Mom & Pop's Mutant Produce

It's been over a generation since Dustfall forced civilization underground, and it now falls on you to inherit the family farm. Two problems: greedy corporations want to buy it out from you to monopolize critical resources, and the farm is just one small dome, exposing your myriad crops to their predator plant species. It's up to you to balance these competing forces to keep the farm afloat and in your control

That's neat, but what's this about?

Mom & Pop's Mutant Produce, or MPMP, is a game made for the 2022 Epic Mega Jam about managing growth in two different phases: the Farming phase and the Corporate Diplomacy phase. 

In the Farming phase, you have a surface dome farm full of mutant plants that continually grow over each other. Each plant type provides a unique resource that can help in the diplomacy phase, so it's important to make sure one of the three plant varieties doesn't get wiped out!

In the Corporate Diplomacy phase, you take the day's harvest down to the Undercity. There are three corporations vying for power, and if any one of them takes enough of a lead, it's game over; they're big enough they can buy out the farm without fearing retaliation from the other companies. Diplomacy phase presents you with a number of actions each corporation is taking that night in order to get a leg up on the competition. You can then choose to allocate resources to guaranteeing actions either succeed or fail - if you don't act, it's all up to chance. Each faction has a different resource they prefer and a resource they won't accept at all, so it's important to have a well-balanced supply of plants from the Farming phase.

How to Play

Farming Phase

The Farming phase takes place in a surface dome, which contains a hexagonal grid of farm plots. Mousing over a farm plot will show information about soil quality, like nutrients, radiation level, and moisture. It will also show the status of any plants on that tile, as well as their environmental needs and what kind of plant can grow over it.

There are three different plants: Stargrass, Megasaps, and Hydramoss. In addition to providing different resources, they also have different ideal soil conditions, different growth rates, and can grow over one different type of plant.

The phase broken into 6 rounds, moving to the Diplomacy phase after the sixth round. Each round the player can take any two of the following actions:

• Harvest: Remove a plant from a tile for a large resource payout
• Prune: Cut several matured plants down to sprouts for a small resource payout
• Water: Increase moisture on multiple tiles, and extinguish any fires on them
• Burn: Set a fire on a tile. Plants on burning tiles will wilt, but nutrients on a tile increase when a fire starts on it, and fires have a chance to spread or burn out each round.
• Irradiate: Increase the radiation of multiple tiles. Any affected plants won't propagate or grow for the round.

Once the player takes their two actions for the round, all plants have a chance of propagating to a nearby tile, and across multiple rounds will mature into larger plants. But plants on tiles that don't meet their minimum environmental requirements will wilt and die. If your last plant of a given type dies or gets grown over, then it's gone. These plants are tightly regulated, and hard to replace.

Corporate Diplomacy Phase

This phase only has one round. Each faction rolls a number of actions that can either affect their own strength, hinder each others' strength, or causes some other effect (potentially even affecting your farm). You then can choose to guarantee each action succeeds or fails, at the cost of resources earned in the previous phase. How much it costs depends on the faction that rolled the action and what resource you spend; each faction has a favored resources that makes it cheaper to bribe them with.

When you're satisfied with your selection, just click "Confirm Bribes" to end the phase. Any actions you didn't guarantee will have a 50% base chance of passing (possibly modified by other corporate actions). Then the resource cost is deducted and you go back to the farm phase.

... Unless, that is, one faction gets too strong. If one Faction is stronger than the weakest by 10 and the second strongest by at least five, they're too strong to worry about the other factions and immediately seize the farm. Like the farming phase, it's important not to let one force at play grow too strong.

How to Win

There is no win-state. You could quit and make the farm someone else's problem, but keeping the corporations at bay is an endless grind.