Very fun! Reminds me of Civilization V, a historical turn based strategy game, combined with farming. I want to see what you would do if you did a history of farming from few plants, research new plants, then expand your crop options! That's what I would love to see in this game!

Cool game! A great combination of 2000s strategies with a farming theme! Your game has great potential, but at this stage the game looks amazing in its own way! Good luck with further development

Best game I've played so far, tons of different mechanics to uncover, and a good tutorial. Sadly I thought the restart button was an undo action so I reset all of my progress just when I was starting to get the hang of it. :( Will definitely be playing more though

I don't really have anything about this game I don't like! The fact that you managed to solo do this in 72 hours is amazing!

My only suggestions would be more work into the art style to make the game truly feel 'unique'. All the gameplay elements you added work great and fit the harvest theme well

Everything about this is incredibly well done. It has a very high level of polish. The story and writing are great. I'm sure there's a way to win, but I wasn't able to do it in my time with the game. Honestly the sense of doom felt thematic. Fantastic art, well paced, great sound. This is a fantastic entry. The fact that it's your first is all the more impressive.

This is just amazing, I love the concept, story, art, sounds and the game play. Crazy work for the jam!

I kind of wish that when you discovered spells, it would add some sort of recipe reference to the side without having to hover over everything. I also found it difficult to tell which spell needed to be "planted" first so would often make the wrong spell when I did look at the recipes.

I almost gave up and quit because I thought it was endless, but then all my quadruple-eye spells kept revealing only water and I realized it was a finite map and therefore winnable (which I felt like I wasn't winning due to a lot of forest patches with health missing, that I mistook for settlements. I was actually doing quite well :rofl: It kind of takes a while to iterate through all the spells though when you have a lot of spells put down but I don't mind because the sounds are solid enough that it kind of makes a cool bop while I wait for the next turn.

Okay, interesting game. First of all, the graphics look amazing. I liked the story and the tutorial to get the basics out of the way. But still have some observations:
- I don't think the defence icons on the tiles are updating properly
- It's quite difficult to predict what's going to happen next round, in the automated section. I know what tiles are fired of, what will be attacked (not how often) but once you get to more than a few runes, you completely lose track of them and just place what you think you need. I made lots of those overgrowth runes, had the complete island covered in forest (except for maybe 5 tiles) and generated 80+ energy each turn. I had plenty of attack runes as well, but the damage seemed to be off, or the settlements were waaay more resilient than they look, idk.
- Without really controlling what's happening and just controlling how much of it is, its well... hard to control :sweat_smile:
- When you hover over a tile it doesn't always show you the correct recipe, the ui there updates a bit slower than the one in the bottom left corner. With the lack of a "recipe" book that just makes it harder knowing what combination of runes does what.
- It all does fit the theme of the overgrowing forest tho, since i had plants/runes everywhere.
- If there are two different stages to runes (sometimes they look different) i didn't really feel a difference

Nevertheless i still enjoyed it and managed to beat it, good job :thumbsup:

Great game! Managed to play for about half an hour. Great mechanics for a simple visual and relaxing audio. Can get pretty challenging, but still fun. Kudos!

thats a very inoovative take on the build up / tower defense genre. I really like the depth to which combinations are possible. I expected one layer at first but the combinations of combinations are a great surprise.
I dont think the game is particularely challenging though - i managed to beat it without understanding half the mechanics for the first minutes.

Hey, I've spent almost an hour on this one, it does certainly suck you in. Not really challenging, also the animations after ending can get really long if someone happens to put spinners everywhere (:smile:). It's also really hard to read if putting one element near other will result in a desired combination, or should the second element be put first, I think that the arrow misleads in some way, would love for it to be clear. Besides that the gameplay is top-notch, there are so many ways a game can be played, love it. It's astounding that you have made all this by yourself, great work!

The macos version doesn't open... :( The game looked fun, so I'm sad :cry:

Solid game idea! Well done ^_^

Amazing game, it's really cool. My favourite so far this jam. The sound design is :fire:, the atmosphere is perfect.

Thanks for the great feedback all!

@toosalty0000, I've just added an HTML build on the Itch page, if you'd like to test that out now! It's working well for me but I can't promise it's completely bug free. =)

https://justinmullin.itch.io/verdant

Currently my favorite board game is "Spirit Island" (it reminds me a lot of this, defending an island against invaders), so you can imagine how excited I was when I played this game. First of all, great that you have a tutorial in the beginning, it helped with setting up and making your first moves, which made this incredibly complex game feel less intimidating.

My favorite part of the game was figuring out the different spell combinations, and there sure were a lot of them.

