Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD52 → Travelling Tea Maker
By detectivelosos and Annie Owl
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 207 | 3.79 | 33 | |
| Fun | 323 | 3.50 | 34 | |
| Innovation | 516 | 3.12 | 34 | |
| Theme | 760 | 2.76 | 36 | |
| Graphics | 212 | 4.04 | 37 | |
| Humor | 347 | 3.05 | 32 | |
| Mood | 121 | 3.96 | 33 |
Really lovely little game, cosy and soothing. I enjoyed the idea of choosing different tea ingredients, I will definitly try to replay it, to see what other (hopefully better...) outcomes can I get. Good writing; drawings really match the atmosphere. I recommend playing this game with a cup of a good tea and some tearoom ambience playing in the background. :tea:
Cute and cozy game, I loved the art and the story was sweet.
I got stuck with the Merchant
I'm a bit conflictied with the graphics as I would have loved to have some more of these very nice drawing. the game could take more, but what is done is done amazingly. the narrative is done very nicely though, the mood is stellar.
Very relaxing and cute game. Beautiful narative and art <3
Nice game! I liked the story and the art :) And making tea is also fun, I liked combining herbs to get different outcomes :)
Really enjoyed this game's style and mood. I don't know anything about tea so guessing what to put in drinks was a bit of a mystery, but I had fun nonetheless! Only issue I ran into was sometimes not being able to scroll down far enough to see the options (this always happened after a character portrait spawned, but not every time) - but I was still able to hover to the very bottom of the screen and select the top option to continue. I really liked being able to collect ingredients, and felt having more options to be able to help different kinds of problems was interesting. The characters you run into are all very unique as well, definitely felt like a lot of time was put into them. Well done!
I really enjoyed the story. Unfortunately, I was a bad tea maker but that didn't bother me. The story is well written and the characters are beautifully illustrated. :tea:
I loved this a lot! I always used to love those make-your-own adventure books and even tried to write some myself in the past. I had never heard of ink before, but now I want to use it for something as well. I also saw it has Unity integration, which is even more awesome :D
The story was very sweet and I loved the idea of a travelling tea shop! Learning what combinations of ingredients work and which not, to then be able to brew the right tea at the right time was a lot of fun. I never did find that ginger though, I wonder where that could be :) Luckily my life ended very happily in the end.
This was a very different kind of game than most in Ludum Dare, but I enjoyed it a lot. Thanks a lot for this short experience :D
I really like the graphics and I enjoyed the story! (I must say that I didn't expect the ending of the young women.) I can now make 3 differents tea : Green Tea + Mint (+ ginger that I never found); Black Tea + Cranberry; Black Tea + Thymus :)
Very cool text adventure with beautiful illustrations!
So cool graphics.
Lovely setting, I really like that design for a text adventure game. Good job
@kromeboy That's strange. If you still remember, can you please tell us what actions led to that?
@t-c Thank you for the feedback! Unfortunately we can't do much about the problem with the scrolling, because we don't have much control over default Inky export to HTML :slight_frown:
@wuppos Thank you for such thorough feedback, I'm glad you've liked the game! :slight_smile:
A very soothing game with pretty pictures. I normally do not play these types of games, so it was fun to have a try with this one, well done!
@annie-owl kind of solve it. For some reasons the "next" in black on black Immagine.jpg
@kromeboy Very strange. Seems like another bug with inky HTML export. Thank you for the feedback!
Very cool game, well written and illustrated! I wish more people made narrative games during gamejams... The fact that the tea brewing segments require [extraludic knowledge](https://pocg2016.institutedigitalgames.com/site/assets/files/1015/howell_-_a_theoretical_framework_of_ludic_knowledge.pdf) is quite bold but interesting
Love the illustrations and a really nice story to play through. I especially loved that it was a very causal game so I could play without stressing my exhausted wrists. I think I figured out two recipes, and liked that the game gave me an option to study them by brewing for myself every now and then. So in a way that became one of the main objectives, and could have been played on more, to find paths through the game where I got to drink most tea myself.
It was great that there was a save and load feature, but it could have been a bit clearer (even though it said I died) when the game reached an end and needed load or restart.
The little twist about the poster in the epilogue was great too.
But I have to ask: What it really thymus (lymph organ in animal bodies) that I served everyone? I mean that does make the game a bit more spicy, or was it thyme (herb) that it was supposed to be?
@local-minimum Save and load feature is built-in Inky feature, so I haven't even noticed it myself until you've mentioned it :smile: And the fact that everyone is talking about poster twist tells me, that no one figured out the recipes for the bride :sweat_smile: I should have made more different options (and respective outcomes).
Thymus was supposed to be thyme, but I used wikipedia to spell check this one and picked an ambiguous name for the genus of herbs( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thymus_(plant) ), that also means a completely unrelated thing :slight_frown: Should definitely change that, thank you for mentioning it!
Hey, I remember playing your game "Sinking Town" ages ago!
This is a very special game. I wasn't sure I would be invested in a text adventure but I was quickly drawn in. There are some typos left but you probably didn't have time for a lot of proofreading. Otherwise, the art is excellent and soothing in itself! I've done two runs hoping to fix what I got wrong the first time, but even now I know there are plotlines I haven't seen yet. The bride joined the teacart business in my second run and I'm really happy about that.
One small issue I had is the Merchant in the epilogue, who talked about a golden ring that I took even though that hadn't happened.
All in all, congratulations for a very atmospheric game, once again!
