A World in a Jar

liquidbrain 2017-04-29 11:24

Wow! We’ve not play that many games yet, but i feel that this one will be one of our top favorites. We have no critique for this one. The music is lovely and the art style is simple but so effective and cute. It’s great that you can save your progress in the game and come back to it when you’re out of ideas. We’re sure that you’ll definitely be on one of the leaderboards. Thank you for this experience. Have an awesome day and hope to see you in the next jam!

As I’m writing this, we’ve played for 20 minutes and will surely play more.

*(We'll be back again on Sunday when the judging starts)*

// Rasmus & Isak ([LiquidBrain](https://ldjam.com/users/liquidbrain/))

tinyworlds 2017-04-30 15:30

This was really fun to play with! I loved discovering new combinations, and there was always sort of an "aha" moment once I succeeded with a combination. The music was very relaxing and fitting, and reminded me a bit at Oblivion or Minecraft from the mood. The sounds also nicely supported the gameplay, and were not annoying even after 20mins of playing. Also cool idea to use the book to give the player hints. Maybe there could have been additional hints if you get stuck, but maybe the absence of this will lead to a metagame, where player exchange combinations. Really cool, innovative game, I could play for a long time! :)

historymaker118 2017-04-30 16:26

Loved the concept of this game, found it very difficult to solve, but once I understood what it was I needed to do, I started finding the right combinations and had fun. I wasn't able to grow all of the plants, but this is a game I want to return to later to at least try again. It's nice to have a puzzle game I want to come back to after getting stuck, that doesn't often happen for me.

The art and music are of a nice quality, and the sound options were a nice feature (something I've neglected to put in my own game now that I think about it). A solid effort for the jam, and I'm really pleased to have not missed this.

I hope you continue developing games of a similar nature.

martenscedric 2017-04-30 17:52

Very fun game, but it is kinda hard at the start. It's a nice game

chloravirgo 2017-05-01 11:49

I will definitely play it more. Best of luck to the author!

chao 2017-05-01 11:54

Absolutely loved it. The music fit the mood perfectly and the plants all looked really nice, contributing to a fantastic mellow mood throughout. The puzzles were mostly just the right difficulty, with the hints given in the plant-o-pedia being just cryptic enough to be solvable without going over the top. I managed to get all the way to the end, and at no point did I feel I was at a block or that the game was slowing down at all.

Had a great time with this, can't wait to see what you guys do next.

arcticmattekar 2017-05-01 20:50

Finally had time to play your game. It has been sitting on my bookmark list for almost a week now. I love the art and music. Solving the puzzles felt like old times discovering magic spells in mmorpgs. A very relaxing and beautiful game :heart_eyes:

dgspitzer 2017-05-02 11:51

Excellent game! The music is as evocative as the bgm of Heros of Might and Magic III~ Nice hints in the Plant-o-pedia!

s-ol 2017-05-02 19:24

Sadly I can't play this on Linux, when I try to press buttons in the menu nothing happens :(

It looks like a pretty complete thing though, tag me if you maybe fix it :)

zeknir 2017-05-02 20:03

@s-ol I just tried out the lastest build of the game on Ubuntu 17.04. It is working here. You can see the main menu but can't press any buttons on the screen? Which Linux distribution are you using?

talon 2017-05-03 16:24

If I had found this game elsewhere, I would never have guessed that it was made in limited time for a game jam. This game is seriously impressive. The mechanic is easy to get into, but there are enough different plants to keep you guessing and piecing clues together. An absolutely amazing production for a game jam.

The one feature that I found myself wishing for was a way to see what combinations you have already tried. For example, when you select one plant, the game could highlight the remaining plants red/green/gray for doesn't breed/in plant-o-pedia/not tried yet. This would cut down on some of the grinding when you've got one you can't figure out and you don't remember what you've tried already.

s-ol 2017-05-03 21:42

@Zeknir: I run Arch Linux and usually don't have any issues with Unity games.

I just tried it again on my Desktop PC (same setup), and apparently it's a fullscreen problem, when I make it windowed it works.

This game seems to have a lot of content for a LD entry and looks and feels whery polished, great job! I'm also not sure if it is hard or I just don't have a lot of intuition concerning plants :stuck_out_tongue:

gamechoy 2017-05-04 00:53

Wow what a great entry! The music and premise are really soothing and it's so easy to pour hours into the game. The combinations are pretty well thought out, and discovering a new plant was always a rush of joy. The game feeds off of your natural curiosity to discover by showing you what you could get and giving hints that are seemingly straight-forward, but the execution is more complicated. It's always satisfying to find a new plant. The music also perfectly emphasizes all these points (I know you didn't make the music, but your selection was perfect). This is quite possibly the best game I've judged so far, and I plan to play more in the coming days to unlock all the plants. Really nice entry, the only thing I would ask for is more.

dunin 2017-05-05 11:05

Impressive game! A lot of content (I played an half hour, and I only discovered radioactive battery plant)(I try to have all in order), and interesting puzzle game, great job!

avavt 2017-05-12 23:07

Really nice game!

Everything in this game go well together, from the art style to music to gameplay.

Near the end of the game it get quite repetitive though, and the combination started being random. I would love it if there's certain "relation" between the product plant and its parent, that way there's more "thinking" in the game (like in the original doodle god game which I loved), rather than just exhaustive fail-and-repeat - which is kinda boring.

random-storykeeper 2017-05-15 09:02

I really love seeing these kinds of games on Ludum Dare, and this adds very nicely to the experimental, growing plants type of game collections. The highlights for me are the art, and the various plants that can be grown are super creative. I actually like how, towards the end, I can really see "worldly" type plants appear and that felt a lot closer to the theme than I expected.

If I could pick out few couple issues I had, they were:

- Some of the hints are misleading. For the cake pops, for instance, you mention that the plant involves something "colourful", which led me to believe that I had to breed a seed with the candlebra in order to make a colourful plant with fruit. But nothing was working, and I could not for the life figure out what else the hint could be for. I actually looked at your timelapse video in the end, for the clue. It would have bee more helpful to the player if the descriptions of the plants were a bit more relevant to the hints in the plant-o-pedia. - While I think the sound effects are well done, there's something about the music that doesn't really sit right with me. Although calming, the loop feels rather short, and since this game is quite lengthy, the music starts to get a bit grating after a while of playing. Maybe I was just too into this lol, but I dunno, a game of this demeanour needs background music that is longer in length and not as repetitive. I know you've opted out of the audio category, but this could be something to consider if you were to continue working on this. - I didn't like how the plants weren't ordered, in the seeds menu, by the same order they are in the plant-o-pedia. I guess it does allow the player to see the plants in the order they've collected them, but it makes it a bit confusing when it comes to trying out different combinations. Often, when following the hints, I would end up with a plant that was completely different from the one I was trying to unlock. It seems, on the plant-o-pedia, that you have it set linearly, and having the seeds on the seed selection screen ordered in that same way would have made it a lot quicker to try various possibilities without being confused by plants you've unlocked after. I don't think this would have been as big of an issue if the hints were less ambiguous.

Overall, I was quite engaged in this and probably spent a lot of time with this than I should have. I just have to unlock all those plants, lol. Good art, good sound effects and nice atmosphere.

pschichtel 2017-05-15 17:07

Very great entry! Nice graphical design, very fitting music and sound effects and a nice interpretation of the theme. It feels so well polished and complete!

liquidbrain 2017-05-21 11:25

I just wanted to come back here and congratulate you on your rank. After playing 20+ games, this was still my favorite! I knew you would do well in the scoring!

// Rasmus