The story created a great feel of importance and gave what you were trying to accomplish a meaning. In the end I managed to win, which felt very rewarding! :smile:


Overall a fantastic entry :trophy:

Great graphics/mood. Text started to feel a little heavy, some sentences could certainly be cut/shortened. I was a little confused when I first started, but trial and error got me through it. Again, wonderful atmosphere you built.

I would totally buy this with post-jam polish.

I'm not very good at this type of game so I resorted to a bit of trial and error, but overall I had some fun with this!
The intro dragged on a little bit, though I admit I'm not the right audience for it.
This feels like a very complete experience, which is fairly exceptional for a jam! Well done!

very impressive! I really enjoyed beating the game, and this has kept me playing for the longest out of every game I've played so far :))) my one tiny suggestion would be to have a way to skip watching all the actions after clicking next cycle, as it takes a long time towards the end of the game (apologies if there was a way to do this and I missed it)


Yeay, victory ! That's a very interesting game, and it's incredible how the game is deep with only 3 spell you can place.
The end game was a little long, because of all animations, and sometime I had issue to understand the role of some forest stuff (For example the red vital charm gave me the same description as the normal vital charm).
I enjoyed a lot to play, the mood was really cool with the sounds and the music. Congratulations for this entry !

What a game! I spent a lot of time with this.

It's wonderfully complicated and complete-feeling. The music set a great atmosphere, the graphics were solid and clear, and the little sfx and flashes were at first confusing but eventually became very good indicators of what was going on.

My first game went well but was a back and forth. I had fun exploring the combo-spells and figuring out what was effective, and the humans were successfully attacking me on multiple fronts, but in the end I prevailed.

Things felt wonderfully tight - should I develop my mana production, or bolster this defense over here?

Then I started to see that expansion of territory and offense were also important factors to consider.

The tipping point was when I started leveraging the multiplier, and combining it with location-independent spells, especially creeping death and the double-energy one.

After I won I was curious how I would do in a second round, leveraging what I'd learned. I absolutely STOMPED the pesky humans:


I spent my first turn creating a doubler and got a combination of creeping death and energy production connected to it. With aggressive use of forest-expansion and double-eyes I got map control quickly and used a core with a ton of doublers. My turns, I couldn't even spend my mana and as soon as I got humans in sight they were ripped to shreds.

They did manage to destroy one forest tile and knock out a couple of spells, though. I wonder if a flawless victory is possible...

It's really cool how the order you put spells down ends up dictating what you get, so you need to expand your mind out a bit to think about the final state you want, and then back into it step by step.

Really compelling across the board. I'm amazed you built such a deep system in such a short time, well done!

This is fun to experiment with! Here is a victory with no Ward of Overgrowth used at all:


I think that the doublers are not actually doubling the Creeping Death, though. But having that many with the doubled watchful eyes still did the trick.

Pesky humans still took down one forest tile though...

@pkenney I'm glad you enjoyed it! I agree there is some bug with the Creeping Death + Spiraled Echo combo, I have also noticed it doesn't seem to trigger appropriately. Maybe that is for the best, because as your last post shows, I think the combo of those two spells plus Watchful Eye for sight of the map is pretty clearly the strongest strategy all told. This one just seemed to come together at the last minute, with some lucky guesses on balance doing enough heavy lifting to keep the game from falling apart.

Thanks for playing and for all the insightful feedback! =)

Really like this one! Trully want a big game from this with more mechanics and stuff. The one thing I want here - a list of combinations you have already found. Great job, one of the best games I played this LD.

This was interesting experience, but I'm not really understood how to play and at the end just waited some flashes over tiles in the end of turn to happen. It was nice to play.

I definitely want to revisit this game later, as I think it deserves more attention than I can provide right now. It has an absolutely incredible depth to it for a game jam entry, and it's impressive that you managed to think of, and actually implement, more spells in that short time than I can fit into my head while just playing it. As a single person! I feel like the biggest strengths and biggest weaknesses of the game are almost the same: much complexity, but too little help from the UI to keep the overview.

*As a technical note, and hint to @toosalty0000: the game does not execute right away on MacOS, because the actual binary inside the application package lacks the "executable" flag. You can add it from the command line using `chmod +x ./Verdant.app/Contents/MacOS/Verdant`. After that, you still have to overcome the MacOS security hurdles, as with nearly every indy game: double click, receive an error message, go to Security settings, enter system password, allow app execution, then try again.*

Thanks for the tip @lenaschimmel (and the kind words) - I'll have to take a look at my Mac build process in the future to streamline that.