Bonsai Season by JuanRod707

[raw]
made by JuanRod707 for Ludum Dare 52 (COMPO)

Bonsai Season is a chill and relaxing game where the player grows and harvest fictional bonsai trees to meet a delivery quota.

How to play: Use 1, 2 and 3 to select the different Tools, A and D to move between planters.

  • Prune: pruning a tree will modify the tree behavior, like changing the quality of the fruit, or the grow speed of the trunk and branches. Experiment with pruning to yiend the best results.
  • Water: keep your bonsais hydrated but don't drown them. Hydration level works as a multiplier for grow speed
  • Harvest: use your harvester to pick a fruit and send it to the delivery bin. You can harvest fruit ahead of time but they will be less valuable.
  • Save up and buy more trees: there are 4 types of trees: Bapple, Chileney, Bomberry and Motato. Each have distinct growth parameters and values.
  • Watch the clock: The objective of the game is to keep an evergrowing demand of fruit value, you have limited time for this, so watch the clock.

I used the help of Polycam to procedurally generate some of the textures in the game, and some Sfx I had laying around, other than that, the entirety of the game and assets was done by me in the 48 hours of the jam.

sshot3.pngsshot1.pngsshot2.pngsshot4.png

Ratings

Overall 181th 3.425⭐ 22🧑‍⚖️
Fun 268th 2.95⭐ 22🧑‍⚖️
Innovation 127th 3.475⭐ 22🧑‍⚖️
Theme 69th 4.1⭐ 22🧑‍⚖️
Graphics 169th 3.5⭐ 22🧑‍⚖️
Audio 120th 3.395⭐ 21🧑‍⚖️
Mood 80th 3.725⭐ 22🧑‍⚖️
Given 15🗳️ 17🗨️

Feedback

LDJam user 280509
09. Jan 2023 · 07:31 UTC
Good game to heal my tired heart after the jam!

My fruits are growing tooooo fast
diesdas
09. Jan 2023 · 18:26 UTC
Very complex for such a short time to make, hats off to you! The only thing that I found weird is the FPS view and the tools resembling guns, gave me the opposite vibe of the soothing music. PS: Love the fact that you can actually watch the plants grow!
LDJam user 12890
09. Jan 2023 · 19:46 UTC
Solid game, unique idea. Enjoyed it, great work!
FlyingMobula
10. Jan 2023 · 08:04 UTC
This is a really cool idea. I thought of something similar with tomatoes because I know they have a pattern that you should use to prune them. I found it hard to figure out where I should prune the bonsai and when the fruits are of good quality. Other than that very cute game.
🎤 JuanRod707
10. Jan 2023 · 11:58 UTC
@diesdas that's actually great feedback! To be honest, not sure where I was going with the gun-tools, maybe a little too much slime rancher influence. Thanks for the comments!
asfdfdfd
10. Jan 2023 · 20:32 UTC
Raising bonsais are never easy: not in game, nor in real life.
MightyBanana
14. Jan 2023 · 00:05 UTC
Very relaxing game
LDJam user 276121
14. Jan 2023 · 00:35 UTC
Very relaxing and pleasant, nice work.
XOREAXEAX
14. Jan 2023 · 20:39 UTC
Wow! Very cool and relaxing :) I like how one can choose to play the game slow or fast depending on how many plants to manage. There are some situations in which it is hard to click on the right part of the plant but this is also the case in reality so maybe not a problem :D
BinaryPrinciple
15. Jan 2023 · 00:28 UTC
Nice chill game, althought I would love more conflict, like having to spray bugs or cutting bad branches.
🎤 JuanRod707
16. Jan 2023 · 12:16 UTC
@binaryprinciple really like the idea of cutting bad branches, spraying bugs was one of the things I planned to include but I ran out of time
Tesseract
17. Jan 2023 · 16:46 UTC
A very nice game, it was fun to play for a bit and I really like the idea, although some parts of the UI were awkward - 3s in the font looked like 8s and the overlapping hit-regions made it tricky to click some things.
I'm glad the timer was so slow - it would be hard to learn the game properly under time pressure.
3ggplant
19. Jan 2023 · 14:22 UTC
Nice and relaxing game. It's quite easy to understand and play, although the fruit harvesting seems to have some bugs with detecting some of the fruits sometimes.
Loig
19. Jan 2023 · 19:25 UTC
Relaxing, indeed. A few bugs with fruits that do not seem to be harvestable, but nothing critical. Can we really shape the trees by cutting the "good" branches?

Congratulations for this game!
🎤 JuanRod707
20. Jan 2023 · 12:02 UTC
@loig thanks for the kind words. You can't shape the trees but the stat modifications actually happen, one of the features I couldn't finish because of time was displaying the tree stats in the bottom panel. But the progression works