Play game
Money grows on trees's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| UI | #2 | 4.000 | 4.000 |
| Art | #2 | 4.313 | 4.313 |
| Overall Fun | #3 | 4.188 | 4.188 |
| Sound/Music | #4 | 3.813 | 3.813 |
Ranked from 16 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Leave a comment
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
Comments
Nice, the game improved a lot during the jam!
Now it's way more fun. :)
Sometimes when there's a lot of action it seems that some clicks are ignored, that's the only minor problem I've encountered. Oh, and one suggestion: if a voice would count down the time in the last seconds, that would be really helpful in all this end-game-stress... ;)
Hi I found this game through the Feedback Quest.
I wanna say I enjoyed the game. The hand drawn art style amazed me and the people who watched me play it. My only big gripes are that there's a lack of a growth loop where it feels like once you hit a point, it feels kinda pointless to grow further and that the game lacks "Weight". As with games of this nature I feel some kind of stimuli, be it audio or maybe just something to give a subtle hint of progress would help bring this game up much higher. The UI while beautiful could use a bit more refinement but overall, its good.
I feel if you put this game on a mobile platform, it genuinely has amazing potential to blow up. It simple, addictive, actually fun, simple on the eyes. I can see kids and myself for hours on this. In theory you could even post this to mobile as it is and it might still blow up with success. Amazing work, please keep it up.
Hey, thanks for your kind comment and suggestions! And, for streaming my game too! 🙂 I've seen the video. About progression, you can unlock different kind of trees that sell for much more, but admittedly in this version it only counts for the leaderboard. Speaking of the leaderboard, it should have been displayed after you submitted your name, but a few days ago, it stopped displaying for some reason. As it is a feature hosted by gdevelop, I suspect there's something currently wrong with their web service.
About stimuli to give a hint of the player's progression, did you have something in mind? Currently there's a badge that shows up whenever you unlock a new type of fruit (you can click to plant a new tree at a discounted price) and some sound effect for collecting, selling and buying.
Thanks for your words of encouragement! I may expand it in the future to add goals, unlockables, more content, and to target mobile platforms.
For stimuli, several games had different approaches. For things like clicker games, it had a distinct popping sound and the change in the scenery as more and more elements generating currency was added. For other games, they used vibrations per click.
So it truly depends on how you want your games to feel. Some games took it a bit too far with the stimuli by adding popping sounds that were effective at first but when you hear over 10000000 popping balloons, those sounds will follow you forever.
A game like this feels like it builds on people's love to see big numbers grow. It's its greatest strength. I wish I could give a more specific input but I'm not much of an expert in this type of game. Maybe try a few around online and see what makes them stand out and try and apply them to your game and its unique vibe. The game you have is very calming and relaxing. I feel it will do so much good in the future if given the chance and opportunity to grow. Its beautiful, hand drawn adds so much to the charm. Again, please keep up the amazing work!
That's great advice, thanks for taking the time! Your comments and others have given me food for thought.
Very entertaining. Do you have a long term plan for this? That is, where are you going with it? Anyway, most amusing and it made me smile. My one suggestion might be to vary the music a bit (as well as having control over the volume).
Thanks! I don't have any long term with my game, my goal is merely to produce a complete game with a limited scope, something I can actually finish and polish a bit, all while learning game design, ui and having fun creating a mini game of a genre I know nothing about 🤓
This was originally my buggy, unbalanced submission for Ludum Dare 52, with a theme that didn't inspire me at all (harvest). To polish it as much as I can and make it actually fun and fully intuitive is my only goal. For instance, until recently most players didn't realize you can unlock other fruits, even though to me it seemed like the most obvious thing in the world. Trying my best to make the features of my game known and accessible to the player is one of the great learning experience I've gained working on this.
I totally get it. I am also using the various games I am making to teach myself all sorts of things.
And yes, never assume that something is obvious to a player. Of course, sometimes you want things to be obvious, but other times not.
Super interesting and with a lot of potential. If you allow some suggestions
But I had a great time playing it... only when I saw the leader board I went frustrated! How is that first place even possible?
The style is also very interesting. My 5yo daughter loved the game! BTW, it also works great in a touch screen!
Hey, thanks a lot for your kind words and cool suggestions! I'm so glad to read that you and your daughter liked it so much :D It's very nice to get the confirmation that the game works great with a touchscreen, too.
About the leaderboard, I've recently nerfed the bananas a lot, since they sold for way too much and their upgrades costs were comparatively trivial. The scores could easily go up to a million if you had at least 30 seconds to spam bananas at the end. After doing that, I should have erased to scores that predated this update, but I forgot 😅 This is fixed, and you got promoted to second place. Congratulations! Thanks for pointing that out, those score were no longer possible and the game looked unbalanced and discouraging.
