The Tree by adrupen
You are a tree. :deciduous_tree: Now Grow!

Comes with plenty of green, eco-friendly entertainment!
- Stunning tree animations.
- Next-Gen vegetation graphics.
- Never seen before root growing mechanics.
- Soothing, life changing, introspective experience.
Experience what you have always wanted to be.
A bark covered harmonic being of incredible strength and beauty.
Create a plant like no plant you have ever meet before.
Be the inspiration to all the young saplings on this planet!
Rid the world of global warming, by extending your fantastic branches!
Enough inspiring words, just play the game already.
Instructions
- Grow root
- Grow branch
- ~Bask in sun light~
- Pesky wind wants to push you over
- Grow roots
- Now you stand on firm ground
- Smile smugly at pesky wind
- Remember that trees can't smile
- ~Continue basking in sun light~
Please enjoy:
The Tree
How to play
Roots produce :droplet:
Branches/leaves produce :sunny:
Grow deeper and deeper into the ground with your roots. Grow deeper and deeper into space with your magnificent trunk and branches. Resist the pesky winds by building roots and strengthening your tree.
| Link | https://github.com/hanneswestberg/LD48 |
| Link | https://hanneswestberg.github.io/Webb/LD48/ |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/the-tree |
Ratings
| Overall | 448th | 3.806⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 586th | 3.565⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 65th | 4.194⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 206th | 4.161⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 693th | 3.855⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 576th | 3.1⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 1103th | 3.352⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 24🗳️ | 13🗨️ |
Anyway, solid entry. Root growing tech is cool.
Blew away animation is so cute!)
Overall a great game.
I wish it had audio
At some point i ran out of ways to build up - is that intentional?
The only real problems I had were quality-of-life issues--there's a number of these so I'll just do a list:
- Sometimes the user interface would be a little laggy and wouldn't stop showing me a root I had previously selected.
- A lot of the roots themselves were not visually drawn. One way I can think of to fix this is to remove the user choice of where the next roots will go. That way, the entire root tree can be generated at the start of the game, and new parts of it will essentially be "revealed" when the player clicks on a new root.
- The tree started to drift off the screen, making it impossible to grow new branches. I ended up with just hundreds of thousands of water as I would just keep adding roots until I could add no new ones, while waiting for the tree to come back on screen.
But if the game was polished to fix these issues, and maybe juiced up a bit with snappy UI and some SFX, I think this would be a really enjoyable short game. If you want a longer game you could definitely go the route other commenters are suggesting and add new stuff--but I did have fun with what was there, only hindered sometimes by small UI annoyances.
To be particularly clear: just the two things, roots and branches, plus the space background, are easily enough to make me want to play this game as long as it takes to fill out the root network and reach space. Just the presence of those obvious goals were motivation enough, and the gameplay was pretty fun working towards that goal.
(I suppose my one idea to solve the root drawing issue conflicts with the presence of the clearly defined end-goal root network... that rendering problem might need a different solution)
The fact that you gave the root mechanism such smart growing it's practically AI is incredible! Too bad I ran out of space for the roots, I had probably filled up every possible spot for roots and all that was left was expansion into space.
I had the same scenario near the end as @honey-pony , when the wind got really strong (especially when it went over 1000) I would have to sit around waiting for the wind to change direction since the wind was so strong the tree's expansion points blew off-screen.