A Run of the Mill

It's not your run-of-the-mill runner game! Harvest wheat and mill it into as much flour as you can while dodging birds and obstacles! Can you reach the next windmill? Or will the birds get you first?

Instructions for how to play are included in the game, so jump on in and try it out! Thanks for checking the game out, and I hope you enjoy playing it!

Inspiration for the Game

The inspiration for this game comes from the cliché "run of the mill," which is often used to describe things "of ordinary or average quality." I thought it was a fitting description of a game created for a game jam.

Before making the game, I spent some time learning about how flour is made from wheat. It's a multi-part process, and there are numerous different techniques, but I chose to make the game based around the following process:

1. Harvest the wheat by cutting the stalks with a scythe.
2. Smack the wheat with a tool called a thresher to loosen the wheat seeds from the stalk and seed husk (the husks are also called chaff).
3. Tossing the loose seeds and chaff up into the air on a breezy day causes the chaff to fly away because it is much lighter than the seeds. This process is called "winnowing" and is referred to by a famous cliché that originates from the Bible, "to separate the wheat from the chaff."
4. Finally, the seeds can be ground between two stones into flour! The top stone is called a "millstone" and is rotated (sometimes by harnessing power from running water or wind), and is the central part of a watermill or windmill!

I tried to capture this process in the gameplay by having two primary actions: scythe and thresh. Since this is a runner game, I added a mechanic where the wheat and seeds get launched forward after each step and rolls around, which was an attempt add a unique element of multi-tasking to the game. Grinding the flour happens automatically as you pass a windmill, which acts a checkpoint and heals your character

About the AI-Generated Art

Hey y'all, my name's Kishan and I'm one of Chris' friends who did some of the art assets for "Run of the Mill". 2022 has seen the rise of diffusion based art generation techniques, and I've been completely fascinated with the power of the tools that have emerged. I started playing around with Midjourney this year, and since the launch of Stable Diffusion this year, I have been playing around with the wonderful open-source models and tools that the community has been producing.

Chris' initial prototype featured a backdrop set as the timeless, "Wheat Fields" by Vincent Van Gogh. It looked great in the context of his wheat farming game, but since the background was a scrolling parallax, it did not repeat as the player traversed the infinite plane. I had just installed a new plugin for Stable Diffusion that allowed for X and/or Y tiling for generated images, so I approached Chris with some background assets that mimicked the style of Van Gogh. Once he implemented the prototype into his game, I was immediately floored -- it really tiled! This felt like such a game changer for prototyping video games, fitting for a game-jam. I generated some sky, foreground, and mid-ground backgrounds, and I used img2img to transform his wheat icons and make them more in line with Van Gogh's painterly style. I'll be very excited to keep honing this technique. Thanks Chris for the opportunity!

Credits

Chris Achenbach (synack.itch.io) - Programming, Character and Bird Sprites, Wheat Drawings, Audio Editing

Kishan (philine.itch.io) - Art for Ground Tiles, Backgrounds, AI Art Wizardry

Music Downloaded from Pixabay:

1. Charles Shomo - Bluegrass Banjo Amp Harmonica
2. Oleg Kirilkov - Jazz Happy
3. Denys Kyshchuk - Upbeat Country Blues
4. Charles Shomo - Banjo Romp