Nathaniel Sherman

Farming Survivor

2nd year master game jam project presented at the Gotland Games Conference

— ROLE

Game designer,

Lead QA


— DATE

October 2022 –

June 2023

This project was originally for the Game Jam+ at University

of Uppsala, Gotland Campus, I was one of the main designers. After the end of the game jam, I took a step back from the project for a short while as I was traveling abroad for a research internship. I then resumed participation as the game tester for the different iterations, giving my feedback on the game feel, bugs, and features that felt out of place or were missing.


Link to the game page on itch.io:

https://terrysunty97.itch.io/farming-survivor

Description

For the initial concept, we were interested in creating a game with similar input complexity and feeling to play as games such as Vampire Survivor but without the violence and mass killing. We settled for farming, where the player has to farm crops as fast as possible to progress through to the next month and unlock new upgrades. If the player fails to reach the monthly crop goal they lose the game.


There are different characters and crops (only one in the current build of the game) to choose from that change different characteristics and change how you increase your crop production. There are also many upgrades and items to acquire during a run to increase your efficiency in farming to allow you to get increasingly higher amounts of crops each month.


In the earlier versions of the game, the player was trying to feed their village/family. In the later iterations of the game, we changed the gameplay to have the player feed a beast that was threatening your village/family. For both versions when you collected fully grown crops you had a choice to either give them to the monster (or your village in the older version) or sell them in the marketplace. Selling them will give you money that you can then use to buy items between months that will help you increase your efficiency.