gelisam 2019-04-29 23:46
Please let us know if the Linux build works for you, we've done our best but aren't 100% certain that it works.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD44 → The Tree of Bounty
By gelisam, michaelsonbritt, Farren, khord and bar
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 619 | 3.37 | 71 | |
| Fun | 740 | 3.07 | 71 | |
| Innovation | 93 | 3.78 | 70 | |
| Theme | 446 | 3.48 | 71 | |
| Graphics | 722 | 3.25 | 71 | |
| Audio | 562 | 2.93 | 69 | |
| Humor | 790 | 2.36 | 59 | |
| Mood | 387 | 3.48 | 69 |
Please let us know if the Linux build works for you, we've done our best but aren't 100% certain that it works.
Cool idea! I love combining tree growth with a strategy game. Nice art too. I wasn't sure how exactly to play but I managed to grow my tree about half way but I couldn't get it to grow further. The music loop was a bit too short.
Nice idea, lovely executed. Sound is annoying :)
Some of the music parts clashed pretty hard with each other, felt like they weren't really in sync. Interesting idea. Also kudos for writing it in Rust.
Good and interesting concept
This is a very chilling and relaxing game. Sometimes, it felt a bit weird being told that I can't grow a branch even though it looked and felt stable. In the end, it plays more like a visual puzzle about how to get the most branches with bounty.I like the fact that it got so many builds for all the systems. Keep up the solid work!
Interesting take on Conway's game of life, and very fun to figure out how to get to berries. I'd have to say next time to keep the recorder out of the sound track.
Well done!
that is a really cute idea. i love the graphic and the sounds. good mechanic! :hearts: want more of that :laughing:
Really nice idea. It misses jus a little tutorial to my opinion. Nevertheless, this is a cool entry
@shubart we spend quite a portion of our time designing the tutorial text at the bottom. Which part did you find the most confusing?
Really love the gameplay here - it's a fun puzzle to try to build up to different things.
A couple of the errors were unclear; it took me a while to figure out that I had to thicken previous branches more to thicken the later ones.
Overall a very peaceful and pleasant game to play - good job!
Interesting game idea, i still don't know the objective but relaxing building a tree.
@raganvald if you get both a bird and squirrel onscreen - and they stay put - then consider yourself a winner! We probably should have added a "Challenge" message for this.
Nice and chill, love it. I agree the audio could be made more subtle and less repetitive.
I enjoyed this game. The music should be more subtle to create a relaxing experience. Like a zen garden. I tried many strategies on multiple runs (tall, wide, star distribution of branches). It definitely requires some planning if you want to get something evolved.
Wonderful :D
I had some difficulties to make the branches larger. Sometimes this was working, sometimes no. I suppose i miss something.
@shubart what's not clear in the tutorial text is a "length 3" constraint on branches. So, a branch of thickness 1 can have a length of 3 tiles, before you'll need to thicken near the trunk. Then, to make a branch with a length of 6 tiles, you'll need a row of three thickness 2 branches, and start moving up to thickness 3 near the trunk, which gets expensive. It looks and feels intuitive to me ... but I can see how confusing it is, now that I'm writing it. Thank you for the feedback, and I hope this helps!
You are welcome. I really appreciated the mood far away of most of the creations. Thank you for the title
Very nice, got a nice zen feeling from it. I'm not sure if I like or dislike the fact that there's not really any negative impacts. Obviously the music loop was too short but over all it was very calming to play and it was a clever idea.
Cool game. No complaints. I played for longer than most jam games I see. I guess audio options might be nice.
This is why we love jam. Awesome work guys, gg !
Nice game! I enjoyed the graphics and the calm atmosphere. A little less fond of the music as it is too repetitive for me.
Very interesting ! The concept of an object needing two other objects to appear is realy good ! At first I was a little bit confused but after all went well. It is very hard to obtain birds or squirrels, but is is doable. I managed to get a bird next to a squirrel, and is was very complicated to find the right placement, using moss to destroy flowers that turns into beehives, finding the good placement for the flower to turn into beeries and putting two berries next to each other to make a bird spawn... The squirrel was easier, you only need two nuts which are at the same status as the beehives in the spawn order. I had a bug where two beeries appeared and a bird appeard while the beeries where disappearing and then disappard while the berries were reapearing, or something like that. This was very interesting but I miss a clearer tutorial and one thet doesn't disappear and that you can retrieve quicly : I had to restart the gam two times to read in totally. I find a bit sad that you can't build a tree as long as you want, yuo are limited with 9 with the thickness thing. This was very interesting and I had a great time figurating how to make birds and squirrels appear, Congratulations !
Cool and interesting idea!
Nice work!
I was an OIer and I know about Conway’s Game of Life, this game makes me feel a little bit familiar.
I think the tutorial needn't to be so detailed cause I'm happy enough when I created the bird by myself even if I didn't know how I made it. All in all, Well done~!
As others said, this was sweet and relaxing! I might just be a huge dumbo but at first I totally didn't get what to do. I think a little infographic at the beginning might have made things easier to understand :) But this is a gamejam right, so ain't nobody got time for that, haha. The music is cute as well :)
I had a hell of a time trying to get a squirrel...
This game has a very zen feel. The rules are right in your face, and you just have to prune your way to perfection. I'm pretty bad at this game, but I did end up playing it for a while. I've seen a couple games now that have the music influenced by the state of the game. It's a really cool idea.
Great job! The little tutorial/challenges made learning the game very intuitive without being intrusive or overwhelming.
@myrmyxo Congratulation to you as well for getting both a bird and squirrel next to each other and astute observations.
