[Game]Moondrop Dale [vJAM.6]

Moondrop Dale

A tattered, beat up, little garden house has been left to you by an unknown donor that had recently passed away. Your goal is to tidy up the property and revive the once flourishing garden to its proper glory, and earn some easy money in a wealthy town.

POP and Data: Moondrop Dale - v2021-09-01.zip (1.3 MB)

POP and Data: Moondrop Dale - vJam.6.zip (1.3 MB)

Source: GitHub - Torbuntu/MoondropDale_Pokitto: Pokitto farming/garden sim game
Itch-io: Moondrop Dale - Pokitto by Torbuntu

Install instructions

  • Decompress the ZIP
  • Move the POP to whichever category you’d like
  • Merge the data and music folders on the root of the SD Card​

Controls:

  • Arrow keys move.
  • B switches to the next tool.
  • A for actions.
  • C to bring up the menu. You access the shop and seed select in the menu.

Changelog

  • vJam - Initial release
  • vJam.2 - Updated tips. Added “trash” chance to fishing. Added toolbar item “Menu: [C]”
  • vJam.3 - Added more help tips. Fixed a weird loading bug when trying to continue a non-saved game
  • vJam.4 - Major UI work and scenery upgrade, huge thanks to @Vampirics ! Things look much more lively now :smiley: also a few bug fixes, and an intro “cut scene”.
  • vJam.5 - Forgot to add an updated watercan icon from Vampirics! Also adjusted and aligned some text/icons
  • vJam.6 - Fishing pole price was 100 but logic was checking if current money was greater than. Fixed that.
  • v2021-09-01 - Actually added art for the magic fruit :man_facepalming: . Shop seed select adjustment. Now forces the player to progress one seed at a time.
9 Likes

I was trying the game. The music is beautiful! Makes to atmosphere very calm and nice. At first I did not know what to do. The in-game help (when the day changes) is a very good idea. You could put much more info there. Also you could tell what the icons are. Much like now there is a “!”-mark when the operation is denied, there could be a bubble which tells the tool name. I was able to grow some white things, and got some money :partying_face:

Other comments:

  • The gfx is very small. It is hard see sometimes, but that is probably due my bad sight.
  • You could make a zip so that the files are in the correct folders already
  • no crashes or anything :+1:
  • Nice water animation

Good work!

4 Likes

Will do this as soon as I release the next beta with a fix I’m working on :smiley: not sure why I didn’t heh…

They are definitely tiny. I started out originally with almost 2.5x the size, but to fit all the content I had to really shrink things down. I’m sorry that they are so small that it is a negative :sweat:

:partying_face: woo!

Thank you! I was weirdly proud of that one! haha

I’ll add this to my list of enhancements to make :smiley: I didn’t realize (as usual hah) that the complexity would require some more helpful explanations. Though this is a common feedback from almost everyone so obviously I’ll have to think of something :smiley:

Thank you so much for playing and giving such helpful feedback! Means a great deal to me :slight_smile:

3 Likes

You really managed to pack a lot of features into the game for the jam! I would say that for a game like this, you really need a lot of things to do so it doesn’t get too repetitive, but you did manage to put a good amount of variety in for the time you had. I do hope that even more things can be added in the future, though.

I think the one-screen restriction is interesting, but also a bit limiting. However, limits encourage creativity, and I think that this can definitely go a lot further with the idea of limiting everything to one screen. On the other hand, allowing the game to expand beyond one screen could give a whole town to explore, which would also be interesting.

I like the “do once a day” task of talking to the tree, and more tasks like that could be interesting, especially if you couldn’t do all of them in the same day, or if certain days had special events. The fishing can get kind of repetitive, and I think it would be nice if more depth was added to it. Also, it would be nice to have better fishing rods that would reduce the amount of garbage I was catching. It seems like there’s so much garbage in the water that the farm must be downstream of a factory or something!

I played all the way until I harvested a magic fruit. The gap in price between the blueberries and the magic seeds is large enough that I felt like I spent most of the game just trying to save up for magic fruit. I think that with more item upgrades and things to do, the grind to get to that final purchase would not feel quite as long. I would love an upgrade to the watering can for greater capacity.

It was sometimes hard to tell for some plants whether they were ready to harvest. Maybe a sparking animation could be used to more clearly indicate plants that are ripe?

Possible spoiler?

Are the magic fruit plants supposed to be invisible? All growth stages just looked like tilled earth.

4 Likes

Thank you so much for the review and feedback! I think given what I’ve been planning for post-release upgrades, you will be happy to know that most of the things you’ve suggested are 100% spot on the radar :smiley:

whoops

Definitely a massive oversight on my end as I attempted to rush to the finish line on the entry :pensive: See here, I completely forgot to add the sprite drawing… MoondropDale_Pokitto/CropManager.java at master · Torbuntu/MoondropDale_Pokitto · GitHub

3 Likes

This is simply amazing @torbuntu. Excellent job on it so far, and I can’t wait to see where you go with it.

EDIT: Discovered you can buy the non-existent tool upgrades for $100 a piece. It will actually decrease your money even though it’s not implemented yet :laughing:.

3 Likes

@torbuntu is so clever that he implemented a pre-order system in his game :stuck_out_tongue:

5 Likes

heh, whoops :laughing:

Well done, the small details as the short intro story, give the right mood to relaxing gameplay.
You really fit a lot of stuff in this one.

Not my genere but I’m going back to grow more vegetables soon :smiley:

1 Like

It is definitely a more focused genre :slight_smile: what sort of things would you have liked to see? I am planning to push this one much further post-jam! :smiley:

1 Like

I’d love to see more of the story background… who lived here before “Tor” and “Lol” ? Did he/she left some kind of treasure under they garden? Are other people leaving near this piece of field? Do I have some neighbors?

2 Likes

I’ll add these to my list of things to work out :smiley: thanks for the feedback! Story will definitely help to push more purpose to the game :slight_smile:

4 Likes