FoonLudum Dare ExplorerLD34 → Growing Sakura

Growing Sakura

By ripatti

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CategoryRankScoreCount
Overall104.30
Innovation54.37
Fun224.05
Theme44.63
Coolness355
Mood723.81
Audio1143.59
Graphics1573.83

Comments

jeroenimooo 2015-12-14 03:32

They were hard from the start dang, but it felt good once you solved them. Fun game!

mortus 2015-12-14 09:47

At first I thought it's a trivially simple game, but once you realize how hard and unpredictable it can become, it turns out to be a clever and unique puzzle. Great one!

skaz 2015-12-14 15:03

Really hard! It's a very interesting game, I struggled to get to the level 4... simple yet efficient mechanics!

niphram 2015-12-14 16:15

Great! Just played through the first 5 levels, and after im done rating a few other games i'm definitly going to continue

cyranh 2015-12-14 18:06

Wow. Amazing game. Looks great, plays great. Just so refreshing to see a good new puzzle concept.

swedishpancaces 2015-12-14 18:09

Really fun and challenging puzzler. Surprisingly hard given the controls. Will definitely play more!

chewie 2015-12-14 18:20

Was hard to understand at the beginning the rules of the puzzle. Other than that it's good puzzle game to solve.

r-t-sonneveld 2015-12-14 19:06

Very original concept, and very hard too! The game play smooth and I love the combination of the two themes integrated into one game.

nihilaleph 2015-12-15 01:09

Pro:
+ Very interesting and original concept
+ Cool art and sound
+ Hard to solve
+ Simple and elegant
Con:
- A bit hard to understand at the begging, but didn't take long to get it
Obs:
o Loved the puzzles!

Awesome work!

commodorekid 2015-12-15 10:54

I'm not a fan of puzzle games so I quit it on 5th level but I won't criticize it with my personal choices because the game looks beautiful. I like the fact that I could undo anytime and how the flowers blossomed when I win. Puzzle mechanics are in place I guess. You nailed it I'd say. Why not a mobile game from this?

ripatti 2015-12-15 18:36

2commodoreKid: Yep, I'm thinking about remake of this game for PC and mobile too.

starspell 2015-12-16 04:22

I'm not sure that I fully took in the instructions and the concepts. However the levels a was able to beat was very fun. I like the look and the sound of the game as well. Great stuff.

akhera 2015-12-16 08:57

I love puzzle games like this. Unique, easy to learn, but very challenging in later levels. Great use of both themes.

si1ver 2015-12-16 09:58

Nice puzzle game!
Your game is awesome as always =) LoA is still my favourite though.

stmatn 2015-12-18 00:14

Awesome game! One of my favorites :)
The gfx look nice, especialy the win-animation. The sounds are fitting and have some kind of "eastern"/japanese sound :)
It was a nice experience to play the game!

orion_black 2015-12-18 02:34

It took me some time to get used to the controls, but once I did I really enjoyed your game.

Did you used some mathematical property of hexes to design your levels or just kind of threw them out and checked if they where solvable. I'm asking because I did this thing where I would look for a side and encircle as much as possible(maybe branching in once or twice), then either repeat or work it from the inside to the outside and finally fill whatever remained(here's an example http://imgur.com/0rFyrzH). At the same time there were other levels that I simply couldn't crack that way and took me more tinkering.

I'm not sure if there's an underlaying principle, it's a good heuristic or it was just coincidence(plus some perception bias from my part hehe).

At any rate, a remake sounds like a good idea.

evannex 2015-12-18 06:31

Bonus points for being about cherry blossoms!

Seriously though great game, great puzzles, great graphics, great everything ^_^ I really enjoyed this. And I've added it to my play later folder so I can try to beat all the levels.

ripatti 2015-12-18 07:38

2orion_black: For the most puzzles I just tried to solve random configurations by C++ solver written for this game. And then for solvable ones further developed it to finish state making small changes and handled the level by hand.

I think levels may be more complex and cannot be solved by simple strategy. But the current levels do not illustrate all possible variety because they were made in just one day.

dx0ne 2015-12-18 13:51

Perfect execution of the theme. Hard but enjoyable. Great work!

dx0ne 2015-12-18 13:52

Btw. you should put in on itch.io.

ittaimanero 2015-12-18 21:06

I like the simple graphics and the general mood on this one! The music is pretty cool too, I think it fits very nicely. Well done!

zeriver 2015-12-18 21:09

Yeah it's definitely a game that i could see on mobile devices. It's pretty fun to play and different from typical logic games. Gameplay is entertaining and difficulty curve is just right.

donar 2015-12-18 21:22

I like puzzle games and I'm usually not that bad in them but this one is bloody hard. I really like this one, awesome job!

