Harvest Quest

a still from this game, Harvest Quest, showing the combat arena part of the game -- a side-view of a player sprite and the enemy, an anthropomorphic lemon tree, with an idyllic backdrop behind them of rolling hills and some trees on the horizon, more hills in the distance in a blue sky. Each sprite has a health bar above them, with the player sprite also having an 'SP' bar for 'skill points'. There are buttons under the player sprite for Attack, Skills and Run, with 'Select your moves!' prompting in the center.

background

Harvest Quest is a game conceived of by my classmate Daniel Reber. With him as designer, Daniel Peraza as artist, and me, Devone Gray and Imani Mobley as programmers, we are working on this game as our capstone project, under the guidance of Professor Aaron Oldenberg.

genre

Harvest quest combines genres, as a top-down navigation, side-view combat old fashion rpg with farming simulation as well. Major inspirations include early Pokemon games and Harvest Moon.

special features

but how are we combining these genres? By making the land cursed, leading to vicious crops you have to fight to harvest! With different plants having different combat levels and attack styles, the player can choose how much challenge they want going into each fight, as long as they have seeds for it.

to buy seeds and other equipment, the player trades harvested produce and gets to know the townsfolk, who can also be recruited to help the player harvest! The player's main stat is developed not by combat, but by building relationships with the townsfolk, encouraging camaraderie.

at least, these are our goals for the game! So far, having worked on it for a semester, we only have the main map, battle arena, game time, and one-on-one combat done. We still need to integrate the NPC's and build the dialogue, planting, and group fighting systems next semester.

my role

i've been referring to my role as "integration programmer" -- while Devone, Imani and i have been working together on most things, i'm bottom-lining getting things functioning together, making necessary revisions to everyone's scripts, readying them for demo builds, and managing version control issues (we're using git, which i'm fairly experienced with.) i'm also handling the scripting for overarching systems in the game, like time-keeping, persistence between scenes, and will be setting up game state tracking and save functionality. Devone built the combat system and Imani built the player controller, camera controller and some other features.

links

find the current demo version on itch.io

and the scripts on my github!