My Crazy Little Garden by Patomkin 2024-10-08T09:38:08Z
Very charming little game, and some very cute tiny creatures. With some audio this could be really satisfying
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → LGK-Productions
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | 56 | Tiny Creatures | Ants Assemble | jam | 211 | 3.91 | 3.67 | 3.71 | 4.23 | 3.72 | 3.75 | 2.63 | 3.72 |
Very charming little game, and some very cute tiny creatures. With some audio this could be really satisfying
Fantastic atmosphere and world building, accompanied by amazing audio design! Really creative and well executed, I'd only increase the firefly light radius to make the cave section more visible. I absolutely love that you have to visit previous locations with your new skills to access new areas. I encountered an issue where upon entering the final code (or at least i think its the final code), the game just freezes. I'm not sure whether the game is supposed to just end or if I'm missing the ending soundtrack. Overall amazingly relaxing entry, great job :)
Ah, second time's the charm, it worked after a page reload. Also that's quite a challenging bossfight you got there.... But again very well designed and visually very pleasing
Very cute and fun, the audio helps a lot to sell the whole experiance. Also spamming upgrades is so much fun :) I'm a bit surprised, that when flinging multiple slimes at once they basically all get flung in random directions (guessing that's based on their rotation). Overall really enjoyable
Very cute characters, very interesting concept. Four different characters at four vastly different positions in the level can get confusing though, although the different special abilities are really creative. Also amazing job on the main menu art!
damn, that music is kinda wild ^^. I liked the amount of feedback and sound effects used, also not being able to move during morphing is a nice little risk/reward. I think the different forms could be used a bit more (apart from water there was no specific reason for me to frequently change forms), and being able to rotate the camera in some way would be nice to provide some more vision. Great job on finishing your entry though and good luck on getting the missing reviews :)
Great atmosphere, amazing music and incredibly polished, loved every second. The voice acting adds a lot to the story. Very impressive for a 3 day jam
Nice little simulation, very relaxing to look at. I'm not sure whether the food sources deplete or not, because at some point, the ants just started pathing over them. It's always nice to see a fellow ant enjoyer though ^^. Great job!
Very charming dialogue and very satisfying crunch on killing enemies. It would be nice to respawn upon dying though (or maybe im just bad... :) )
Very cute game, and nice sound effects :). This somehow reminded me of a mobile game called "Zombie Tsunami" (Problably just because of how you gradually increase your groupsize). Good polish overall, also the hitboxes seem quite forgiving, so the whole game felt very fair and responsive, great job!
Love it, really polished and a lot of fun!
Sadly did not run too well on my humble laptop 😅
The game art honestly looks great! Very nice title image too!
It took me some time to understand what to do. Some feedback for selecting the build-types could help a lot. I only noticed the placement-indicator after a view minutes of playing.
Congrats on finishing your game (without tutorials)! I really liked the title art, although you should probably turn off filtering for pixel art sprites. I'm not sure if you can actually fight the enemies, if yes, i didn't find the button :)
Very creative entry, love the idea. Some audio would be great, but other than that, the game is really polished, and very satisfying (although most of my creatures died in the process)
Very fun game, no opportunity for a pun has been left out 😅
PS: nice voice-acting 😎
I like the concept, it fits the theme well. Also the interactions with various flowers were quite nice and the bee names a great touch (although it's quite heartbreaking to sacrafice jimmy the bee to a wasp). For enemies it would be nice to have some indication about what their sensing radius is. Generally a very charming game, great job!
Although this only being a cut down version, i still had a lot of fun exploring. I think the core gameplay is well designed, and for a jam of 4 days, this still contains lot of content. I would definetely play a fully fletched out version of this, there is a lot of potential. Great job overall, I enjoyed my playthrough a lot, especially because of the generally relaxing ambiance :)
Very charming game, love the quirky artstyle. It would be nice if your character could teleport from edge to edge like sheeps do. Also I'm a bit confused on what the percentage on game over represents. If I push all the sheeps out of the area it still shows ~90%.
Fun little game, I like the amount of feedback sounds and enjoyed the music. Some balancing would be needed and I'd make the health bars a little less obstrusive (maybe only showing health on damaged units). The skeletons are quite cute though, with some harder enemies you'd really need to think on your feet about how to place your units. Great job overall!
