Ludum Dare 52 Jam Entry

IMPROVED POST-JAM VERSION: https://lopar.itch.io/harvest-merge-alpha

Read this for info, but play that version!

Jam entry page: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/harvest-merge

Theme: Harvest

Controls

Move forward/backward, Rotate clockwise/counterclockwise
WADS / Controller D-Pad

Rotate board
QE / Controller shoulder buttons

Push Elements
Spacebar / Controller right-bottom button (Playstation X, Xbox A, Nintendo B)

Pull Elements
Z / Controller right-left button (Playstation Square, Xbox X, Nintendo Y)

Restart Game
R / Controller Select button

Merge the same element together by pushing them together. Or, pull them backwards (as long as there's an open space behind you!)

You can climb up up to one cube at a time, just by walking on it.

Blocks will also merge together if two of the same block are on top of each other, whether you pushed them there or they spawned on their own!

Premise

You need to make some food for your family... from scratch! Start with sunlight and water and merge each element in a sequence until you get to harvest crops!

Inspired by a fusion of several puzzle games including 2048 and Wario's Woods, with an isometric twist.

Credits

Programming/Art/Music/Sound 

• Lopar

Idea bouncing/Testing

• Ruinerr
• Michaelfirman

If I had more time...

Right now there's no real win/lose states to the game. But I think getting to the crops is pretty cool. Send me a screenshot if you

I wanted quite a bit more polish and some settings, but time is obnoxiously finite, as usual.

I also would love to figure out how to better represent where you and the cubes are in the isometric playing field. The minimap helps but it only helps so much!

Post-jam Bugfixes

Any changes during the LD52 jam review time will be for performance/breaking bugs only and not feature work.

• Web version - Because of long load times as well as pauses in-game for shader compilation, I reduced the shaders into a single ubershader, and made sure the particles shader is preloaded as well.
• Win/Linux binaries - No changes yet!

Known bugs

Both known issues right now involve the web version and shouldn't affect the binary builds. Godot 4 is still in beta and there are still quite a few issues with the HTML5 export.

• The web version only works on Chrome (and likely some other Chromium) browsers, due to how itch currently handles SharedArrayBuffer.
• On some systems (observed on a few Macs), the web version takes incredibly long to load, or doesn't load at all. This seems to be due to shader compilation issues, and I've been attempting to find a fix. 
  One possible workaround for Macs:
  I was able to get the game to go from taking minutes to load to loading in <5 seconds on my 1st gen M1 Macbook Pro by doing the following:
  • Navigate to `chrome://flags`
  • Enable `Experimental WebAssembly`
  • Set `Choose ANGLE graphics backend` to `Metal`
  • Restart Chrome