Grovekeepers is a browser game I am building that puts Stardew Valley’s farm routine together with Pikmin’s squad commands. You run a farm, and the workers are small plant creatures called Sprigs that you send around in a group. It is one self-contained HTML file for itch.io, drawn on a canvas and scored with synthesized audio, with no outside assets and no network calls. On September 22 I opened the first playable build, and everything in it worked, and I could not tell what I was supposed to be doing.
What is Grovekeepers?
The pitch is a farm you do not work yourself. You plant and harvest, but through the Sprigs, the way Pikmin lets you throw a crowd at a problem and watch what happens. It is an original game and not a clone of either one. It is free, and it is not on itch.io yet.
Before any code existed I wrote two planning documents, one for the design and technical choices and one for the production side. The first milestone was a squad-movement prototype, on the theory that if moving a group around is not fun, the farm on top of it will not save it.
What does it mean that it worked but was unclear?
Mechanically, it all worked. A test run would have called the build healthy. But I am the person who wrote the design documents, and I still did not know what the first minute was supposed to look like, what my goal was, or what the game wanted from me next. A stranger would have closed the tab. Passing tests told me the code did what I wrote. They said nothing about whether a person could play it.
This is the second time in about two weeks. An idle battler I built earlier this month went through the same thing: a green test suite, and then a tutorial pass after I looked at it as a player. So it is a pattern now, not bad luck, and I treat the first minutes of a game as their own thing to check.
What did I ask for?
Five things. Cheerful music. A tutorial. Achievements. Quests, so there is always a next thing to do. And more sound effects, so each action has an answer you can hear. All five are about the same problem from different sides: the game has to tell you what you did, what to do next, and that it went well.
These are requests, not results. I will write up what worked once they are in a build.
What is the game called?
Not settled. Grovekeepers is the working title. The others on my list are Little Harvest Legion, The Hollow Farm, Root and Bramble, and Undergrowth. If one of those makes you want to click, tell me in the comments. I would rather pick with some outside votes than with my own ear.
What is not done?
The music, tutorial, achievements, quests and extra sounds are all still to build. The test that matters is a stranger playing it with no help from me, and I have not run that yet.
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