). Obviously you get more cash rewards when you complete the harder quests. Each quest also has the potential of changing how you play the game. And because Patrick is crazy and designed the quests, some of them are a real pain if you have too many upgrades and others are a pain if you have too few upgrades.
Balances
Lower Speed Buff on Ghost Peppers
Speed reduced because character was hard to control with full speed and Ghost Pepper speed buff.
Elongated Buff Duration
Felt a bit short.
Not enough time to realize the effect of the powerup and use it (?)
New Upgrade Costs
All costs were increased to account for increased gold received from quests.
Time Warnings
Having trouble remembering when the night ends? Now we show reminders for when there are 20 and 5 seconds remaining in the round.
Other
For mobile builds of the game the audio does not play if the phone is on silent.
Music
Made by the incredibly talented Noah Schwalger.
Created a more fleshed out and developed music style, with individual themes for the home menu, harvesting cycle, and shop.
Original theme was solid but like many aspects of our game needed to evolve with the rest of the game. The game became a more casual, light game that required an appropriate soundtrack to accompany it. With Noah’s touch we looked to create a more relaxed harvesting experience.
Sound Effects
Professional Root Monster Voice Actor
Ratings:
9 / 10 National Voice Actors Judges:
“Sounded like he was directly in my ear.”
5 / 5 Grand Society of Hearing:
“What? I can’t hear anything anymore.”
7 / 10 Professional SFX Committee:
“It was supposed to sound annoying, and it is annoying.”
11/52 Average Player Base
“I can’t get the satanic howls of the root monster out of my head, help.”