Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD46 → Branch Out
By thermacon
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 633 | 3.32 | 25 | |
| Fun | 635 | 3.15 | 25 | |
| Innovation | 300 | 3.56 | 25 | |
| Theme | 116 | 4.10 | 25 | |
| Graphics | 663 | 3.19 | 25 | |
| Audio | 492 | 3.08 | 25 | |
| Humor | 794 | 2.09 | 24 | |
| Mood | 674 | 3.02 | 24 |
This game is pretty addictive, when everything goes according to plan it is a blast to play. But it is also pretty hard! You need sunlight to remove bugs, but bugs decrease sunlight, so once the bugs take the upper hand there is no way to save the tree. Love the low polly graphics! Overall nice work!
Fun game but there were a couple major issues. 1: I never lose I just get stuck and have to go back to the menu and restart 2: DON'T PUT THE MENU BUTTON IN THE CORNER I kept on accidentally clicking it and losing all my progress 3: There is no point in getting more water because you cant do anything with it you just need to have some to stay alive
Wow, game is really addictive before you understand numbers, took me some time. Really great concept. Got to 4k nutritions then stopped. And yes, menu button should not be that easy to click in this game, coz you lose all progress
This was really cool! It was really easy to understand what was going on, which is super important for a simulation game. I like the trade-offs between making more branches and more roots. The mood is perfect too: chill and relaxing while I make my little tree all big and strong.
I agree with some other comments that there is no real way to fight back against the bugs if you don't have enough Sun, but maybe I'm missing something.
Really cool game!
I loved the concept of the game, however things are very slow starting and a bit confusing even with the tutorial. the audio is nice, and I like the graphics, good job with this one. There are things that could be improved on, but all in all, good job.
Could use some UI work, there didn't seem to be any reason for tbe build/stop button. I'm playing on 5k monitor and it doesn't appear to be scaled so all the buttons and stats were tiny. Not sure if it's a glitch or not: Based on the instructions I thought that more leaves would mean more sun, but in my case more leaves made the sun stat drop quicker. Aside from those issues it's pretty good. The branch and root building mechanic is something I've never seen before.
-Great graphics and audio.
-I liked the main growing mechanic.
-It was difficult to find the build order.
-I had no idea what the bug defense actually did. I assumed it would help against the bugs, but there was no visual indicator of what is going on behind the scenes.
-The bugs were difficult. It seemed like they would end me before my exponential resource curve took off.
I had fun! Nice work.
I can never get my nutrients + sunlight to total more than 1.5, why am I not getting more income? These dang bugs are killing me! I like the idea, I am just bad at it :(
nice game, liked the balance of having to build out the branches and roots at the same time. Several times there didn't seem to be a reason for me losing, my tree looked great! so maybe some sort of visual indicator of when things were going badly would be useful?
Graphically it's really simple, but quite pleasing to look at. It's a nice minimal approach, and it's very gratifying to successfully build a tree. Each branch & root made felt great. This isn't my kind of game, but my friend admitted that he would absolutely waste way too many hours playing just this version of the game. Good job!
Biggest challenges: The menu button quitting the game caused my friend & I to close the current playthrough way too many times. Some indication of the resistance to bugs, or a health bar or something would be nice for showing where the damage is at instead of a branch just suddenly falling off. finding the build button took us a while, and the build mode vs not build mode isn't really needed, building can just always be active & the upgrades screen could still be there to click. A volume control also would have been nice, since after a while the music started to get bothersome.
Good stuff:
It's pretty cool the way you're forced to push your roots down and your leaves up, creating a very recognizable tree, although I might have liked more explicit reference to this. The way you balanced out the usefulness for each resource makes the management in the early game interesting-- balancing between nutrients to keep growing, sun to survive, and water as a way to occasionally add extra management. The art style was very functional and communicated both tone and mechanics well-- I especially liked the procedurally generated tree leaves.
Areas for improvement:
As other people have said, the big one here is UI. I ran into an issue where I couldn't see the instructions on the opening page, which made learning the game a little frustrating at times, I kept accidentally pressing the menu button, and the stop/start function was unnecessary and overcomplicating. These are all little things-- maybe if you had the chance to have your game play-tested, it could have helped spot this kind of easily overlooked stuff. It hit a point eventually where I had essentially infinite nutrients, and the way the resource use worked I could only increase either sun or water by one without depleting the other, turning an interesting, engaging resource management task into a slog. More complexity might have helped this, but that's hard to do in 48 hours.
Overall:
This game is at its best in the middle of a play-through, after you've accustomed to the UI quirks but before the gameplay becomes repetitive. At that point, the game is an admirable combination of the satisfaction of watching a beautiful tree grow under your care and a frenetic, engaging resource management game.
God Damn. Well done, took me a while to take the hang of it but it was fun, the tutorial is a bit tedious as you have to read a lot to kind of understand the game.
A quit button and a reset button would be a great adition, and balancing the game a bit more would be nice too, sometimes it feels like you have no control over anything in the game.
BUT! it was fun, I spend a good hour in there, great game :)
I found it pretty hard to balance adding roots and branches, I always ended either gaining no sun or no nutrients and my poor tree got eaten by the bugs. I really like the idea, but at least for me it was a bit too hard to play.
Really cool game! I enjoyed it a lot!
I really wanted to get into the game, but I just couldn't get it. No matter what I do my plant just dies. I can't seem to gain sun after a certain point. Even if I build completely evenly, one of the things will just start running out very quickly at some point. It feels a bit like holding a stick on a single finger. I gave it a shot but couldn't figure out in what order you're supposed to build to keep it balanced. I had to reread the tutorial several times to be sure I didn't miss something, but not really.
Just like a lot of LDJAM games, it lacks some good feedback. I'm not really aware if the bug thing actually helps because the plants keep being eaten anyway.
I like the mechanic of building branches, that's something new I haven't seen in many games.
Hey there! I really liked playing this game. At first the controls had confused me, and I kept losing and I couldn't really pinpoint why. I didnt realize there was such a fine balance between the three elements. I feel like you could benefit from making the increments of the three elements a little bit smaller so that the player has a little bit more room for mistakes. It took me almost ten minutes of losing to get a grasp on it so that might make it a little easier for the people who have a harder time with it. Also, I would like to say that the music fit really well and was well done. I feel like how long you make a branch and root has no implication on how much it adds to the elements. This makes me want to make the branches as small as possible so I can fit the most amount of them in a tiny space. I know we only had 3-4 days to make our games so some ideas we had don't get to get implemented, but if youre planning on expanding on this idea you could totally have some connection between the length of the branches/root and the amount of resources it gives you. You could also add some new upgrades or even do like a shop so the player could buy a fly swatter, and then the player could try to kill the bugs that way while they are managing their resources. Also, you should consider having a quit button.
All in all this was really great idea, and it was fun to play! Good Work!
-Cranch
The game got much more fun when I started to understand the mechanics and not lose every time. This is a very good game once you get the hang of it, good job. I probably did something wrong, but it felt like I couldn't get much sunlight only nutrients because if I built more leaves water would decrease so I would only get about +1 sunlight. Anyways a great game, keep on making games!
Nice game there! The branches probably die too fast due to bugs, but it was fun to balance it! I was just missing a way how to kill bugs myself.
The only annoying thing was, that I pressed Menu multiple times which indirectly reset the game (having a Continue button would be great).
Keep up the good work!