The Machine's Blessing by Solrinn

The Goddess' BLESSING saved us, but it is changing us.
I must grow my GARDEN to FEED the village, but the OIL turns crops to METAL.
If we can eat, we might live a few more days. When we starve, we turn into MACHINES.
I must fight to KEEP US ALIVE. Oil leaks from my brain. Just a few more days.

- GROW your PLANTS

- And FEED your population

Team :
Arthur MAYOT : Lead Game Designer/ Project Manager / Writer
Anthony HUREZ : Lead Programmer
Abel LEFEL FERNANDEZ : Game Designer / Programmer
Erlé MONCHANIN : Sound Designer
Noémie VERSTRAETEN : Project Lead / Lead Graph / Singer
Clément GOULEY : Game Designer / Graph
Little TUTORIAL before the first update of the game !

- Open your drawer to show your Plants and Food ! (There are no insects yet)
- Use metals to change your crops!
- Don't forget to use your food or feed the village by adding it to the cart!
| Youtube | https://anthony-hurez.itch.io/the-machines-blessing |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/the-machines-blessing |
Ratings
| Overall | 1501th | 3.37⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 2316th | 2.635⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 1383th | 3.212⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 762th | 3.865⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 143th | 4.446⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 328th | 3.82⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 910th | 3.558⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 47🗳️ | 24🗨️ |
The audio and visuals were great! If you do a post-jam version with working mechanics, I'd love to try it out!
We added a little tutorial on the main post ! :smile: I hope it's clearer now !
Even if it's not perfect, we are really happy to read your feedbacks. We will fix some bugs and submit a corrected version to you as soon as we have a little rest, as my mate said !
I wanted to say... It's my first game jam and it's my first game eveeeeer... I was really nervous and afraid but now i'm very really proud of everybody in this team. We had a lot of fun :heart: Thank you everybody for all your comments ! :two_hearts:
-Noémie V.
I'll check the tutorial and play again!
I also don't quite understand what happens to arable fields after some time (after a few days). And what is wheelbarrow for.
And I don't know if the settings button should work or not. It doesn't work for me.
Aand another thing - description of those mysterious boxes on top bar is hardly visible.
Besides that, not bad. Probably too big scope (just as in my team project :smile: )
Cheers!
Nevertheless, the music and art are beautiful. For a first game jam you all did a great job so you can be proud of yourself! The overall idea is pretty good! Can't wait to see you guys at the ENJMIN :wink:
I still can't find the right balance in gameplay but the graphics, music and overall mood kept me playing.
Chapeau - beautiful art!
Great job, you can be proud !
And some enjoyed the experience anyway! To see the fruits of my teammates' toil so justly lauded makes me so happy for them!
The team is working hard on a fix for the UI, which is admittedly unclear, on a little tutorial, various bugfixes and tiny features that they couldn't get to work before, and to try to make the little tooltips readable. The short background that was written during the jam and some moody tooltips for the crops might find their way into the game too, but only if the devs can find some time for that, which is not a given (they're already very hard at work).
Indeed, the gameplay might be a little much for a game of this scope, and especially with the troubles we encountered trying to display the relevant information clearly. It would need some form of progression to make it easier to get accustommed to the various systems, easing into the concepts, a bunch of streamlining and balancing... I think complex systems are fine, learning curves are fine, but this all need to be taken into account to really make the player's experience as enjoyable as possible. Still, it's proof of concept for a tiny bit of something larger, that I thought could be fun and interesting.
(I'm a bit sad for now that we could not get the crop laboratory-atelier into the game, but one day, I may get to repurpose some of those ideas to torture some other team. I can only hope they'll be as wonderful as this one.)
As you noted, the balance on the ressource systems and crops yields are kind of wonky, and needed a lot more tuning to really get right - especially after so many gameplay features had to be parred down and put into the garbage can, which threw a bunch of design elements out of the metaphorical window and the balance with it. But time was like oil between our fingers. I have not a great grasp of scope and achievability yet. I do very much lack experience and efficiency in, let's say, practical game design - but isn't it very much the point of doing these jams, I believe?
A lack of foresight on my part wanted to take the game in one direction, but the constraints of practicality in the design took it in an other, and I'm pretty happy that we could collectively make that shift of focus work - some tokyo drift-like turn it was - and still have some elements of the intended experience delivered through other means than the ones intended.
Again, I thank you kindly for your returns and feedbacks. They are duly noted. I wish you all a wonderful day, and success in what you do! Please be kind to others and yourselves.
Edit: Wait, that's some nice singing, I didn't get to hear it at first!
After your first feedbacks, we managed to correct our game. We have fixed some bugs on the v1.1 but there is no tutorial yet. It's coming on the v1.2 ! With more bug fix.
Feel free to test it and give us your new comments! But, please, do not rate this version v1.1. We did in more than 72 hours.

[**PATCH NOTE v1.1**]
_Added features_
- Crops now become BLESSED when planted in BLESSED soil.
- Products special effects have been implemented.
- Products now exist in BLESSED form.
- Products are BLESSED when harvested from BLESSED crops.
- Products can be turned into crops using the hoe.
- BLESSED products turn into BLESSED crops.
- Crops info in the drawer-dossier now display the crop's quality.
- BLESSED crops now output BLESSED products.
*UI fixes & updates*
- The crops drawer-dossier is now more visible.
- The track switch has been turned into a radio! ♫
- Clicking on a harvested product highlights the WHEELBARROW, the hoe and the soil tiles.
- Products names have been updated.
*Bug fixes*
- Tiles now correctly become PURE when crops are planted on them.
- BLESSED earth or planted tiles can no longer become BLESSED when OIL leaks.
- FERTILITY and QUALITY now correctly affects the crops' output
*Balance changes*
- OIL leaks adjusted from 50% to 20%

Thank you for all your support <3 ! ❁☢❀☢✿
@krebzor @nosfer @good-enough @jbdev @bohrmaschine2000 @j-c-one-bit-studio @bramreth @maryush28 @empheon @oscarglo @5imon @demontoon
After I read some of the comments here, I tried to play the 1.1 version. It is much better. The addition of the highlighting and the hoe are very useful. I still don't know what the metals do. I couldn't figure out how to get "pure" crops again, and my entire field became "blessed", which I soon realized was a problem.
Also, I encountered several glitches (also in 1.1) where I couldn't click on the circles to water/oil plants. And sometimes I wasn't able to click on inventory items until the next day.
I don't really get why the drawer must be clicked to be seen. I know it obscures the view of the statue, which is very beautiful, but I quickly started leaving the drawer open all the time.
I can tell that this has some potential, but there needs to be some major improvements to the UI first. The confusing UI really drags down this otherwise very beautiful game.