FoonLudum Dare ExplorerLD52 → Grow In The Dark

Grow In The Dark

By lenaschimmel and flauschzelle

View on ldjam.com

CategoryRankScoreCount
Overall1933.8121
Fun3093.5221
Innovation1683.6821
Theme1324.1419
Graphics2643.9221
Audio1733.6719
Humor3523.0219
Mood564.1521

Comments

wolfraam1974 2023-01-10 06:46

Interesting idea

starofleaf 2023-01-11 03:00

It's a good game, but I feel that it lacks creativity. It's a little like the previous small game of skating, but it becomes the player who controls the placement of the character and the direction of the next move. In addition, players also need to consider the number of steps to harvest all fruits within the specified number of steps. I hope you can show the step counter next time, because counting the grid may be easier than watching the dark

flauschzelle 2023-01-11 19:58

Thanks for your feedback, @starofleaf! I don't know what skating game you were referring to? I thought about showing the allowed number of steps somewhere, but thought that it would not be important... because the goal is just to find the shortest possible way. But we probably didn't explain that good enough. Unfortunately, we had a lot less time than usual and had to finish some things very hastily this time :/

kir-pow 2023-01-16 19:15

Really nice game to play after work. I loved the sound effects of the old lady. Really set the mood. Easy to pick up the controls!

caeonosphere 2023-01-21 10:29

Hey, we both made pseudo-programming fruit-collection games! :D

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Fun idea, and that last puzzle was surprisingly tricky. I had to totally change my solution a few times in order to get it working, it's like a neat little encapsulation of the traveling salesman problem or something. Would love to see more, maybe with extra confounding mechanics.

blinry 2023-01-22 13:20

What a pretty game! I like the hand-drawn sprites! And especially the animation when the night starts is astonishing! You also picked a font and a soundtrack that go with the aesthetic very well, and the sound effects made me smile! :D

The game mechanic is really promising! Especially when multiple ghosts and houses are involved, this could result in some pretty challenging levels. As-is, I felt like I sailed through the levels (too) smoothly, but I'd be curious about what you could make this into with more time!

Placing the sign posts felt a bit tiresome, as you often have to click the right mouse button to rotate. Maybe a solution involving dragging from a grid cell into a certain direction could work? Or the option of using the arrow keys to set the direction before clicking?

cataclysmicknight 2023-01-25 02:27

Aaaaawwwwwww this was so lovely!!!! I wanted to play this the other day but for some reason the file kept erroring... today it worked though! This is such a sweet little story and a clever puzzle game. The art is fantastic too, but I loved how clever the game made me feel, and the story was an amazing, surprise bonus!

I knew whatever you released this time around would be great after Alarm Clock Arcade, and I was right 😊🥳

tod-semple 2023-01-27 05:59

Amazing mood! The music, fonts, and art all worked together to create atmosphere! Nice!

bezbiletnym 2023-01-27 17:08

It's so beautiful! Wow!

natiki 2023-01-27 17:48

I love the concept, art, and the story! Awesome job!

mark-winter 2023-01-27 18:47

I thought this game was so cute -- the art style was adorable and old-fashioned. I noticed an issue where the ghost's number didn't increase in the second level when it picked up fruit.

The effects noises were much louder than the music, which was a little jarring. Sometimes the distinction between the plants and the background was low (I have bad eyesight haha). Overall, a really fun game! I loved how the levels got really challenging -- lots of jam games are more of a presentation of a concept than a challenging game :) you definitely made a full game here! Great job!

profan 2023-01-27 19:57

This is a cute game, feels a little like programming but a lot cuter and the overall theme is lovely!

The difficulty ramped up pretty quickly though and on level 2 already it was getting pretty interesting, some smoother cotnrols for placing things would definitely help too, but this is definitely one of my top picks as far as innovative games goes this jam :)

Nice work!

darpasquid 2023-01-27 20:02

I liked the art a lot, but it was a little hard to distinguish things like where the walls were, and which direction everybody faces at the start.

I see the potential for some interesting puzzles done with this ruleset (having to deal with limited basket size, puzzles where characters' paths cross in clever ways, and so on) but I don't really feel like any of the puzzles lived up to that. Even on the final level, the breakdown of which fruits needed to be picked up by which ghost was easy to figure out--the basket size limits actually worked against the puzzle's depth, because you never had to have a ghost visit the house twice, or visit with an incomplete basket, or so on.

But I do think you could make some interesting puzzles with just these mechanics, not even adding new types of tiles or anything! So I'd be interested to see what you come up with if you do decide to make an expanded post-jam version of this game.

flauschzelle 2023-01-27 20:44

@darpasquid thanks for the feedback! I agree that there would be more interesting levels possible, and I even already had some similar ideas - we simply ran out of time to implement them before the submission deadline :/