Spent a solid 5 minutes reading through my contracts ^^, I don't think I've ever seen a jam game with that much backstory/worldbuilding, so hats off for managing to do that in the time limit. In general very enjoyable gameplay and amazing graphics. I would have loved to see the tiny drones rendered into the game because the placeholder graphics seem kinda out of place. I think I managed to glitch the drones (only visually as far as i could tell) to have a permanent beam to a destroyed tank without me being able to remove it, or this is a mechanic i did not understand. Screenshot 2024-10-08 232028.png Really enjoyed the general atmosphere though, and had way too much fun just right clicking around the map.... Great job!
@cliva Well, it wouldn't be a real game jam without overestimating the time budget and having to cut a lot of content due to some annoying bug appearing :).
The right click being unintentional is actually hilarious, i love it ^^. I was already wondering why it basically did not interact with anything.... Congrats on finishing a version despite the difficulties though.
Fantastic game with incredibly strong storytelling, art and atmosphere. The whole box concept is so charming to me, and extremely well executed. The puzzles aren't that easy, but extended my playtime to a relaxing 10 minutes, and were therefore well balanced (at least for me). I also appreciate the amount of polish that went into the game, basically everything has a feedback sound, which makes everything feel coherent. Some slight scaling punch or similar upon pickup/release would be nice, but the animation upon completing a puzzle is just top notch ^^. A really artistic entry with simple, yet effective storytelling, great job!
@kotolazer Yeah, agent avoidance was and still is a problem, which proved to be way more difficult than anticipated. You can still select single ants by only clicking once and then move them away, but thats obviously not very user friendly. Also I agree that the game loop from hive level 3 on could use some work, it can feel quite grindy due to the resources being far away. Glad that you enjoyed it though!
@slippers Performance does become an issue at 10+ workers, especially on web (im sure this could be optimized a lot, but time is merciless...). I agree that for the endgame some outposts for resource dispension would be nice, to minimize return time. In retrospect we should probably have increased worker speed on hive upgrade but it is what is... I'm glad that you noticed the pheremone system though, I also thought it was quite neat :)
@chocolat-endive Oh whoops, missed that in testing. Outposts would be a nice design choice, could have just spawned them in on a certain hive level. Good catch though, and congrats on finishing the game :)
@schadocalex The pheromone system, while very interesting was a bit tough to integrate, because it should feel like the ants are following their trails, but you don't want to take to much control away from the user (basically the issue you described). Thats why the ants will only start following trails when they are in an idle state, which happens after they interact with their hive. After you command them to a specific point, they never switch back to idle and therefore never walk away. This is not extensively communicated in game as we didn't want to overload the user with too much information (so I'm doing it now :) ). Glad you enjoyed the rest of the game and had fun beating it!
@cliva Glad you enjoyed the music, there are 6 different (short) tracks split into 3 daytime and 3 nighttime, being triggered with a certain probability on day/night switch. Great to hear that you took the time to finish the entire game!
Hi @surfa, thanks for the extensive feedback. I agree that some of the controls feel a bit janky, due to a mixture of ants overlapping, the selection not being clear and some targets being hard to see. Agent avoidance was a bit of a problem during the jam, so we sadly had to replace it with a system that at least kind of seperates them upon reaching a target. We uploaded an updated version to itch.io which improves some of the enemy interactions (mainly ants being able to attack them automatically) and some of the target highlighting (no outline for selected ants though...). Glad you enjoyed the game in general!
Nice, relaxing game, the gravity ball is actually quite interesting. It would be nice if you could aim your pickaxe with your mouse though :)
This game definitely has some atmosphere to it. Quite an interesting interpretation of the game jam theme. Some more feedback/polish on death/item collection would be nice and the movement is very sensitive (which I'm assuming is on purpose due to it being used in the time change level) although i love the snappiness. Also a fan of the speedrunning mode (quick respawn is really nice). Congrats on completing your game despite your difficulties!
Absolutely incredible artstyle and the story is presented in such a charming way - the drawing book scenes are very well executed. The platformer controls feel slippery (which I'm assuming is on purpose), but at smaller sizes (and higher speeds), Kalvins tends to behave quite janky (i glitched out of the map multiple times). I would recommend adding some camera lookahead, because it's quite difficult to see whats in front of Kalvin (in Unity you could use cinemachine for that). Overall really creative entry, great job!
Great atmosphere, nice use of lighting and a very calming soundtrack. This game has a great mood and the current concept fits the jellyfish quite well, it would be nice to have this current be visualized somehow (for example via the particles flowing). Some indicator of where to go would also be nice, it's stated in the description but you could use the glowing jellyfish thingies to guide the player (or something similar). I really dig the overall vibe though, great job!
Made from scratch with C++ and OpenGL is very based :). A timer or some kind of scoring system would be nice though.