Seed by whitetigle

[raw]
made by whitetigle for LD26 (COMPO)
Please note that this version is available for :
- Windows
- Mac (OSX 10.7+)
- Linux 32bit (64bit version coming in a few days)

What is it?
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Seed is a real arcade game where the only goal is to beat your high score. Just like real arcade games. :)

Controls
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The mouse and its left button are your friends.

Controls
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The game is basically set in a very strange place where seeds appear in the sky and 'water' bubbles pop underground.

Click on a seed to make it fell down on earth.
Click on a water bubble to make it reach earth.

If a water bubble reaches a seed a plant will grow.
If a plant grows enough it will free a beautiful flower.
Beautiful flowers then free their seeds so that you can plant new kind of seeds. And so on. It's a kind of life cycle.

To pass to the next level you need to free 20 flowers.
Each new level means a lot more points. So passing a level is always a good thing except that things will start to get complicated...

Now you will see that you can't get all the water bubbles. Even if they stay a little while, if you miss one it will just fell down. Every few bubbles down The Void will grow.

That's your main problem: eventually everything will disappear into The Void. That's life. So grab all the points you can before it reaches the central limit.

Remember : if you don't take any risk you won't get many points. Seed a rewarding game for risky people :)


I hope you'll enjoy this pixel gardening experiment!

Ratings

Coolness 73% 3
Overall 3.69 139
Audio 3.11 314
Fun 3.39 224
Graphics 3.89 109
Humor 2.25 529
Innovation 4.13 29
Mood 3.55 133
Theme 4.13 82

Feedback

FuzzyWuzzie
29. Apr 2013 路 04:07 UTC
Strangely fun, even though I had little idea what I was doing.
馃帳 whitetigle
29. Apr 2013 路 04:36 UTC
thanks for playing :)

A few more tips for those who want to raise their score :
when seeds grow enough they free a flower. So you can see a little dot at the base of the plant. But if the plant grows too much it just disappear and leave room.

Also note that seeds do not live well one with another. So sending a seed on another seed will remove the planted seed.

Water, when sent right next to a seed will make it disappear because water is better in a seed that outside ( don't ask me why ).
arkeus
29. Apr 2013 路 04:38 UTC
This is kind of amazing. I love the graphic style and the concept. The only thing I thought could be made more clear is when you grow something too much and it disappears. It's not obvious if it's a good thing or bad thing (I'm assuming that it's a good thing since you can grow something new there), but perhaps some kind of bonus or something when that happens, to make it more obvious.

Awesome job though!
nintendoeats
29. Apr 2013 路 04:42 UTC
I'm very impressed. Mechanically that is an extremely compelling game. The decision about which half of the screen to focus on is neat, as is the relationship between a droplet's distance from the center and our ability to judge which horizontal location it occupies.

If I were to criticize, the music loop started to drive me nuts long before the pool filled up with water. Actually, the water should probably fill up faster. Obviously that is a subjective design choice.
CherryNukaCola
29. Apr 2013 路 04:43 UTC
Wow. Really loved this. Thanks!
NemoStein
29. Apr 2013 路 04:44 UTC
The game takes a while to load but the game is fantastic.
Is a little mess in the beginning, but as soon as you understand what (and when) to do you can't stop playing.
Waave
29. Apr 2013 路 04:44 UTC
This is really cool. I like the visuals, with some more work this could make an awesome arcade game.
馃帳 whitetigle
29. Apr 2013 路 05:00 UTC
Thanks for all these comments!

arkeus>well it *can* be a good thing because you need room to be able to grow new seeds. I mean the new kind of seed you get after having grown a flower. But *it is dangerous* because you have a weak spot for water bubbles which could then damage other plants around.

nintendoeats> yeah I agree with you about the loop. Too short and too repetitive. But I went short of time.