I like your suggestions a lot, especially the local competition mode! The prices would need to be rebalanced, but I'll start to work on that.
One of the very early builds had one click per fruit, but it was tedious and tiring in practice, with so many clicks my hand would hurt after a single session :)
Fruits going bad and fruits prematurely collected are interesting ideas, but I'm not sure if a variable price would work well 🤔 Also, it's very subjective but having fruits go bad would mean that they would stop smiling, and that would hurt the happy-go-lucky feeling I'm trying to convey. I like the falling fruits idea though!
Yep. I understand the going bad situation vs game mood. At least, falling to the ground could add some kind of distraction. The price changing during the fruit grow is to make the "fast" player suffer a little... he needs to wait, not because it is not allowed to click but because it gives him less score! nailing the right time is the key to the master player! About the "one click": it makes a lot of sense in a touch screen. You can easily try it. The web version in Itch works fine in the web browser of your smartphone! Glad you like the ideas! Keep up the good work! Cheers!
You bring some very good points, thanks! Adding varying prices would necessitate some changes in the code, but I like the idea, I've put it on my backlog. "One fruit at a time" could be configurable in a settings menu, along with a volume slider 🤔
I've updated the game on itch with a new local competition mode as per you suggestion. The implementation is still a bit rough around the edges, but I'm satisfied with the balance and with what it brings to the game. I'd love to get your feedback on that if you can spare the time! 🙂
The next update will be a speedrun mode and varying prices, and that where I'll stop I think. Thanks for sharing your great ideas!
Actually, I like the multiple fruit harvesting: it adds the task of finding the sweet spot to harvest most fruits with one click and thus makes it more interesting!
Finding that sweet spot is a joy to me too when playing on PC, it's nice to read that from someone else! For a dedicated mobile build though, while I'll keep multiple fruit harvesting I'll probably reduce that hitbox a bit because tapping quickly is faster and more fun than pointing and clicking with a mouse (or worse, a trackpad).
This was actually really fun and I'm glad there is a timer or I would've lost track of time. I didn't notice there were more fruit till about halfway through. My only real suggestion is to add some icons to the auto collector menu and some feedback when buying upgrades like a noise or even flash the UI. I wasn't sure I was upgrading till I saw the prices went up.
Thanks a lot for your kind feedback! I'm really glad you found it so much fun. I realize that lot of players didn't notice the other fruits (either at all or too late), way more often than I thought.
I think I've come up with the perfect solution : when a fruit is unlocked, in addition to the badge showing in the top right, I display a text like "Pears unlocked!" and the next time you open the upgrades menu, it opens on the page for the new fruit. This project has been an excellent opportunity for me to practice better UI design 😁
The game is already updated on itch, I've also added a sound effect for the Buy action, that was indeed missing.
I agree that the autoharvest page needs to look and function more like the upgrade page, it was a late addition to the game, making it look better is on my backlog.
Thanks again!
This was fun! I didn't realize there were different types of fruits, and ended up only growing apples.
I bought the auto-harvester, but I couldn't figure out if the pointer was following my mouse, or if it was random, or if it was going to harvest everything every X seconds..
At one point, I somehow paused the game in the upgrade menu, and couldn't unpause it, or go back to the game, so I had no choice but to quit. I would likely have played the game a lot more otherwise
Thank you for your valuable feedback!
I've reworked the game a lot since the beginning to make the other fruits more noticeable, the most recent addition is a notification on the top right of the screen that signals a new fruit has been unlocked. I think I'll put a text in addition to this to make it stand out more. How did you notice there were different types of fruits?
The autoharvester moves to a random tree every X seconds. I realize this isn't clear enough, I'll add a short explanation in game.
I'm sorry you couldn't unpause the game, I'll have to investigate this 🤔 I'll try some monkey testing to see if I can reproduce the issue.
I noticed, after I had bought 4 or 5 apple trees, that the upgrade page has arrows. After I finished playing, I also noticed other fruits in the screenshots.
Thanks for the precisions! I've made the new fruits near impossible to miss now, and I fixed that pause problem. Your feedback is really appreciated! I will check your game out later today 😁
is the version updated here? I'd love to play your game again now that the pause is fixed
Yes, the itch version is up to date 🙂 Thanks for your interest! I hope you'll enjoy the small quality of life improvements that I've made.
🤣I played again, and I'm top of the leaderboard now by a healthy margin!
I had fun playing it, can see you could easily spend some time in the game optimizing for faster earnings, especially with the leaderboard.
Game loads fairly fast.
Couple of issues I saw - for some reason one of my apple trees stopped growing fruit. Also, auto-harvest takes a bit to wake up.
Edit - also the submit arrow for the leaderboard is partially covered by the maximize widget
Thanks a lot for your precious feedback! I've added it to my backlog. The "dead tree" bug is as old as the game but very rare, I thought it was gone when I refactored the code 😕 Thanks for reporting it, this is precious information.
