Scare the Crow!

In game

Inspiration

We came together over a shared hobby of game development—we're a group of coders/artists with music and sfx experience. For this hackathon, we wanted to test our skills and make a game in a short amount of time—we workshopped a couple different ideas before eventually landing on a farming game where you played as a scarecrow who couldn't move.

What it does

In Scare the Crow!, you play as an immobile scarecrow caring for a small farm. The farm starts off barren, but by scaring critters into scattering seeds, you can grow plants that count toward your total score. However, as your farm grows lusher, crows start appearing to snack on your hard work—the scarecrow needs to fend them off to keep the farm alive.

How we built it

We used the Godot engine, which most of us had previous experience in. We started off working out the general architecture on paper before individually implementing different components and finally sewing it all together. Two of us were working on assets in Aseprite (for the scarecrow, background art, and critter/plant animations) and we used Jummbox to mix some vibey music for the game.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into a few difficult bugs, especially as the night dragged on—most of them silly in retrospect but incredibly frustrating in the moment. We spent a long time working out critter behavior under multiple different scenarios to make sure we stamped out any unexpected behavior—from critters spawning in strange locations to failing to spawn in proper amounts to getting stuck under the scarecrow.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're really proud of the atmosphere we created—it feels just arcadey enough to be fun but just tranquil enough to echo the mood of a game like Stardew Valley. The art, shared between two of us, came together pretty cohesively and the music/sfx/vfx add just the extra pop the game needed.