The Gegnome Project by Brendo

[raw]
made by Brendo for Ludum Dare 56 (JAM)

Just another day at the hat factory.

Feed your gnomes to grow hats.

Sell hats for cash...

...or drag a hat onto another hat to produce a new gnome.

Use mysterious processes to get new types of hats.

screenshot1.png

Ratings

Overall 235th 3.875⭐ 26🧑‍⚖️
Fun 114th 3.978⭐ 25🧑‍⚖️
Innovation 304th 3.587⭐ 25🧑‍⚖️
Theme 493th 3.739⭐ 25🧑‍⚖️
Graphics 194th 4.239⭐ 25🧑‍⚖️
Audio 236th 3.717⭐ 25🧑‍⚖️
Humor 103th 3.913⭐ 25🧑‍⚖️
Mood 312th 3.804⭐ 25🧑‍⚖️
Given 23🗳️ 22🗨️

Feedback

Human Writes Code
08. Oct 2024 · 08:27 UTC
This is a fantastic looking game. Great art and animation. The music suits it perfectly, too. It's also really quirky which is fun. I'm not going to lie, aside from feeding the little guy random horrible stuff until he died I'm not entirely sure what I was supposed to be doing. Which just makes me think it's a metaphor for life... most likely my life.

Overall, great job!
Daniela
08. Oct 2024 · 17:13 UTC
The art is very nice!
Kirass
08. Oct 2024 · 17:15 UTC
Funny game! I liked it!
Mitsukoy
08. Oct 2024 · 17:17 UTC
The designs are so pretty, and i found the game quite fun !
JulienLussiez
08. Oct 2024 · 17:17 UTC
Funny and fun. I was surprised when my gnome grew an hat but why not. The gameplay works pretty well. Good job.
Thassar
08. Oct 2024 · 17:17 UTC
Very fun little game. It's a little unclear what the goal is but it's fun to feed your gnomes dead rats.
NecroTwist
08. Oct 2024 · 17:25 UTC
Certainly, a very interesting game, though I have no idea what I am doing. It's kind of cute and morbid at the same time.
RaeTheWizrd
08. Oct 2024 · 17:25 UTC
Never before have I enjoyed feeding gnomes this much, I got a little too attached to the first one before he died. Cool little gnome game! :3
Shlolo
08. Oct 2024 · 17:26 UTC
Great work, had a lot of fun. I gotto ask... How to you even come up with such an idea XD. Breeding garden gnomes to harvest and sell their hats is definately not something I've ever heard before, but I love it!
Samuel Hollywood-Summers
08. Oct 2024 · 17:27 UTC
I love the look and sound of the front end menu. I had fun feeding gnomes and making hats for a while, but some interactions started to get blocked (not being able to sell the hats, for example) which became frustrating. I managed to get to the point where I had little blue crescents on the hats, but looking at all the icons scrolling past at the bottom, I assume there is a lot more to discover. Thanks for sharing.
ferelily
08. Oct 2024 · 17:29 UTC
Perfect! No notes!
Kaiynest
08. Oct 2024 · 17:29 UTC
It's a really fun game, I actually played for quite a bit and I love the music and art style
brdyy
08. Oct 2024 · 17:33 UTC
Liked it a lot! I couldn't figure out what some of the items did, though, because they didn't combine with anything.
TentacleDream
08. Oct 2024 · 17:34 UTC
Well, it was a very strange game at first, but in the end I was hooked on it for a long time. I couldn't complete the final task. But in any case it was interesting.
LDJam user 279715
09. Oct 2024 · 05:36 UTC
It's a great concept! It seems to be simple when start but when several gnome to manage, it's more challenging to be efficient !

A fun game that you'll want to play again :wink:
Peter Dam
15. Oct 2024 · 15:51 UTC
Great artwork! I managed to fulfill the order, but I still feel like I didn't completely grasp how the mixing works. Also some items didn't seem to do anything, not sure they're just for decorating the yard... like the fountain, rock... and the pink ingot? I feel like perhaps there might be something hidden, at least with the pink ingot. It was cool to be able to strategize though how many gnomes I would be able to actively keep feeding and decide when it was worth breeding a new one or selling the hats. Overall I had lots of fun, I think the graphics and interface was good, only thing that wasn't fully clear are the supposedly decorative items (but also a few secrets are fun to have too, if that's the case). Congrats on the game, I really enjoyed it :)
Ninjavitis
15. Oct 2024 · 18:20 UTC
@peter-dam thanks for checking out our game, and I'm glad you enjoyed it!

All of the items have an effect on the gnomes, which is activated by dragging them onto the gnome, but I agree that it isn't always super-clear what the effect is. One of our goals with the game was to have the player experiment to figure out what did what, so there was a tension between clarity and _mystery_. Dunno if we found the right balance, and it was complicated by the fact that a lot of those gameplay/mechanics were implemented in the hours leading up to the submission deadline. :)

As a minor spoiler to anyone who comes later, you can often see the effect of an item by using it on a gnome after they've sprouted a hat. If the item has no effect because of the current state of the hat, nothing will change.
LDJam user 168929
25. Oct 2024 · 14:04 UTC
This was really fun! Loved exploring the mechanics of all the items. One issue I ran into is that it seems like if you fail and play again, any items you bought in a previous run seemed not to be available to purchase. Easy enough to fix by reloading the page, but I did get confused and stuck for a bit before figuring it out. Once I got past that though and beat it I had a great time! Great effort on the art too, really high quality all around!
Ninjavitis
29. Oct 2024 · 23:01 UTC
@anson-rutherford whoops, that's yet another bug where we failed to appropriately reset the state of the game upon restart. Thanks for pointing it out! I've been considering trying to clean up the codebase now that the jam is over and there's no time pressure (and it's currently a bit of a hot mess) and I'll address that bug if I do so.