I don't know if this helps, but it happened a short time after I bought an apple tree, on the one I bought.
Fun game. I really appreciated the addition of the autoharvest. It was a nice surprise to see that option pop up after gaining so many additional apples and trees to harvest. Might have been nice if it was visible for the whole game so I knew it was something I could work towards buying.
Just out of curiosity, was this game originally made for/inspired by the last Ludum Dare which had the theme Harvest?
Thanks! Yes it's my heavily rebalanced Ludum Dare 52 entry, I fixed all the bugs I could find, refactored the code, and added new ideas and all the best suggestions I was given. It's still a simple clicker game but I'm trying to make it the best I can as a fun experiment, because it's a style of game I'm not familiar with at all. Did you take part in the last Ludum Dare too? If so, I'll take a look at your game 😁
About the auto harvest not being visible from the start, I made the decision to hide things you can't yet afford, including the upgrade pages for the other fruits, but the jury's still out on that one. On one hand knowing in advance what you can buy later can help help you plan, but on the other it might be discouraging to notice that a banana tree costs 4000$ while an apple only sells for $1 🤔
I have participated in Ludum Dare a couple times, though last time I was never able to think of a game I liked that was short enough to finish for the jam. However, it did inspire a couple ideas I am still working on, like my prototype for Time Harvest in Space, which I hope to finish someday.
See what you mean about not wanting super expensive things to appear too quickly. Especially for a game that essentially has one long level that does need to unfold to some extent. In that vein, maybe starting with no actions beyond Pick and having Sell and each individual upgrade be added as you pick and earn larger amounts of money in the style of unfolding games such as "A Dark Room" could be an interesting way to go.
This is such a cute and addictive game, I love the title, the art style, and the simplicity of it. Good progression as well.
It's definitely a good mini game to stream between big sessions to calm down from intense games. Perfect for chatting sessions for streamers.
My highlight here, I didn't get very far before time run out. I saw other people's score and gasped at how high they could go, I will see about trying this again to aim for higher and give it a more thorough run. My only suggestion at the moment is make the score board layout match the game so it feels together.
Wow, thanks so much for streaming my game and for your kind feedback! Being able to see you play is awesome and gives me precious information and ideas. I'm sorry that you couldn't type your name at the end, it seems like the textInput component doesn't always work as intended 😕 It happened to someone else too. It might work next time, but at this point I'm considering alternate solutions.
The scoreboard layout is also standard from GDevelop and at the moment it doesn't integrate very well in game. I think I will code my own to better match the game as you suggested.
This jam is such a wonderful occasion to get quality feedback, I've been able to rework my game daily to make it better and better. Thank you for hosting it and providing this opportunity! 😁
OH yeah I could not enter my name, forgot to report that bug, that's why I do my archive. lol Glad this jam is helpful to you, it's my pleasure to help out. I feel the most in my element helping and promoting other creatives.
I enjoyed it, this is the first clicker game I've played. I didn't understand at first until I clicked sell and saw the upgrade menu. I starting upgrading got to 5 trees and auto harvester. It was enjoyable. The feeling of progress felt good and the artwork was great. This would be a great game to have on your phone.
Thank you for your kind feedback! I have never played a clicker game either, so I thought it would be a fun challenge to make one without reference points :) The feeling of progress was non-existent when I first submitted it for LD52, so I'm glad it felt good to you now.
Thanks for letting me know it wasn't clear at first! I'll add a tutorial message at the beginning of the game.
Cute, funny little game with weird, but somehow adorable design. It starts slow, but then it picks up with more options.
I have no idea how others got so many points, but that's a challenge. ;)
Here are two suggestions:
– When looking for upgrades, I switched to the pears. I didn't have enough money, so I went back, collected some more cash and then opened the menu again. I didn't expect that it switched back to apples, so I accidentally bought an apple tree instead of a pear tree. :( It didn't help that apples and pears look so similar... Maybe make it so that you always enter the menu at the same page you left?
– The music is nice, but very repetitive. Maybe add two more music pieces, then it rocks better.
Thanks! Since then I've tweaked it slightly to accelerate the first phase of the game. I'm glad it provides some degree of challenge, the Ludum Dare 52 version was more of an unbalanced mess which mostly consisted in spamming bananas for 4m30s 😁
Thanks for your suggestions too, I'll incorporate them into the next iteration!
Hope it helps, good luck!
Thanks for your detailed feedback! It helps a lot :) I found all your points relevant, so I tackled them all and uploaded a new version.
Thanks again, that was valuable. I'd very much like to try your game, it look very polished but I only have Linux and Mac machines at home. Can you provide a build for either of those?
I don't have a Mac, and I haven't set up Linux build yet. I'm afraid I can only share Windows build for now. Still, thanks for the interest!