Blight in the Garden

Weekly Game Jam 97 Submission - Strange Garden

My latest game-jam submission. It was a little more ambitious than I had time for, but I hope you enjoy nonetheless. Expect bugs and game balance issues. Be sure to read the instructions at the start, as they are essential for understanding what to do.

Basic Controls:

[Any Key] to advance text.

[Arrow Keys] to move and jump.

[V] To interact (Pickup, drop, take from seedling box, activate fountain with full mana)

[C] Consume carried plant to gain Mana. Mature plants only.

If you win, you can continue planting as long as you like!

Version 1.1 Updates:

Tweaked starting Mana, increased Berry value, increased Mushroom value, decreased cost of planting Spinach to encourage players to plant this defensive item and added to it's description in the instructions. Mana bar now flashes when full to better signal the urgency of heading to the fountain. (Thanks to Thoof for their feedback on the difficultly!)

Comments

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Nice game! I gotta say I really enjoy how all your games have the same aesthetic. I was wondering.. what tools do you use to build your games? 

Hi there, thanks for trying my games! Glad you are enjoying my continuing look/theme. It was a conscious choice,  but also a way to save time on making assets each week, haha. Another coming soon :)

I'm using Construct 2 to build my games. For art assets, I'm using piskelapp.com and Photoshop CS6. Piskelapp is very basic, but I find it great for quickly making animated sprites. Lastly, when I have time to add SFX, I've been using https://www.bfxr.net/ to quickly generate retro sounds.

Cool concept, I agree that there's balance issues. Movement and platforming and stuff felt good, and I like the new assets. 

It was a struggle to stay alive, let alone build enough mana to activate the fountain, and that was after four or so tries.

One of the biggest issues for me was that if you threw a seed too close to another seed, or near the fountain, it'd just disappear. It'd be nice if they tried to seek out the nearest possible tile or returned to your hand or something, or at least gave back the mana used to make it.

There's a few things that could make the game a bit easier to play. You could start the player off with more mana. Or you could move the seeds a bit closer together. You could also slow down the corruption rate.

Thanks for giving it a try! My original scope for this game was out of control for the amount of time I have in a week.  I'd say 10-20% of my planned design reached the final game.

Great suggestions! With more time, I'd definitely change how the seeds work when they hit an occupied tile. For a quick fix, I updated the starting Mana and tweaked the balance of cost and reward for the plants. Hopefully this makes it easier to succeed! RNG still plays a big role. If  corrupt seeds manages to hit both sides of the starting land early on, it will make things much more difficult.