Farmer's Nightmare
A downloadable game
CONTROLS:
WASD to move
E to pick up food
Left Mouse to Interact
Right Mouse to Shoot
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One day, you discover that a horrible abomination has manifested on your farm! Its influence seems to slowly corrupt your horses - but even so, you need to take care of them before they turn on you!
Pick up food and fill the troughs to prevent them from getting hungry, and click the horses to clean their coats and hooves. When the horses mutate, their needs and features will change - so keep good track of those, because if mutated horses get upset, the only thing you can do is defend yourself from their wrath!
While you're taking care of the horses, you'll need to work on getting rid of that fleshy abomination too - that's what the shotgun is for.
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This game was created for Acerola Jam 0!
Whew - despite it not being entirely finished, I can't believe I got that much done in just two weeks.
This idea is strongly inspired by games I used to play in my childhood, namely the Bella Sara horse care game and Zoo Tycoon for DS! I've had a lot of fun making this and learned a lot - the only shame is that I didn't quite have the time to let it get playtested to adjust the balancing. Wherever it's too easy, too tough or otherwise messy, that's probably why!
If I find the time I'd love to make some visual improvements and gameplay fixes, so I appreciate any feedback!! Thank you so much for checking it out! :D
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Update July '25: I've recently wanted to practice refactoring and finally revisited Farmer's Nightmare for that...!! I started working on some improvements and hopefully managed to fix some of the glaring issues, but mostly I've just made the code a lot nicer. Would love to find the time to do more!
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Comments
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This is an insanely cool concept hook and really good execution, I enjoyed playing this immensely! Your 2D art assets are gorgeous and fit the overall vibe really well (+ honorable mention to the horse legs lifting animation in the minigame, probably an odd thing to notice but horse animation is quite difficult and that felt very well done^^) and having to jump between horses to care for them as quickly as possible worked great for engagement (difficulty-wise it felt doable too). I saw that you could feed the horses with meat aswell but never got to the point where they demanded that, is there a further mutation step after growing a second head? xD
(Also I guess that is not the plan, but should you ever decide to keep working on this further, I am definitely interested in where it would go:))
Excuse the long comment, you did great work!
Oh my gosh! I don't know how to start - this comment made me so happy!!! I had the biggest smile reading it, thank you so so much for the kind words!! <333
This game is probably my proudest work for a game jam so far. It was really fun to make! I really appreciate you enjoying the art and animation - it seems that my lingering childhood obsession with horses has its perks, hehe. And I'm glad the difficulty felt appropriate, the balancing is probably the quality I was most on the fence about! The mutations are, at this moment, entirely random - so if you play a couple more rounds you might find the mutation that requires the meat ;3 Now that you mention it, though, I love the idea of mutations evolving further with different stages! Noting that down as we speak!!
Life got very busy after this jam, but I've always kept wondering if I could find ways to keep working on this game. I'm still very excited about the idea, and your comment really reignited my enthusiasm!! I suppose the biggest hurdles are figuring out how to turn this from a quick jam project into something more thought-out, and deciding on which direction I want to pursue - but I do have some ideas! I think if I take some time to really consider my options I can find a good path, and if I do I'll be sure to share it! :D
Again, thank you so much!!
Resolution doesn't scale correctly so main menu options are off-screen.
Ah, thank you for letting me know! I'll work on getting that fixed^^