FoonLudum Dare ExplorerLD52 → Les Fleurs du Mars

Les Fleurs du Mars

By tttt and Rich Machines

View on ldjam.com

CategoryRankScoreCount
Overall4463.4532
Fun4413.3132
Innovation4703.1931
Theme2293.9830
Graphics6013.1030
Audio3313.2830
Humor4282.8330
Mood5073.2830

Comments

xaviarrob123 2023-01-09 23:22

Nice and simple score based minigame!

I'd suggest a button to lower / disable the music for the future and some mechanic to use the necter on or a reason to collect it!

herryfabien 2023-01-09 23:24

The CD for snipping it felt really long especially because you had no feed back on it.

ahintoflime 2023-01-09 23:24

Nice idea for a game, suits the theme well. Sometimes I found it a little finnicky to get the scissors in the right place to cut. How did you do the flowers, are those 3d-rendered sprites?

rich-machines 2023-01-09 23:44

@ahintoflime the floxers are simply pixel art, I used Marmorset Hexels3. I made the "lighting" manually, simply changing colors. We wanted to give the flowers an alien and artificial look.

bloodfin 2023-01-10 00:47

Haha, lots of good stuff here, the fiddly frantic feeling of trying to line up the scissors was great and something that could be leaned into. Lots of franatic key presses lol. A little more polish and feedback animation on the cuts and this could feel really good. Great work!

heinar 2023-01-10 00:47

Great job

wolkp 2023-01-10 19:27

Satisfying little game! Love the idea of a guy in outer space running around with little scissors and cutting the plants <3

copito 2023-01-10 21:46

holy crap i loved it, looking at the title i expected some high brow arty thing and that expectation just made this oh so much better... amazing!

chompdev 2023-01-10 22:20

score4.PNG Cool game! I like the simple rules and the good, steady ramp-up of difficulty over time. The variation in growing speed was a nice way to keep things engaging, as was the curved dome shape requiring you to more carefully monitor the right and left edges of the screen. The flower sprites are great and the cutting is fun and require you to pay attention to the timing as you move around. Well done!

bas-van-den-berg 2023-01-10 22:29

Very well done. Simple and effective. I had a bit of trouble with cutting, didn't always cut when I thought it should though.

pazzi 2023-01-11 04:55

This was hard! Learned very quickly to monitor the speed and proximity to the edges- very simple, yet intense, creative and fun! Only thing I would add is a global scoreboard. This would really, REALLY make this an addictive game! Amazing work!

miolosh 2023-01-11 16:13

Nicely done! It was quickly clear what I had to do. I just had the feeling I sometimes did not know why I was not cutting the flower. Was it a cooldown, was I not in the right range? A little feedback on that might be interesting.

tttt 2023-01-11 16:37

There is some width around the flower from where you can cut. The eyes of the robot are highlighted with green when you are in the correct position but clearly is too small to notice :)

adam-burt 2023-01-11 20:45

Great mechanic - in particular the risk vs reward of letting the flowers grow more to get more nectar, which then makes it harder to cut them in time! Good music, clear visuals. A really good effort!

rich-machines 2023-01-11 21:07

@adam-burt thank you! Yes, we tried to keep the mechanics simple but somehow interesting and not trivial. Really glad you appreciated that!

rich-machines 2023-01-11 21:10

@herryfabien and @miolosh Yes, cutting flowers needs a little bit of precision. That's the part we can improve in the next versions of the game. Also the choice of the spacebar is probably suboptimal. As @tttt pointed out, there's a hint in the eyes of the robot: they turn green when a flower is "locked"!

rich-machines 2023-01-11 21:12

@pazzi Thank you! You are right, a global leaderboard is a must-have for this kind of games! By the way, my high-score is 616!

