Soil Reaper is a Solo Dev game designed in 48 hours for the Spring 2D Jam ‘25 with the theme “Overgrown”. 

How To Play

In this game, you play as the Soil Reaper, an entity who harvests plants using his scythe!

Swing your scythe using the left click. If you are on a mobile device or a tablet, simply tap the screen with one finger

All plants can be harvested in one swing

The environment spawns plants at a specific rate while every plant has an individual growth cycle

Harvesting the plant earlier in their growth cycle will yield less points but slow the spawn rate timer of the plants

Harvesting later in their cycle will reward you with more points but increase the spawn rate timer

When a plant reaches its max growth, a small purple animation alongside an audio clip will trigger. This is the indicator that the plant will give maximum points when harvested

Be careful! Leaving a plant at max growth for too long without harvesting it will result in it becoming overgrown and withering away, indicated by an animation of black particles. 

This withering damages your life pool. When your life pool hits zero, the game is over.

How This Fits The Theme

This game has two major instances of "Overgrown". 

1. The spawn rate of the plants themselves. The growth rate is directly managed by the player's actions when harvesting crops. Should the player accelerate the growth rate too fast, the entire map will become "Overgrown".

2. The plants themselves go through a growth cycle. Each step in the growth cycle determines the rarity of the drop, capping out when the plant is fully grown; the drawback being the plant can only exists in this state for a finite amount of time before becoming "Overgrown" thus damaging the player's life pool. 

Original Concept

The game idea I originally came up with was about a civilization of sentient vegetation that needs to relocate its colony every time unforeseen circumstances limit their livelihood. The "Soil Reaper" is an entity spawned out of necessity by the colony itself in order to harvest enough material to properly relocate to a viable environment. The first idea was a character who resembled the grim reaper, dark menacing. However, after some consideration in congruency with the theme, the idea of a little sprout-ling like hero became the perfect fit. He would receive a magical Scythe as his harvesting tool, a legendary item kept within the colony for circumstances like these. Due to time constraints, I had to remove three other Scythes and upgrades; the image files are still in my exported package.  I hope you enjoy my game!

Credits

Developer: Alan Salas

Art Assets: Free Game Assets (GUI, Sprite, Tilesets), Umoral, Eagle Studio, and Blueapollo

Sound Assets: Splice