That pink watering can is cute as hell, no wonder he wants to drop the gun in favor of gardening!
Cute and clear art, good little intro to get the concept, AWESOME menu and nice auto aim feature.
I struggled with the camera.
You did great, congrats!

The Audio was quite crunchy. I think the camera focus needs to shift toward the enemies when a new wave arrives.

Using the mouse wasn't very intuitive for me without reading the description. The vibe was really cool though. Good job on the graphics too!

Great feel ! I like pico games ! I had trouble with the input but it's nicely done.

Difficult, but fun! I like the addition of different weapon types. Using a rocket launcher on slugs felt a bit overkill, but I loved it :smiling_imp:

I thought the art and music were pulled off nicely as well. Great entry!

Great game! The music was funny and the upgrades were nice. It is definitely worth it to prioritize the life of your flowers and switch the weapon with the watering can. (Why ESDF though? Is this a limitation of PICO-8?)

Very nice. I like the high paced action gameplay and the theme is quite humorous. Beautiful pixel art and sweet sound effects as well. Good job!

Neat game. Unlike most reviewers, I didnt like the music but thats just my oppinion. :D

Man what a cool game, the input threw me for a loop though. But the charm of the game made me stick it out had a blast playing more rounds then i expected :blush: Thanks for the cool game!

I really like the music and sfx. The graphics are nice too. I have built a few Pico8 games and I can't believe you built this over the weekend, great job!. Took me a minute to figure out you could aim with the mouse, maybe a more prominent cross hair? Any way it is an excellent game!

Great job! Took my way to long to figure out how to shoot (that's on me for not reading lol).

constructive feedback: if I were to change anything, I wouldn't make the health bars a bit easier to see; it may be an issue with colorblidingness but they looked like lava pockets.

positive feedback: Smart move making first wave have no enemies, that way I knew how heal the plants. Adore the art :). Music was familiar be retroized :)

I had some trouble with the controls as well, but it's a nice game overall. Really liked the game over music! Hahaha

It was so great! You guys made me wanna try PICO 8 dev now x)
Audio was awesome, graphics were neat, and although I also feel it to be a bit "frustrating difficult", it was really a great play. Awesome job!

The music was great, and the graphics too! They inputs are a bit wonky but the gameplay makes up for it

Thank you so so much for the wonderful comments everyone! we really appreciate the feedback <3
It looks like learning the controls (especially mouse) was an issue for many people, we could have done better with relaying this info within the game (@codechomper good idea with the crosshair!).

@codechomper yes, ESDF is a decision made by PICO-8. The W key is also available, but is mapped to a different action, and we ultimately decided it would be best to stick to what PICO expects (especially if people have remapped their controls in the full version!)

@ion-programming good idea! the camera code is something we did really early on and didn't alter much later (only to add the start and end 'custscenes'), but some kind of logic to push the camera towards enemies would be a really nice addition :)

OK, here goes: I lovehate this game.

I am going to talk about what I like, but I am also going to critique details in the controls. The critique is not because the game is bad, or because I'm giving a poor rating. Exactly opposite: it's because the game is very GOOD but has a couple of simple choices that really downgrade the play experience for me. I hope you are OK with that sort of feedback, because I mean it to be helpful and constructive, and I really hope it does not come across disheartening or insulting.

First, I LOVE the design. The Doom theme is great, and the art and chippy sounds have this great dissonance between the aggressive/demonic theme of Doom and the peacefulness of gardening. The design of gameplay is also excellent in the way that it forces me to multi-task and trade off between combat and gardening, I just love it. I also think the tutorial is very intelligently done: it leaves me alone in peace for as long as I need to understand several key things, the controls, the flowers and how they need watering, and even the flower-radar in the lower left.

It's a great game in that regard, and I like it.

And now for the pain, and please forgive me as I state my opinion as "fact":

1) Water on Z/C isn't right. I am in physical pain from twisting my pinky around to hit Z while keeping my hand on ESDF. Pico-8 would have let you use Tab, but the game doesn't accept that input. Right-click, E, shift, TAB, almost ANYTHING but Z, X, or C.