miolosh 2023-01-11 21:25

Ahaa, I tried it again and indeed! If you watch the eyes it does help :)

shp 2023-01-12 05:48

I love the concept and the music really rocks! Maybe the game would be a bit more fun if the movement speed was a bit slower and cutting didn't require as much precision, then the challenge would be more about choosing where to go and what to cut more than being able to be precise quickly

fluburbio 2023-01-12 05:52

This is great! I love how simple and easy to understand the game is, yet it requires good skills and observation to master. I would love if the music accelerated the nearer a flower is to the top, like in Tetris. Besides that, I too found the hitboxes a bit small. Oh, and that title may be my favorite of all the game I've seen so far, bonus points for that :D Great job!

yubs 2023-01-12 05:53

I really liked the way you could let them grow more for more nectar, but more risk. I will say some more feedback on the snip with some sounds or more visuals would be nice. The difficulty ramp was really well done, plenty of time to figure out mechanics before it got to tough, fun game!

wobbleblocks 2023-01-12 07:18

Nice and simple and pretty fun! great work! :D

tttt 2023-01-12 08:12

@shp We are happy that you liked our game and I agree that the music is really good (our dirty secret is that @rich-machines is indeed a great musician if you enjoyed his music here is his [spotify page](https://open.spotify.com/artist/1ISCqaEWabkIHP4uCKMl4j)). Concerning the gameplay we realized that it should be easier to choose the flowers to cut but unfortunately the jam was about to end.

@fluburbio Thank you for your feedback and for the suggestions! Yeah targeting a flower should recieve indeed more care.

@yubs Yeah the more risk you take the higher the reward indeed. Thank you for your suggestions we hope to be able to improve it in the future!

@wobbleblocks We are glad that you found our game fun!

smeljey 2023-01-13 21:55

Interesting concept! I like the idea that the more you risk the more is reward. Music is dope. However it was a bit hard for me to cut the right flower with the scissors

lereveur 2023-01-14 00:30

Seems simple at first sight, but it needs to be precise, as the scissors hitbox is short - I reached 678 points, and it was harder than I expected. Good job!

amarokczukay 2023-01-14 13:40

so what, you want my space bar to be broken, that's it? :D jk

the flower design was cool, music is really nice, and the idea of having to cut flowers neither too soon or too late is great. however, i found sometimes that the robot didn't cut the flower i was expecting him to cut.

good entry, thank you for submitting!

rich-machines 2023-01-14 18:57

Thank you all for playing! @amarokczukay yeah :) , we realised that maybe the space bar is not the best key. Probably allowing the players to use also left click or another key is better. @amarokczukay @smeljey the precision needed for cutting the flowers is a tricky point, we tried to balance it, in the next versions it will be more permissive for sure. We wanted to avoid possible exploits, such as running around continuously and spamming space bar. Anyway, as a little suggestion, the eyes of the robot turn green when a flower is "locked": hope this may help.

rich-machines 2023-01-14 19:02

@lereveur impressive score! If you want to improve even more consider the following things: -eyes of the robot turn green when you're in the right position to cut -different types of flowers give you different scores. Some of them give you points earlier but they don't scale a lot when they are ripe. -each flower have has slightly different speed. You may want to keep the slower flowers there, and do not cut them: if you cut a slow flower the probability of spawning a faster (and dangerous) flower is high.

buni 2023-01-16 19:27

At first I was just running around snipping everything, but I figured out that this was wrong very soon. The idea is quite unique, great job!

tttt 2023-01-16 23:14

@buni Indeed! That strategy literally doesn't pay! :) Thanks for trying our game!

hoichael 2023-01-20 18:20

Really cool game. The mechanics are simple but work well. Nice idea having the "critical height" not be a straight line but form a circle - particularly elegant as the circular form doesn't just add additional depth to the mechanics/decision making but also coherently ties into the visuals - cool stuff.

Also, great music - which is where my only (minor) criticism lies. As the music is pretty intense it would heavily profit from a proper seamless loop that begins after the initial buildup of the track, instead of just looping the single track over and over again - but I guess you guys thought the same and just didn't have time to implement that, same thing is the case with our entry :D

rich-machines 2023-01-22 17:26

Thank you @hoichael . It would be great to implement a more dynamic and smart music system but, yes, time was stringent. We are looking also to add a control for volume, as suggested, since I don't know if everyone is happy with a pressing and intense music going on all the time.