d1gital-cuts 2019-04-30 03:29
Solid artstyle, great music. A simple, fun, yet meditative experience. This is exactly what I needed after 73 hours of crunch and 9 cans of energy drinks :) Great job!
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD44 → Sapling
By TurboSocks and treeboater
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 304 | 3.68 | 24 | |
| Fun | 608 | 3.21 | 25 | |
| Innovation | 100 | 3.77 | 24 | |
| Theme | 270 | 3.70 | 24 | |
| Graphics | 305 | 3.95 | 24 | |
| Audio | 19 | 4.28 | 25 | |
| Mood | 28 | 4.30 | 25 |
Solid artstyle, great music. A simple, fun, yet meditative experience. This is exactly what I needed after 73 hours of crunch and 9 cans of energy drinks :) Great job!
I like the art style , well made !
Nice tunes and overall game! The only thing that could be better is the explanation on what to do in the game, I failed like 3 times in a row without knowing whats going on! Great game!
Great artstyle & music. I imagine the exponential growth could be really fun with some other elements added in :~)
Really liked the atmosphere of the game, perfect to relax.
A really solid and relaxing experience. The audio is phenomenal and could not be more relaxing. The game is pretty simple and quite forward. I wish there was a way to zoom out though.
I really liked this game, nice graphic, and nice mood !
I think this game is one of the most original game related with theme. You really did a very good job.
Charming and effective artstyle, nice music and a fun mechanic. It has a soothing joy to it. As a player, I was lacking a bit of direction, since I think there's no goal? But it was fun to expand for a while. Nice game!
I love the art. I love the soothing background music with the chirping birds. I love the fact that my forest dominated the entire region, leaving the corpses of its predecessors behind as it went on a massive multi route journey towards the bottom left of this strange land! :P.
Nice relaxing game. The audio fits perfectly. I think it could be a bit harder though. When I played it, it never seemed like I have to think about where to plant the next tree. It just kept going forever. Overall a nice experience.
Simple and charming! Love the music, really relaxing game, well done.
This is such a soothing and calming experience....
Would rate higher on mood if I could. Lovely pixel art and music, the gameplay kept me playing longer than expected, and I'll always appreciate game mechanics that become more apparent as you play without a tutorial.
What a journey. haha I really spent a lot of time with this game. I started with getting the feel for the mechanics. It seemed like I needed to pick the seed placements that had the most return. I was also noticing the art was very nice, simple and easy to look at and the music and audio were relaxing and high quality. I experimented with different methods, trying to branch out tons of different mini-forests, advancing one large wall of trees, etc.. it soon became apparent this game needs a zoom. I suppose you could argue though, that the lack of a zoom feature increases the likelihood that you would forget about a certain group of trees and they would die. The problem with this is that this implies that the game has any form of difficulty.. I realized at some point that you only ever received 5 seeds total in a turn which you begin receiving within a few turns of the start. It made me wonder if it mattered where I placed the seeds. It did not and I received 5 every time because I was always able to put down 5 every turn. I began to wonder if it was even possible to lose. I started trying to choose placements that would block myself off and force the trees to die. I spent a while doing this and realized that it may never happen. All in all, this was a very good attempt and it was mostly enjoyable. However, the absence of either a win or loss condition left something substantial to be desired. I would love to see this worked on more, maybe add in some catastrophic events that you would have to try to avoid and also refine the balance of seed planting/return so that the limit isn't necessary. Also, add a win condition.
This game is definitely a masterpiece. All what you did is astounding. The procedural generation of the map is very well made. This game is so relaxing and amazing. The graphics are so beautiful, the music is absolutely perfect. Evrything is motionless but so alive. The exploration is so good. You "walk" step by step, discovering amazing landscapes. This gives me chills in the spine. Sometimes your group of trees divises. One group go to the right, and one to the left. Sometimes they merge again. Sometimes they go into different directions and they will never meet each other again. This is so beautiful but also so depressing. The game almost gave me an existencial crisis. I start imaginating stories involvinging trees (I must be crazy), with a family of tree wandering around the forest, but one tree is lost, and he endlessely roams, searching for his lost family that he will never retrieve. This game is so deep. I don't care about the gameplay, your game is just so beautiful. It gives me feels that I have never experienced before. I would play it endlessely if I could. No words can define how I feel playing this game. You have created such a masterpiece. You should continue developping it, add more things, make it more beautiful, if it is even possible. Even the game over is amazing : after wandering for such a long time, after exploring such beautiful landscapes, the group of tree finaly arrives into a place where only dead trees surround them. now they can't reproduce, they can't move anymore. They die. The whole specie is extinct. They finaly die between the cadvers of their ancestors. Are you even humans to haave crated such an amazing game ? This is simply the most astounding game of the jam, you really should be proud of you. This is the definition of a masterpiece.
@royalsoup Thank you heaps for the in-depth review, we really appreciate your feedback. Zoom was one of the last features that just didn't quite make it into the code, we actually had to comment it back out as we had it half finished but didn't have enough time, it definitely would've made a difference though. We had intended various threats and goals within the game, but as time ran out we focused on having the base game mechanic run as smoothly as possible. In the end the game is just intended to be relaxing as relaxing as possible. But yes we'd have loved to have included some more dynamic goals within the world. The seed limit was just an arbitrary decision that got left as our priorities were refocused, we found returning all the seeds from the dead trees far to exponential towards growth, and unfortunately we weren't able to come up with a fair mechanic for reducing the seed count that fit within the world. Thanks again for your review!
I clocked out at 73 turns and 324 tiles!
Loved the mood you created with this game, especially with the music that just goes perfectly along with it. The bird noises in the background add a lot of atmosphere too. You really nailed that relaxing nature feel, great job!