The Busy Gardener by elektropapst
The Busy Gardener
You are gardener, always looking after your flowers. Since you really love your flowers, it would be sad if they wilt.
Screenshot
Controls
The game is completely controlled by mouse click on a tile to move the player or interact with the flowers.
| Control | | |-------------------|--------------------------------------------------------------| | Left double click | The Character tries to find a path and moves to the location | | Left single click | A menu for interaction opens (see below) |
If you click on a flower you have two options:
- Use your watering can to water the flower
- Use your shovel to dig up the flower
From time to time a flower needs water which will be indicated by a "drop" icon (Time to use the first option).
If you forget to water the flowers or do not have time to fulfill your obligation, the flower will wilt and become a brown shrub (see above image). Once your third flower withers, you've lost and the number of flowers alive is your score.
As you are a conscientious gardener, you cannot walk over flowers. Therefore, plan early how you want to arrange your meadow. For that you have up to four slots to store flowers (Red, Blue and white in the second image above). If you click on an empty space, you are able to re-plant your flower by clicking on the corresponding menu slot.
Thank you for playing and keep your flowers alive
--
The game was created in Java using the awesome libGDX framework.
You may run the jar via java -jar desktop-1.0.jar (Tested on Linux)
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Changelog
``` V1.1.0 - 2020-04-26
- Increased TIMEFORWATERING to 15 seconds
- Flowers appear faster at the start of the game
- Experimental HTML5 Export ```
Ratings
| Overall | 1736th | 3.268⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 1711th | 3.089⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 1794th | 2.982⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 651th | 3.926⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 1560th | 3.37⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 1872th | 2.167⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 1333th | 3.333⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 64🗳️ | 14🗨️ |
P.S. It was quite tricky to run the jar file on Windows :)
Got to 20 flowers at best, but success here is down to a lot of luck unfortunately. Flowers seem to get thirsty completely at random regardless of when they were last watered. This means that a group of flowers cannot be prewatered to reduce the risk of a trip to the other side of the garden. New arrivals might also randomly require water right as they appear, which is quite unfair at times.
The controls aren't up to this wildly random task. Queuing actions is a nice feature, but I didn't find a way to cancel the queue, which doomed my gardener on one occasion. On another occasion the program crashed and on a third dozens of *"drop" icons* appeared at once and obscured the screen.
If I was in charge, I'd reduce the randomness, increase the wilt delay slightly, and fix the action queueing. On top of this I'd actually extend the layout planning aspect of the challenge by not simply giving points from alive plants, but rather from groups of similar colored plants. These groups could also yield extra points if arranged in specific configurations, such as *+, -, T* or what have you.
Anyway, it's a good start and despite the randomness (or maybe because of it) I gave it many a go.
FYI you can add this (for people like me :) ): windows user will need Java (seems obvious but...) and create a file .bat (thanks to Notepad for example) with your command line (java -jar desktop-1.0.jar)
Nice job