I didn't always get how the thing will split. An indicator would've been great but well, we all know that the time was fairly limited.

mockthebear 2015-12-18 21:25

Best game so far

daveh 2015-12-18 21:38

Nice puzzle game. Simple, intuitive logic but it gets hard pretty fast. Great job.

kernel_panic 2015-12-18 21:39

This is a great puzzle game! I love it!

janacek 2015-12-18 22:05

GReat game, I lov eit !

dokthar 2015-12-18 23:13

Very good.

zanzlanz 2015-12-18 23:19

Fantastic puzzle!! I definitely think you should make a polished version of this - I can see people really enjoying it on mobile and PC. I'm amazed that you have 40 levels!

jnharton 2015-12-19 00:30

Looks very good and is fun to play, if only for a short while. It can become mildly frustrating if you get backed into a corner a lot. Got through the first 3 relatively easily. A simple mechanic done well, and that's not super easy.

boxedmeatrevolution 2015-12-19 00:44

I couldn't get the game to work. I'm running Windows 10 and ran Bin/GS.exe. The game loaded, but the only button that worked was the Level 1 link! Clicking the filled hexagon didn't do anything (left and right click), and neither did clicking the help.

I don't see anyone else here commenting with a problem so maybe I did something wrong :( It's too bad, because I wanted to play! It looks like a unique puzzle game.

Also, the Logs/Console don't seem to display any errors...

logon13 2015-12-19 04:35

Wow so many levels it must have been really hard to design all of them in such a small amount of time

stevenjmiller 2015-12-19 06:08

Absolutely amazing! So much content and extremely fun!

themonsterfromthedeep 2015-12-19 06:10

This game is very cool. It is also incredibly difficult. It took me a long time to do the fourth level.

ripatti 2015-12-19 08:29

2BoxedMeatRevolution It's possible that the game works with fps much less than 60 on Win10. The game detects clicks checking mouse button state on two consecutive frames; for low fps you may make the click between frames and the game won't detect it. Try to press mouse buttons slowly (hold and release it with some delay).

From my side I'll try to fix the problem if I find an access to a Win10 machine.

spotco 2015-12-19 09:13

Wish there was more visual feedback on "why" a certain branch couldn't be done. Nice music.

2015-12-19 16:34

Good, difficult, smart game.

amras0000 2015-12-19 19:55

Very well done. The game's difficult from the start, and, unlike what I'd expect from abstracted mechanics, actually feels a bit like I'm growing a plant.

The game's definitely difficult from the start, and might benefit from a slightly gentler curve up front (first 4-6 levels) - something simple to introduce the mechanics and mode of thinking you'd need for the rest of the game. The first level is good for this, but it might've been good to keep a tutorialish feel going until level 4.

That said, the save feature does allow the player to put the game down for a while and pick it back up with a fresh mind, which is excellent for this genre.

As far as I've played it, the game seems well designed and certainly feels very smooth to play.

arcturusdeluxe 2015-12-20 17:13

Cool puzzle mechanics, seems simple enough but becomes deceptive challenging. Nice presentation too!

ianh 2015-12-21 10:36

Really elegant puzzle mechanic. I'd love to have this on my phone!

reheated 2015-12-21 12:17

I'm only about half way through, but I'd better vote now in case I don't finish it before the voting period runs out! It's really wonderful. Clever rules and excellent puzzle design. Some nice hard puzzles. It's impressive how many levels you designed. (I understand you used a solver to speed up the level design - it's a clever way to make lots of content in a short amount of time.) Very nice presentation too. A most enjoyable and memorable game, well done.

ithildin 2015-12-21 23:59

Awesome idea, it's very challenging and execution has an overall relaxing vibe with the sakura setting.

Well done!

2015-12-22 14:10

Thanks for your game!
This game was tough but fair. I really enjoyed it!
I played your game along with several others from this jam and 'reviewed' them here: https://n8r8.wordpress.com/2015/12/22/n8-r8s-8-ludum-dare-34-part-1/

skywilly 2015-12-22 17:30

A great puzzle-game, congratulations !

lukezaz 2015-12-24 03:29

Surprisingly fun game. Still can't believe you made 40 levels - excellent work! Only issue I had was that the controls were slightly annoying when trying to go down a path.

nusan 2016-01-04 10:10

I love hexagonal grid and puzzle game, so this is great ! I don't see yet how to solve hard levels, but I will come back to this. Keep up the good work