Looking at 'Clicka Lettuce Seed'

Clicka Lettuce Seed

I think I got lucky somehow. Or maybe the idle games market isn't saturated. Some other platformer games I've watched haven't gotten nearly as many plays in the time they were up.

2981 plays so far. So that's a few pluggings of the 'grow your own food' idea. Most of those were in the first two days. I only posted about it on the Stencyl forum, have been saving other options simply to get a better guage of effects. If I advertised on all the places I could think of, I wouldn't know which was contributing what.

Had a few bugs to fix - it's hard to catch them once you're used to the game. Probably should have had some way to test each hour quickly - without a way to go through the whole cycle of the game, you can't run a six hour playtest over and over.

So, I'm left wondering if I make a game with more action in it, will I get less plays? The next game is kind of a blend - part action (navigating the mazes of a natural landscape), part idle (gardening, again, of course!). In fact you can play the game as you choose, action or idle or a mutually beneficial mix of both. And a story in it!

It's a more ambitious project, having a features budget of around 25. Of course the budgets always get blown out, but I'm at feature 15 so far.

Clicka Lettuce Seed

Clicka Lettuce Seed Idle Game

Clicka Lettuce Seed is an Idle game based on gardening that you can do in real life - I wanted to concentrate on that, as a way of making an Idle game and showing what anyone could do. It shows how you could save money and use that saved money to hit a series of donation goals - and past that, have the savings for whatever you want!

From the general game blurb:
A more true life Idle game, with actions you could take in real life to save money every day! Grow lettuce plants and harvest their leaves to save on buying food. Do it alot! Get through the eleven donation goals and you get to the final bonus points screen and finish the game! Play again to try for an even higher amount of bonus points!

Note: Oxfam is mentioned in the game so as to promote/advertise for them for free - it's not endorsed by them or anything, though.

Controls.
Mouse clicks for everything. Look for the red 'start here' sign for where to begin.

http://www.kongregate.com/games/Noontide/clicka-lettuce-seed

TIPS!

Auto harvest and Harvest Cooldown
With Auto Harvest, when you first buy it it starts out at a 12 second cycle.

This lets you idle and is fine if your Harvest Cooldown rate is above 12 seconds.

But if your Harvest Cooldown is at, say, 10 seconds and your Auto Harvest is at 12 seconds, then your crop will sit idle for the two seconds between 10 and twelve. You could get that crop all the sooner if you upgraded Auto Harvest! And that'll make a big difference over each game day (which, incidentally, is 4 minutes in RL)

So if you upgrade your Auto Harvest to match your Harvest Cooldown, you will be harvesting the very moment it's possible to - thus optimising your harvest and getting it done as soon as possible!

Harvest Rate
At default, whenever you harvest there's a 10% chance you will destroy a lettuce when harvesting from it. The harvest button flashes red when a lettuce is lost.

The Harvest Rate button becomes available once you have 40 lettuce and 1 Karma. Pressing it will reset your Auto Harvest (possibly in future there may be a refund of saved money spend on upgrades) and make your harvesting slower! Yes, slower! But now there is no 10% chance of losing a plant.

This makes it more of a true idle game. You don't have to activate it, you could keep battling against slowly losing crops (and likely gaining far more than you lose, consistantly). But if you don't want to keep battling, normal harvest rate is the way to go.

http://www.kongregate.com/games/Noontide/clicka-lettuce-seed