Dev Log: Enemy Waves and Gameplay Loops
Waves of enemies are attacking the farm! Granted, they’re not doing any damage yet, but it’s starting to feel like an actual game.
A giant wave of grubs attacking the farm
The core gameplay loop for Space Moths Are Eating My Farm is: Plant, Explore, Harvest (repeat). Players plant seeds to enable currency accumulation, explore (and fight) to gather more planting resources, and harvest crops to realize currency gains. The cycle repeats, and escalates, as the player finds better and better resources to use on their farm, and encounters stronger enemies the farther they explore. On its own, this loop can be satisfying as a farming simulator, and I enjoy games that follow this pattern. That said, I wanted to take a slightly different path with this game by introducing a secondary gameplay loop: farm defense.
The farm defense aspect of this game shifts the focus from farming sim towards tower defense and reinforces the twin-stick shooter element. The player has to carefully balance how much time they spend exploring vs how much time they spend at their farm. They also need to be strategic when investing their resources. If they plan on spending most of their time at the farm, they might solely focus on builds that allow them to scale crop production. If they would rather spend more time exploring, they may need to invest more resources in defensive builds. My goal is to enable a wide variety of playstyles within the game.
Both gameplay loops still have a long way to go, but I’m happy with the progress that’s been made this week. I added a mob wave spawner, helped mobs target plants (even when out of range), improved mob drops, and added the option for certain mobs to despawn if there are no plants left to attack. The last feature is helpful for difficulty scaling, because it allows me to add non-lethal mobs in the early stages of the game. These non-lethal mobs will help the player understand how to fight and defend their farm in a fairly low-stakes environment, without needing to leverage a rigid tutorial framework.
Over the next few days, I plan on refining the waves and enemy drops to prepare for the first round of playtesting. There will still be thousands of things that need to be built and adjusted before the game is truly playable, but I want to start soliciting feedback as soon as possible to make sure I’m not overlooking anything critical as development progresses.
