afrasiab352 2023-01-10 12:08
A weirdly calming game, reminds me of old flash games.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD52 → Necromancer's Garden
By animawish
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 248 | 3.72 | 29 | |
| Fun | 337 | 3.48 | 29 | |
| Innovation | 86 | 3.87 | 30 | |
| Theme | 185 | 4.05 | 30 | |
| Graphics | 552 | 3.27 | 29 | |
| Audio | 245 | 3.53 | 29 | |
| Humor | 166 | 3.50 | 27 | |
| Mood | 104 | 4.00 | 29 |
A weirdly calming game, reminds me of old flash games.
I got an lua error buit the game is fun and seems more complex than I initially thought.
@reikan Thank you for playing! Did you get any error text? Do you recall what you did when the error happened?
Fun, really interesting game. Only problem so far - I got stuck after picking too many spells that I didn't have mana to use. Music is great, the art - good enough. I'm not much of a strategist, but I still hope to beat this game.
@labete Thank you for playing! It is deeply frustrating to hear that you got softlocked, I thought I had squashed that problem. I've uploaded v1.0.3 which should hopefully resolve that issue going forward.
@animawish one more thing, I noticed that "famine" spell has 6 mana icons, but requires 7 mana to use. I already died in 3 different ways traying to win, still no luck :D
@labete Ah great catch! I've thrown up a quick fix for that and another OBO error I found. I'm very glad to hear that you're enjoying the game! :pray:
Nice to see LÖVE entry from you again :slight_smile: And what a brain teaser this is. Really nice twist on the theme. Requires both planning and luck (maybe too much luck). Juggling between the three resources (money/mana/time) is nice also mix of elements.
But there I find few issues: 1. It was not clear for me, that you can take as many spells even if you don't have the mana right now to cast it. As a result I took ~10x **Rot** cards at the start of the game only to try to get rid of them over next ~20 turns. 2. I could not figure out the rules of how many coffins you get each day. It seemed to scale with number of mana I have? As after reducing my mana from ~50 -> ~3 in two turns I got ~1 coffin from constant 4 every day. As a result, most of the later game, once I had **Forbidden Fruit** I had to spend all time/mana budget to only deal with the coffins I get. Maybe it also scales with money I have (as I was having 130+, as I didn't really need anything from the shop)? 3. Then the money - I didn't really have what to spend money on after buying **Forbidden Fruit**. Thus it started to just accumulate over time. 4. Not being able to pass turns when when I don't have anything more to do. Well, technically I had ~30 mana, several **Rewind** spells, **coffins** and **Crescendo** (I got from the **Purple Cap**) in hand. (and very similar in the deck) My only options were to waste mana by rewinding, getting hand full of coffins, and finally I was forced to use **Crescendo** failing my run. 5. No way to thin out your deck than actually using the cards. And I am not talking about coffins. 6. I am pretty sure this was deliberate decisions, but it really annoyed me. That the **Growth** accelerated rot by 2 days, but full rot cycle is 3 days, so you cannot do **Rot** -> **Growth** -> **Rewind** in some dire situations, even though I am wasting lots of mana just to save one plant. 7. Organ chime while thematically in place it stood out a lot (maybe audio levels/loudness?) and I found it a bit annoying. Glad you can mute the sounds, though other sounds to well placed.
Other than late(r) game chore of not getting overrun by coffins I find the game pretty enjoyable experience. :thumbsup:
@bloodycoin Thanks so much for the feedback! I'm glad you enjoyed the game, it's very exciting that there was enough there for you that you had such thoughtful comments.
Regarding points 1 and 5, you can remove cards from your deck in the seed or spell screens by clicking on the cards in the wheelbarrow, and it even refunds the coins for seeds. It's mentioned in the tutorial but it's not super emphasized so I can understand missing it. Something for me to think about as far as in-game discoverability goes...
Really a challenge to make a deckbuilder in a jam! And you've chosen a quite interesting set of interactions to play with! I tried to build some different strategies, and was fairly successful until I ran into the 20-unburied-coffin end :smile: Initially, I did not get how the spells worked, and flooded my deck with some unnecessary spells. Might need some limits there to protect people from accidents! The card placement and style was well done. Game with potential!
A very complex game for a jam and a lot of content here XD.
