Garden State by cbear_wallis
This jam was weird...I did a hackathon last week and only got 4 hours of sleep but I needed to do the ludum dare for reasons. Anyways...what me and my girlfriend made is super experimental.
NOTE: The game saves a picture of your garden when you're finished so you can post on twitter etc.! ^_^
Instructions:
~Escape to quit.
~mouse is used to drag Plants onto the board. Plants can only be dragged onto grass. Every 2 flowers allows for an extra point for making plants. Lastly, This isn't competitive game...have fun with it <3 It's quite relaxing and nice in a lot of ways!
NOTE:
screenshots save in the actual mac app?? I couldn't fix this in time >.< so just right click the application and click show package contents. It's in the Contents folder. Sorry <3
NOTE: The game saves a picture of your garden when you're finished so you can post on twitter etc.! ^_^
Instructions:
~Escape to quit.
~mouse is used to drag Plants onto the board. Plants can only be dragged onto grass. Every 2 flowers allows for an extra point for making plants. Lastly, This isn't competitive game...have fun with it <3 It's quite relaxing and nice in a lot of ways!
NOTE:
screenshots save in the actual mac app?? I couldn't fix this in time >.< so just right click the application and click show package contents. It's in the Contents folder. Sorry <3
Ratings
| Coolness | 56% | 3 |
| Overall(Jam) | 3.63 | 181 |
| Fun(Jam) | 3.11 | 485 |
| Graphics(Jam) | 4.17 | 117 |
| Humor(Jam) | 3.60 | 152 |
| Innovation(Jam) | 3.50 | 250 |
| Mood(Jam) | 4.18 | 22 |
| Theme(Jam) | 3.03 | 748 |
Also, 420 fertilize it
Feedback: Sometimes the speech bubbles get in the way, but the puns make up for that.
Perfect music choice.
The cute little interjections from the plants were confusing at first, but still cute. I also love the look of them, and the gently swaying grass.
I had a little bit of difficulty placing plants due to the cursor being above the tile I wanted to use. Even with the shading placement help, I still couldn't land the purple plant til my 5th attempt.
I didn't really understand the counter system with the plant costs, or how you earned points back. I actually thought I lost once I covered all the dirt, despite aiming for that goal. It might be a bit clearer to add some sort of 'win' screen.
In terms of polish, you could add a rollover effect on buttons. I also found it a little jarring that the music restarted when you restarted the game.
Good job!
The music, sounds, juicy animations and speech bubbles makes it feel like a complete game.
However it's a nice relaxing game. Good music choice!
The whole atmosphere of the game is superb. The animations for the art assets blended very nicely with calming music and just give the whole thing a flow that feels great.
It took me probably two or so rounds (maybe 3?) to start to figure out why exactly the rounds ended. But I liked the overall presentation of the mechanics and how everything is learned by interacting with it and observing behaviors. I read your post-mortem post and I think you were really able to recover and make something engaging and different by cutting out the notion of specific player goals. For a small scale game like this it's wonderful to just be able to unwind and enjoy the mechanics with no other clutter getting in the way. It feels... pure, I suppose is a good way to phrase it.
The talking plants were a nice touch too, though I found they tended to talk a bit too much. Often times their dialogue would overlap over each other and sometimes with multiple speech bubbles present it would detract from the rest of the experience. So I think maybe spacing them out a bit more would have been nice.
Oh this is nit-picky, but I also noticed what you call the "brambles", the darker squares... when they act on their turn I noticed their animations could have been slightly smoother when they seem to "exit" and move to another square. They disappear instantly, and it could have been nice to have them shrink out in the same way the "grow" in to their final position.
Also I found sometimes when dragging a plant over to a specific tile it wouldn't register as I expected sometimes. It wasn't a huge deal, but sometimes I would have to re-drag the plant of my choice over a tile more than once to get it to go to the tile I expected.
Fantastic entry overall though, it's a little bite-sized bit of relaxing joy. These peaceful zen-like games can be interesting to see because of how tense game jams typically are. Interesting how, from so much stress things that are so calming can be created.
Not sure whether to rate you up or down for that one ;) (up, of course!) Very cute & very relaxing. I think there's a great puzzle game in here too if you explored it more (sort of a Threes/Triple Town/Road not Taken kind of thing