Astronoka is officially described as a "space vegetable production and pest control game". The game revolves around the player cultivating vegetables on a fictional, futuristic star system. The objective is to win vegetable contests and eventually the All-Universe Vegetable Competition, while setting traps and defense to protect the farm against a species of pest called Baboo.
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Unique currently JP-only farming/tower defense game. The idea is you're trying to become a galactic-level farm - to do it, you have to compete in crop competitions at a local planet. How do you raise better crops? Well... you put your crops into a seed-making machine, first. Then, you can use a breeding machine to mix two seeds. Seeds have various 'genes'.. how big they are, flavor, etc, and based on what you mix, you can sometimes breed a new seed with a stronger gene. (or a weaker one!) there are subtle ways to encourage mutations. I think the idea was to just roll with your failures but I cheated and used save states... (Don't do this...)
that being said, the loop of breeding gets a little repetitive. It's a very specific kind of strategy game, one that I was interested to interact with for a few hours, but it keeps going.
to make this task nontrivial is a tower defense game where you buy traps to ward off these native species. However they have good AI (The designer of this is an AI researcher!) and will learn to avoid traps you use too much. Interestingly, the enemies will also EVOLVE to get over certain traps. The game frames this as a kind of 'ecological balancing' - sometimes your crops need to be destroyed if you've been defending them too well..
This too, goes into huge amounts of detail - there's an in-game message board with detailed e-mails about other farmers trying to (humorously) figure out what to do with their traps or seeds. It's a very 'lonely' game (there's few NPCs and your farm is mostly a menu) but the message board adds a fun social dimension to it.
Competitions are straightforward, you just need to hit a certain requirement for your crop. The crops are always these strange variants of common crops on our earth, that have evolved in strange ways for space. Some interesting eco-lore going on in this game, lol..
Overall it's a cool game. I really am curious if there's potential in farming games at all beyond just iterating on what harvest moon did in the '90s, or replacing one feedback loop with another (e.g. Rune Factory swapping out some bits for action rpg)
Anyways this game's director did other cool AI experiments on PS1/PS2, so check those out! Muumuu is the studio..
that being said, the loop of breeding gets a little repetitive. It's a very specific kind of strategy game, one that I was interested to interact with for a few hours, but it keeps going.
to make this task nontrivial is a tower defense game where you buy traps to ward off these native species. However they have good AI (The designer of this is an AI researcher!) and will learn to avoid traps you use too much. Interestingly, the enemies will also EVOLVE to get over certain traps. The game frames this as a kind of 'ecological balancing' - sometimes your crops need to be destroyed if you've been defending them too well..
This too, goes into huge amounts of detail - there's an in-game message board with detailed e-mails about other farmers trying to (humorously) figure out what to do with their traps or seeds. It's a very 'lonely' game (there's few NPCs and your farm is mostly a menu) but the message board adds a fun social dimension to it.
Competitions are straightforward, you just need to hit a certain requirement for your crop. The crops are always these strange variants of common crops on our earth, that have evolved in strange ways for space. Some interesting eco-lore going on in this game, lol..
Overall it's a cool game. I really am curious if there's potential in farming games at all beyond just iterating on what harvest moon did in the '90s, or replacing one feedback loop with another (e.g. Rune Factory swapping out some bits for action rpg)
Anyways this game's director did other cool AI experiments on PS1/PS2, so check those out! Muumuu is the studio..