2) The camera is not correct. Because the player needs to see the action, many top-down shooters will not keep the character exactly in the center, and instead will shift the camera a little so they can see ahead of where they are going and/or aiming. Bloom does exactly the opposite, letting the player move ahead of the camera. This creates a multitude of problems, and it actually took me some testing and reflection to identify that all of these bad feels came from just the camera:

- It denies a view of the action. Every game, I lost to enemies I couldn't quite see but felt I should have.

- When enemies do come into view, there is only a tiny range of area that I can click into for shooting. One time I overshot the edge of the screen so bad that I closed the browser.

- It lets me flip my aim accidentally, because I can walk right past my own reticle (thus reversing my shooting direction). This doesn't normally happen in top-down shooters (because the screen would move sooner) and it took me quite a while to even realize what was happening to me and why.

Consider the following screenshot, where I have added a red arrow indicating my movement toward the enemies (I know only b/c of radar), and I have marked in red the "play zone" https://imgur.com/znWnf9P Such a tiny of portion of the screen is used usefully, and the rest goes to waste. Most combat occurs in this tiny cramped screen area.

For comparison, check out a video on youtube called "Nuclear Throne's Camera - A Case Study (Unity)" It will show you how you can open up the screen with slightly different camera logic, and provide a better play experience.


That's it! Just two things: button map, and camera logic. But a lot of impact on feel. I actually played this game a bunch anyway, because even in spite of the pain, it has so much to offer in its nice design that I wanted to experience more of how the gameplay developed.

Overall this is a very solid entry, but it could be AWESOME if the feel was on point. I hope it's okay that I unloaded some specific feedback on you. If you hate even seeing this kind of comment, let me know and I'll come back and delete it.

@pkenney thank you for putting the time into writing this! Don't worry about the criticism, it's really helpful to hear :)

I agree with both of your points; we could have thought more about both of these, and I wonder if we got so used to our original solutions for input and camera that we just didn't notice them being an issue?
I was taking inspiration for the feel from games like Enter the Gungeon (relaly good camera logic), but it's actually been a while since I've played it and I probably forgot about details like that, that really impact the feel.

I wonder if the mouse input would be better if your aim direction was always relative to the center of the screen, and we drew a reticle around the player based on this direction? I don't know of any games that do this, but I guess it would imitate analog stick input on top-downs like Enter the Gungeon.

As for controls, X/C may have been decided on too quickly just because of PICO-8 conventions (though we should have looked deeper into the docs to find Tab/Q!). I bet right click would be another good option for watering, like a traditional alt-fire...

The video you linked to seems really helpful, will give it a proper watch soon. Thanks again!

Nice graphics... but bad controls like everyone stated. It's not the first game with this issue - if you map a lot of things to the keyboard - stick to the keyboard. If you want mouse+keyboard then go with traditional way - arrows/WSAD, and mind that the player can probably use one more key that is very near and that key is SHIFT or SPACE - no more! Because other fingers are occupied with WSAD players have only pinky and thumb that can comfortably only be used for shift and space. Other keys that are near (1-4,R,Q,F) can only be used for sporadic single action like reload, change weapon, open door because you can't use them simultaneously with WSAD. When you decide to use arrow keys then the possibilities are even more narrow. Don't kick the doors that were already open since first Wolfenstein and Doom :)

I was "BLOOM" away :P Seriously, what a game ! I really liked the fact that we started with a slow beginning by just watering the plants (which is very clever, because we learnt that we can water them), then boom the waves began, and here the fun struck strongly !

Also I liked the nervous gameplay, however, I had some troubles to hit well the targets, indeed, it seemed that there was a little latency, between the input and the shoot in the game. Moreover, I found that the level of sound was a bit too loud for me.

Overall very nice work !

Hi! Small tutorial in the beginning would be helpful, beside that its a nice entry!

Great game. I just wish that slugs would have to kill all plants on the map for me to die, not just one. Could stop some instadeaths.

Very creative use of music, it's just great. Love seeing PICO games here.

Cheers!

Loved the twist of Doom into Bloom Eternal! Had quite some fun playing this. I do think controls could be a bit better, felt it was quite awkward to control. I kept misplacing my fingers. Also it felt quite harsh on how easy it was to die, not expecting it to be super balanced in a Ludum Dare game of course. But probably better to err on the "too easy" side of things.

Graphics, music, fun and mood felt very much on point, especially the little loading sequence :)