In the first devlog I introduced KlonkWerk. Today I want to show you a little more closely what I am working on: what actually happens during a run of Keep Harvesting, and which decisions sit between the individual harvest rounds?
You start on a small field. Plants grow back, your sickles fly out to them and you collect resources. Out of that, your build takes shape piece by piece: the combination of abilities and upgrades that keeps you going for as long as possible.
Every harvest keeps the farm alive.
The state of your farm keeps getting worse. Harvesting restores farm health, and at the same time it hands you the resources you buy your next upgrades with. The further your run gets, the stronger the decay becomes. Your harvest has to keep up with it.
That ties a lot of things together: faster sickles bring in more yield and help you stabilise the farm. Extra healing per harvest can buy you air when the state turns critical. Farmers, dynamite, harvest fires, lightning and more take over part of the work on their own, which lets you partly automate the farm.
Between rounds, the skill tree opens. That is where you decide where your resources go. More sickles? Faster harvest helpers? A larger plot? Abilities that hit several plants or set off further harvest effects?
My goal is for you to feel those decisions out on the field. A new upgrade should change something: how fast you harvest, which effects work together, or how well you get through a difficult stretch. From a modest start, a build should grow step by step in which more and more pieces mesh.
The seasons shape the run as well. Among other things, they change which resources turn up more often and which seasonal bonuses apply, so an ability can be particularly useful at one point and less so at another. On top of that come over 40 weather events that reach straight into your gameplay.
After the run, your farm keeps developing.
When farm health drops to zero, your attempt ends. The seeds you earned can then be spent on booster packs in the meta shop. Opening one lets you pick a single permanent upgrade out of several, and it stays with you in future runs.
So there are two levels of progress: the decisions inside a run, and the upgrades that outlast it. On your next attempt you can build on what you have unlocked already, and on what you have learned about how your abilities play together.
Keep Harvesting is still in development. In the coming posts I want to show individual systems more closely and explain the thinking behind them.
If something in particular interests you, or you have questions about the idea behind the game, leave a comment under the current Reddit post or come to the Discord. Your feedback also helps me pick which glimpse to share next.
Lukas