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.)