Good work!
An interesting combo of both the gardening and deck-builder game. I was impressed with the amount of cards and interaction of the mechanics that you were able to get to in a jam timeframe, well done. I did find some of the mechanics hard to figure out, I was never consistently able to generate mana despite trying a couple of approaches. I also found the pixelated text on the cads difficult to read while playing the game. Overall a very impressive game, well done!
Really complex game with a lot of cool strategy. Took me a few tries and a couple different strategies to beat it. I like that you're able to remove cards from your deck to influence your card draw. I think there's too much luck involved though. 3c Mystery > 99c Forbidden Fruit.
My strategy (spoilers ahead):
Rot coffins for money, buy Bluecaps for mana. Mystery to get Forbidden Fruit. Plant coffins to keep your deck empty. With ~40 mana on the final turn, empty your deck except ritual spells, Think, and Rewind.
Cool game! The text was a little hard to read, but I liked the deck building!
I am incredibly impressed by the amount of complexity show in a game jam!
I enjoyed how consistent the art style was t made me feel nosalgic for ms paint.
Really loved this game, definitely in the favourites and replay category for me. Once I had found browncup (think that's the one that randomly removes a coffin?), rot and growth I was repeating myself a bit. But I like that the amount of coffins you gain each day increases to stop it becoming boring. One improvement could possibly be the graphics? I'm playing it on a 35" monitor and it can be a little blurry. Loved the audio, creepy organ music. great game!
Very funny game with from the premise to the actual plants. Graphics were neat, but I had a hard time to recognize some stuff because the pixelization. Should've only planted hot dogs.
Great game!
I had a big amount of fun playing this game!! Found it comprehensive, and the tutorial is well written I'm bad and always died because I have more than 20 unburied coffins, tried different strats, pretty sure using pumpkins is the worst idea haha Sound matches and is efficient creating the mood,
Loved it, well done!
Always enjoy a deck builder, and this one was no exception. There's definitely a bit of a learning and strategy curve, but I feel that's a hallmark of the genre.
I did have a couple of issues, though they are fairly minor. - The sound on the planting screen specifically was too busy for me. I think it was just too many sounds layered all at a fairly similar volume. Other screens where fine, though. - A lot of the font on the cards was fuzzy, even in the small window.
This entry was so amazing. Complicated. Neat. interesting. cards, cycles, costs, coffins, intrigue, spells, sounds, great job!!!!!! And then i had a bug crash out the game. Something to do with planting an orchid and the moon moving to the last phase or something. :-)
Fun puzzle/card game but the goal feels a little hard to reach for me. I feel like introducing the player to new spells and plants over time would help give them a perspective on what they should be doing to move forward. Aside from that neat game!
This game desperately need normal tutorial. Or what-to-do in description at least. Most people will just play random cards.
Nice, cool concept and there's clearly a lot of content here. It was definitely tough to figure out what to do though. (I'm pretty bad at deckbuilding games to be fair.) I feel like through the process of one playthrough (which took quite a while) I had a vague idea of a strategy but my deck and garden were too much of a mess to actually implement it by that point - it felt pretty tough to get a real gold economy going, and there were so many coffins it just got overwhelming. Wish I had more space to plan out areas for rot coffins separated from actual plants. One thing that I found frustrating was the lack of the ability to pass when you had other actions you could do, like sometimes I was forced to harvest ivy which I didn't want to do and later I was forced to play one of the ritual spells out of order which made me game over, which was frustrating. Honestly feels like the game might be better if it were simpler (fewer plant types maybe) or at least have a proper gameplay-based tutorial that introduces mechanics one at a time. Still impressive for a jam game, nice work!
First, gotta say I really found the art style awesomely nostalgic -it has a really cool, fun vibe to it. There was a lot of depth to the mechanics -really fun! I really like that you didn't shy away from using cool perspectives -it added a lot of life to the different scenes/menus. oh also -liked the humor in the description too lol xD Anyway, really cool game! -awesome work! :D
I read the description and the game idea sounded interesting, but, sadly, the linux version does not work for me.
Hey ! Great entry here, i love the coin/mana balance with some flower that bring you money but remove mana. I mainly use Rot that clear some coffin, i don't really understand some of the spell. But overall a good entry, good job !