Planetary Garden by joatski
Planetary Garden
How to play:
- Play HTML5 build (requires latest Chrome or Firefox)
- Download from https://joat.itch.io/planetary-garden (Windows build)
- Repopulate a barren planet (Earth?) with life by seeding new plants
- When the time is right, enlist animals to help automate the process (one of them knows an ancient secret).
- Eventually other things happen. No spoilers.
Notes:
- Progress is saved between sessions, but time does not advance while the application is closed. Keep it open to continue amassing life. The HTML5 version does not save progress yet, sorry about that.
About:
- Made for LD38, created under the compo rules (worked alone, created all new assets, finished within 48 hours of starting). However, I got a late start (3 PM Sat) and did not submit in time for the official deadline, so it's technically a jam entry.
- Source code and assets are included (download from https://joat.itch.io/planetary-garden, made with Unreal Engine 4.15). Unless otherwise noted, assets created for the compo are placed under a CC0 license and game code under a MIT license.
- Blog Post (contains a bit more info about my thought process and the watercolor style)
Ratings
| Overall | 323th | 3.462⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 239th | 3.444⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 658th | 2.519⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 400th | 3.407⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 541th | 3.037⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 455th | 2.52⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 582th | 2.042⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 549th | 2.92⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 30🗳️ | 32🗨️ |
I love these games in which you have to grind a lot to unlock something!
The only feedback I could give you is that would be awesome to hear background music, especially if you have to spend a lot of time looking at the game.
Nice work!
Earth +10 ;)
I love this kind of game! ^^ It's so good when you have the auto click!!!
Great entry! (even if there is no music)
Gotta say I played this for quite a while. I sometimes get really into optimization kinda games, and this was no exception. However, the problem with a game like this for me is that I start to really scrutinize the working systems at play, and unfortunately in this case I noticed that a lot of the 10x priced plants were absurdly overpriced after a while. 450K for one plant, or 6.5M for ten. At that point, there's no choice to make there. I was also mildly disappointed when I unlocked Earth Prime, which was literally the exact same (or at least same-feeling) planet starting from scratch.
If you can think of some interesting, unique ways to reward your player for their time invested/clever resource allocation, I'd say you have a pretty neat game on your hands. :)
When you hit milestone thresholds in # of plants owned of each type or across all types then the production speeds up, so a lot of the time it makes sense to go back and get an older plant to the next multiple of 25. Each successive dimension also boosts the amount you earn per plant across the board, so it really starts to speed up and then you can watch the pretty planets go by.
I didn't get all of the messaging in there for these mechanics, so there's no 'ding, you're now producing faster' at milestones, etc... though. Always more stuff to do than time to do it in :)
https://twitter.com/joatski/status/857765134923640833
One of the best games I played so far... congratz :P
I'm actually a big sucker for things with exponential growth mechanics and harvesting and such.
This has a bit of that "Cookie Clicker" vibe which is both addicting and neat to see how far you can get.
Keep up the good work bro!
(I'd love to see this expand by the way, MOAr flowers, perhaps upgrades and some music would be nice, i'd definitely sink some hours into it!) ;)
On a more minor note, some music would have definitely improved the experience, and the artwork could also have used a bit more polish (the font seems like an especially bad choice due to legibility).
PROS
- Pace picks up rather fast
- The easter egg is pretty
CONS
- Lack of music makes the clicker game rather boring for an extended play session
For full criticism and breakdown of ranking, as well as candid reactions to gameplay, do check out the video~
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4BfYdLa1uU
@inventroom: Thanks for the video playthru. Pretty sure that's the farthest anyone has gone in the long garden; I only went to the mid 40s while testing :)
At the last minute I adjusted how powerful the per-planet bonus is and moved the dimension unlock down to goats from humans to make sure more people actually found the ascension mechanic and tried shifting thru several worlds. I still think this was the right call for a jam game that people will typically only evaluate for a few minutes but it does make it pretty trivial after a few worlds (most clickers go with a linear boost per ascension rather than an exponential one).
Really cool cliker game! I'm always addicting to them despite the fact that I find them a bit useless. But gotta click these little green boxes that pop up you know! :°
This one has all the good ingredients, and the speed up with each planet is a nice addition (maybe it's a standard in clickers though but I've just played a few). Otherwise it just lacks some music and it would be perfect for the genre!
Really well done, I've passed quite a lot of time in this one :D
For further development, an overview screen with all of the planets that are unlocked can be introduced, with information about current resources collected by them, it will also allow quicker switching between them. All of the planets could alongside their resources, also gather a fraction of them into global resources pool, that could be used for buying upgrades.
I really like the fact that the game starts to play it self after a while. In fact I'm still playing as I type this.
What I'm missing is that the different plants look a bit to similar. I'm not entirely sure which is a daisy and with is grass.
Nice little game, it's like a clicker game but with a lot less clicking, which I appreciate. I would really like to be able to rotate the planet, as meaningless as that is.
I played on stream at https://www.twitch.tv/videos/143780402 - time 2:11:00
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8iJfrvw7wWA