Well, I made everyone I came across furious and caused a bride to murder her groom on their wedding night. I never knew the life of a tea maker was so fraught with peril! That bandit didn't get to steal anything though, so the joke's on him.
While certainly unexpected, the story was entertaining and the art was nice. Great entry
I loved teh artstyle, I wish there was more so I could appreciate more! It was actually very unexpected hahaha but I enjoyed it!
The thing that caught my eye first was definitely the overall concept. I like merchant/caravan games, and I certainly haven't seen a travelling tea maker before. So the cover art was evocative and enticing.
You probably made the right call to just gut the harvesting and focus on the people interactions and tea-making. I'm honestly not sure how you could do harvesting with that engine and make it not too tedious for the player.
It was neat that although there is no exp/leveling system, I still felt a bit of progression as I was learning new recipes and or course, brewing the right one as well. I wasn't sure at first if I was going to get a ton more ingredients and recipes but luckily it wasn't bad. Definitely a different entry from what I've seen so far!
@kyrio Thanks a lot for the feedback! It's always cool to sea familiar names in the comments :smile: Yeah, the epilogue was developed in a rush, so the merchant part has some errors in it, that cause him to remember the ring no matter what. I'll fix it in a postjam version. Really glad that you've managed to explore the bride plotline, I was afraid no one would find it!
@peachtreeoath At first we were planing to integrate the Ink scripts into Unity, and have a big map where the harvesting part would take place. But on the second day of development we realized that we won't be able to make it in time, so we just sticked to the bare Inky. I'm glad you've liked the end result!
What a pleasant experience, the writing was great and the images where fantastic. This is one of those entries that I will remember after the jam, which is a huge compliment! :trophy:
I did have the problem with the merchant, but was (thankfully) able to move forward since I read the comments. I would suggest putting info about it in the description :thumbsup:
Ah this is a nice concept to be a travelling tea merchant and make different teas based on the situation. I also really like the little illustrations :)
Unfortunately I often didn't quite know which ingredients would be the correct ones but maybe I just didn't look for enough clues since I read the text kinda fast.
I'm a terrible tea maker but the game is really nice! I'll give it another try to find the ginger or honey ! (I don't wan't to die alone in the woods for the third time...)
As it turned out in the first play, I was a really terrible tea shop owner. Although I did not make any money, I still got "The money you've made on your journey was enough to buy a hut near The Capital.", which kinda broke the immersion...
But I decided to make myself a tea in real world and replay the game. And I did much better!
I really loved the story and the atmosphere, as I am a tea lover myself. The game probably will be in my top 5 entries this jam. One thing though -- during my second play, in the ending, I got this:
"After you got to know him a little better you realized he is not that bad of a person. You asked him once, if he ever got his golden ring back. The Merchant: You should have never given it to the guards. They probably pawned it in the nearest stall."
I never spoke to the merchant about a ring nor did I get it from him, so you must have made an error during programming/story writing. :)
Overall, well done!
Such a wonderful narrative! I made myself a cup of tea while playing :)
It really seems like you put a lot of work into the different branches, and even after two play throughs, I can tell there was more that I didn't unlock. That's really good! I appreciated that you gave opportunities to experiment (make tea) and learn what different combinations did. And I really like the way you used the theme! Opening the right options to "harvest" herbs felt really rewarding.
My second playthrough, I got Izabelle to join me, and I pleased both the merchant and the guard. It was really satisfying! :heart:
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One thing I wondered at the end: I scrolled back and didn't see anywhere the merchant mentioned a ring. Maybe a story branch that didn't quite line up?
Screenshot 2023-01-20 211224.png
Erm, excuse me? I was minding my own business, brewing tea for unappreciative customers, having a cozy life in a tea wagon when all of a sudden I died alone in the middle of the woods! That was an unexpected and abrupt twist, but until then I really enjoyed the atmosphere. I've never heard of ink, it seems like an interesting platform for these types of games.
I liked that the take on the theme was not super literal, just a recurring theme in the story. Well done!
cool narrative game! i liked the ambiance, here, and the illustrations were nice! when a new character appeared, the "next" button was hidden (it happened to be too low? or black on black? anyway clicking on the lowest edge of the screen made it work until the next character) but apart from that, it was a pleasant experience!
Really lovely, and felt surprisingly open with a lot of replay value, given that it's a jam game (usually narrative jam games like this are much smaller and more linear in scope.) I loved the mechanic of experimenting to find the best teas while not using up all your special herbs, and I loved that it took some real skill to brew good teas (I didn't make anything anyone liked until my second playthrough.) The art is charming, fantastic, and polished. My only complaint is a few typos and story inconsistencies, but those could easily be ironed out through playtesting. Good stuff!
Thanks everyone for the feedback! It feels great to know that someone took their time to play your game, out of so many entries :slight_smile:
@thomasward Originally we had a different ending if you haven't made enough money to buy any property in the capital, but it was too depressing so we just cut it. I'll probably try rewriting it and release a post-jam version :slight_smile: Thank you for the feedback! Glad you've liked the game, despite the botched ending :sweat_smile:
@hawkin Yeah, the ending was rushed and it has some logical errors :sweat_smile: We will fix them in a post-jam version. Thank you for the feedback and your kind words!
Nice, enjoyable little adventure game! The illustrations were lovely, I would have loved to see more of them! I also encountered the same bug that kromeboy mentioned, except I could not click ahead so I had to restart, but I was happy to do so since it was a nice time. Good work!