FoonLudum Dare ExplorerLD44 → Hell's Garden

Hell's Garden

By king-kujito

View on ldjam.com

CategoryRankScoreCount
Overall2.4013
Fun2.0413
Innovation2.6313
Theme2.9411
Graphics2.9012
Audio3.2012
Humor2.2512
Mood2.5412

Comments

mrstari 2019-05-05 14:08

the graphic and the music are nice but the mechanic terrible, sorry. i dont like web versions. More information about this game would be nice. i dont know how it really works to play.

purrseus 2019-05-17 11:25

I really like the premise and it all looks quite beautiful in a retro kind of way!

mateusboga 2019-05-17 13:05

Very nicely implemented mechanics, I love the growing/withering animation of the plants, and the music is nice too! I just wish the mechanics were better explained in the beginning, took me a while to understand what to do.

After a while of playing it seems the game ran out of memory and stopped working, you should see a fix for that :/

Great work nonetheless!

duke 2019-05-17 13:07

Looked interesting enough... Like some kind of gardening simulator. But the gameplay mechanics were very obscure and I had a hard time understandig what was happening and how everything worked. Even after 5 minutes playing and planting the first kind of plant (Which was not very intuitive), I was not able to grasp the concept of the game.

Seems like there is a lot of balancing to be done. Everything takes forever to do and even at the maximum of time perception, I was just standing around waiting... I guess that I played the game wrong in every aspect. So some kind of ingame instruction or hints would've been nice

The graphics were basic but I appreciate the details and the day night cycle. The music was cool. No criticism there :)

king-kujito 2019-05-17 13:13

@duke Waiting basically is the game. I wanted to try something completely different from the platforming games I've been making most LDs ^^

king-kujito 2019-05-17 13:14

It's more of a very weird garden designing simulator thing than a game really. There'd need to be a win condition or a lose condition for this to be a game.

pcmaster 2019-05-17 16:31

I'm not sure, if I'm doing anything wrong, but when I press space, it doesn't seem to plant anything. Or stop planting. Even if I press 'Q' or 'I'.

king-kujito 2019-05-20 11:24

@pcmaster you can only plant if time is not sped up

king-kujito 2019-05-21 16:58

@mateusboga I didn't encounter that problem. What are your machine's specs?

corny 2019-05-21 17:07

At the beginning the gameplay was a bit confusing, but then I got the hang of it - planting my little hellish garden was seemingly a very soothing experience... which the music contradicted really hard! Especially when the guitars and drums went off, that caught me completely off guard! Gave me a laugh, not gonna lie.

The one problem that I had with the game is that the controls could use some polishing. Well, that and some more user friendly tutorial/explanation stuff.

king-kujito 2019-05-21 17:09

@corny I fully agree that a tutorial is needed for this. Could you go into more detail about your experience with the controls?

corny 2019-05-21 17:48

@king-kujito my main gripe is the abundance of control schemes - having to switch between moving mode and planting mode. Same with having to use the mouse to navigate around the inventory and nothing else, so you end up having to switch between multiple (albeit similar) control schemes: one to have Death move, one to plant stuff and another to shop for seeds and move the sliders around. Switching between them felt a bit clunky. You should make it more streamlined.

Here's how I'd personally do it:

Have holding rightclick on the mouse switch to "planting mode" (currently the Q toggle) with Death facing the mouse cursor and leftclick planting seeds. Releasing rightclick goes back to "walking mode". Also, time speed-up could be a keyboard toggle, maybe the Q button since it doesn't have have a use now?

I think you get the gist here, make the controls more uniform throughout the game, with less switching around that should make the experience way more immersive and thus better for new players

But that's just my two cents, who am I, a game designer?

(No. The answer to that is no)

mateusboga 2019-05-21 19:55

@king-kujito I was running it on Opera, I did not try it in Chrome or Firefox so maybe it works fine on those.

2019-05-24 21:05

It's rather confusing to be honest