breadstick 2023-01-09 21:20
An interesting little optimization game! The early portions did leave me wishing there were easier ways to quickly navigate around and do what I wanted to do, but I also liked the rapidly expanding scope
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD52 → Expand
By tesseract
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 653 | 3.10 | 22 | |
| Fun | 666 | 2.85 | 22 | |
| Innovation | 151 | 3.71 | 21 | |
| Theme | 236 | 3.97 | 21 | |
| Graphics | 702 | 2.52 | 21 | |
| Humor | 674 | 1.86 | 20 | |
| Mood | 768 | 2.50 | 20 |
An interesting little optimization game! The early portions did leave me wishing there were easier ways to quickly navigate around and do what I wanted to do, but I also liked the rapidly expanding scope
This is a cool idea! I imagine it could get crazy if you play for a long time (in a good way).
I like the visual representation of exponential growth - it's satisfying to go from growing single plots to massive fields so fast. A more in-depth tutorial would be nice, specifically something that spells out the point of the game early on. Controls like zooming out or planting crops are hard to parse when there's little context regarding what the game is about. The plant/paste mechanic is really cool! I could easily see this expanding into a neat clicker game by combining plant/paste -> grow -> harvest into an auto-farmer.
Really neat idea, but not the strongest execution. Specifically, having to constantly click "Grow" became really annoying fairly quickly. Some hotkeys and the ability for time to pass automatically (maybe even with a slider to set the speed) would have gone a long way with this.
Overall, definitely a game with a lot of room to grow that I can see a lot of people enjoying. I can totally see this having a bunch of different plant types and interactions in a more fleshed out version.
Interesting idea. Once you get the idea (I think I did?) the game becomes repetitive quite early. Maybe you can add some tech / automation unlocks to add more "content" to the game.
Nice job!
Thanks for the feedback everyone. I'm sorry if it felt repetitive too quickly. Clicking grow was supposed to be sort of annoying to encourage you to optimize the layout (although the game should explain more to teach you how to do that properly). It could certainly have been done better. I'm not sure about automation - it's currently scaled so that you can usually afford something new each season if you planted things well and the usual length of an idle game is a bit too long for Ludum Dare. Regions should probably contain fewer farms or add a better way to plant more farms than middle clicking each farm individually.
@bthedestroyer Different plants are almost completely implemented (typing 'init(true)' then 'redraw()' in the browser console should start a new game with a different looking plant that grows slightly differently) but I didn't consider multiple plant types at the same time; that's a great idea.
@ellie-rasmussen I'm glad you liked it - with a bit more time it would have extended to galactic and universal scales - the smaller scales were implemented in a way that would allow trillions of total plants. Sorry the tutorial wasn't better.
A very cool design! I love the idea of this game's objectives and play area slowly expanding outward as you discover new plants, buy new plots, and unlock tools and options later in the game. I also really like how certain plots can be better or worse for specific plants or growth patterns. Nice job on this jam entry! It definitely feels fresh and unique compared to most of the games I've played so far :)
Oh, fractals everywhere! Nice :) Loved that part of the game, having more planting fields was something I definitely didn't expect.
The game gets pretty repetitive soon, unfortunately. I figured that planting 9 plants in a 3x3 pattern, each separated by 2 squares, is a bit suboptimal but easy to use and provides steady income, so I just did that for all the soil types. After that it was just a ton of clicking: select farm, harvest, plant, zoom out, select farm, and so on. Definitely agree with others that some automation would be cool, or alternatively a more deep UI that allows you to do repetitive things easier.
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It's a fun game to plant, harvest, plant more plants and harvest more. However, zoom in and zoom out are a bit inconvenient, but I think it would be okay if these functions were replaced with only the mouse wheel. Well made game!
@lisyarus I'm sorry the hints weren't clearer, you shouldn't need to zoom in very often. If you record while zoomed out, you can replant the whole layer without needing to zoom in. The farm scale (between plot and region) has slightly different pasting mechanics since it plants all unlocked plots with whatever was in the first plot of that type when you last clicked save on that scale. Since planting automatically harvests, you can unlock everything in the first farm by clicking 'record' while zoomed out after planting the first plot , then just cycling 'grow,plant,Buy Plots' about 20 times.
Thank you very much for explaining yourself so clearly, since I suspect other people didn't realize that too.
188 seasons on my first playthrough! Once you get the copy/paste mechanics the game gets definitely easier and faster. Not much of a gameplay, also some basic CSS would be appreciated instead of raw default HTML elements. Still kind of satisfying, would doom-play during work hours waiting until 5PM :) Edit: that's exactly what i did, new record 99 seasons :)
A bit confusing for me and missed some sound ^^U but liked the originality ;-)
Nice game! Took me a little while to get the hang of it.
Took a little while to understand what is going on but in the end despite playing it rather confused it was still a decent experience. Well done!