From your description, the bug you've found doesn't sound like a bug. As you may know, life disappears (or sometimes gets replaced by simpler life) if there isn't at least one of every type of ingredient needed to make it appear still next to it. And this happens everywhere at the same time in "turns" so its very possible to have loops like the one you described. For example, three leaves in a triangle will all turn to flowers at the same time, then all disappear, then all become leaves again, repeating the cycle.
@yukimiitsuka Its really impressive that you managed to find the bird's requirement on your own. We considered giving later recipes to the player only after they've discovered it once. But then thought it was already difficult enough as is.
So we added the tutorial and challenges to both teach players and guide, but kept it optional and not block progress for anyone who wanted to go off on their own and just explore.
This is such an interesting concept and such a peaceful experience. It wasn't clear in the instructions which actions required a click in the center of a hex and which should be clicked on the edges. For example, it took me forever to thicken the branches because the knot felt like the natural place to click. Overall, it's a great game. I love the mechanics.
Very relaxing after so many shooting games!
Very relaxing game, however the rules for me were not clear, I did not understand why my leaves died etc. But it's a chill game and they're always welcome for me! Nice game, I quite liked the core idea. Can be improved after the jam a lot.
@Arqcenick it's like Conway's Game of Life, where things appear and disappear every turn according to rules. When a tile is ... - Empty or leaves, with two adjacent tiles that have leaves, it turns to flowers ... Flowers require at least one adjacent tile with leaves to remain, or they die - Empty, with two adjacent tiles which are flowers, it will become a beehive ... Unless that tile was already about to die for some other reason ... Beehive requires at least one adjacent tile with flower to remain, or it dies - Empty or flowers, with one adjacent beehive & two leaves, it becomes berries ... Berries requires one adjacent beehive and one adjacent leaves or they die - Empty or flowers, with one adjacent leaves & flowers & one thickness upgrade, it becomes nuts ... Nuts require all original conditions or they die - Empty with two adjacent berries, it becomes a bird ... Birds require all original conditions (two berries) or they leave - Empty with two adjacent nuts, it becomes a squirrel ... Squirrels require all original conditions (two Nuts) or they leave
Some things do NOT auto-upgrade. So for example, you might need to delete leaves - add moss then remove the moss - before it becomes a beehive.
You're right it's complex. Would be nice to have an illustration showing all the progressions. We were just happy the rules seemed to balance and work once you know them! Learning experience.
Really fun game! I had a great time playing!
Really fun game ! I really love the concept. At first, it was really hard to get the mechanics.
Pretty game. It took me a long time to figure it out. Some of the tutorial tips seemed to go away too fast for me to grasp what they were talking about. I did manage to get up to berries. I like how the music seems to progress and add instruments as you get further along. The one instrument, the high pitched one is a bit grating on the ears though.
Excellent game and very innovative idea. The sound wasn't that bad for me.
It's so relaxing!
Looked and felt interesting enough. Seemed to not really be my time of game, though, to be honest. I felt kinda left alone when trying to figure out what to do. Especially when I couldn't grow anymore branches and I tried clicking around like crazy until I found out how to make the branches bigger. Didn't feel like the most intuitive feature.
The sound effects were nice, even though I'm sure I've heard a them before in some other game. The bgm theme was a bit repetetive. Felt like a very short loop.
Since I'm not the strategy guy, It was hard for me to be engaged in the game for very long. It didn't seem there was much of a real challenge or something that was actively working against me as a player. But maybe, the game gets harder the further you get your tree growing.
The art looked good but I'm not sure if the style of aliased pixels were a good call. It really felt like a freeware game from the mid 90's because of that. If that was your intention, then congratulations :) Some of the assets seem warped a little, like when a pixel perfect image is moved by 0.5 pixels. Then you get this strange bulr on one axis of the image. All in all, I think the art works well, but could definitely some polish to make the game more engaging on first sight.
That's really nice ! :) I loved the music (my cat also), I had some difficulties to understand the game but the notes helped ! :)
The music is really hard to tolerate... Playing the game is soothing. It is a bit difficult to understand how the game works. But in the end I like the concept.
I liked the game, even though I am not sure I totally understand it.
Like the idea of cellular automata very much and that it's a game where you can only progress. Sadly I must have done something wrong as I never managed to go anywhere and experience the dynamic soundtrack:( https://youtu.be/lVCsQbSi-js
@philstrahL, thank you for the awesome video review! Really nice of you!! It's so interesting watching people playtest The Tree of Bounty. The same difficulty happened with a friend of mine who works for a game company ... people are obsessed with clicking everywhere and don't read the entire sentence of the instructions or the warnings. The challenge text says "click a branch to make it thicker", and the warning says "too many thin branches in a row, click to make thicker". But ... you never left-clicked on the branches near the trunk to thicken them.
It's an interesting lesson in *tutorial design*. People today expect information presented in a very specific way. As a game designer, you want to create innovative mechanics, which people have never seen before. But new mechanics demand a slick tutorial.
We could have made an "mouse click icon", hinting to click on branches near the trunk. Pretty expensive for the time budget of a game jam! We'll keep trying!! At least, this game is *slightly* more intuitive than the last one I worked on, Crunch Time from Ludum Dare 40. Still lots of room for improvement!
This is really very, very cool. Great job. It's enjoyable simply to click things and see what happens, but it's also a fun challenge. The tutorial works well, but it could be handy to be able to bring up some sort of chart of the different types of outcomes, it's a lot of rules to take in. But wow overall this is really impressive.
Cool, I got what in Conway terms would be called a 'blinker' 3 leaves turning into 3 flowers and back again. :D
@esben-jensen, thank you for trying it out!! We tweaked some rules to reduce blinkers. That's why sometimes you need to add moss and then remove the moss to get what you want. So it's not the same rules from Conway's game, only roughly inspired. But yes, it's still rather blinky-blinkety. Glad you appreciate that!