NemoStein>the loading sequence is... (no I just can't say that here). Well it's *kind* of loading...
pvwradtke
29. Apr 2013 路 06:54 UTC
Very cool, took me a while to figure out the goals, but after that I had a good time playing it. Also, I liked the visual style.
lasergans
30. Apr 2013 路 11:34 UTC
Love this game! Very minimalistic, innovative and with a nice design!
timtipgames
30. Apr 2013 路 12:15 UTC
Very very good. Love the style and the mechanics are really great.
Blizzil
30. Apr 2013 路 13:11 UTC
This is truly an amazing game! Graphics, Music and Gameplay are awesome. But i didn't know exactly what i was doing in the first moments, a small tutorial would make it perfect.
EdoMiyamoto
30. Apr 2013 路 13:28 UTC
Very good mood !
wonderwhy-er
30. Apr 2013 路 14:15 UTC
Pretty unusual, took me some time to figure out what to do, yet it was actually fun.
But still confusing. But initially fun somewhat when you figure stuff out by trial and error :) I would say a neat trick for LD games, no need for tutorial if games allows easy trial and error learning :)

Anyways, cool game :)
馃帳 whitetigle
30. Apr 2013 路 14:25 UTC
thanks for all these nice comments :) I am really happy that you enjoy my game. I really enjoyed making it so that's very cool.
Evil Cult
30. Apr 2013 路 15:04 UTC
Nice game. The main thing I liked was the feel that the graphics and music gave. The gameplay was also fun but I feel as though it could have been a bit slower and more deliberate.
AlanZucconi
30. Apr 2013 路 15:27 UTC
I really like the big-pixel style that you used for the game! :) And it is quite rewarding when you realise what you are doing! :-)
meszka
30. Apr 2013 路 15:28 UTC
Pretty addictive :D
YsenGrimm
30. Apr 2013 路 15:45 UTC
Great idea with really good graphics, but is somehow feels really "slow" for a arcade game. Anyway keep up the good work :)
Chman
30. Apr 2013 路 15:48 UTC
Really cool toy, quite unusual but refreshing. A bit like a zen garden... with pixels instead of sand.
Webravenz
30. Apr 2013 路 19:02 UTC
original idea and addictive game !
Jiggawatt
01. May 2013 路 18:58 UTC
Experiments like this are the soul of Ludum Dare. It's a bit chaotic for an arcade game, but since there's feedback for just about every interaction, playing around with it is quite pleasant.
zkenshin
01. May 2013 路 22:56 UTC
Quite an interesting game. :)
Volute
02. May 2013 路 00:23 UTC
Very cool and innovative ! It also fits the theme perfectly.
馃帳 whitetigle
02. May 2013 路 08:17 UTC
Thanks for these comments!!
free_napalm
02. May 2013 路 13:50 UTC
Nice relaxed game.
stqn
02. May 2013 路 17:38 UTC
Nice presentation! It seemed that the game would go on forever no matter what I did though.
kyyninen
02. May 2013 路 17:40 UTC
This was awesome! It would be fun if game saved a screenshot each time block fell into it's place and after defeat made a time lapse of the entire session. I'm gonna try to make one later...
deepnight
02. May 2013 路 20:32 UTC
Man! You did reaaaally great on this one :)
I understood the game in 5 seconds without any tutorial or anything, everything was really intuitive: excellent work on the feedbacks.
I'm not sure I got everything right, but when a seed is planted, dropping more on the same column is useless?
deepnight
02. May 2013 路 20:33 UTC
Man! You did reaaaally great on this one :)
I understood the game in 5 seconds without any tutorial or anything, everything was really intuitive: excellent work on the feedbacks.
I'm not sure I got everything right, but when a seed is planted, dropping more on the same column is useless?
Also, the music was quite too repetitive after some time. It would have been great to add some sound synthesis like a tone matrix or something :)
Dark Acre Jack
02. May 2013 路 20:59 UTC
Excellent game design, with a little more audio variety this will be something great.
axcho
03. May 2013 路 05:53 UTC
I love the art style, but I did not understand what I was doing. I could make the towers grow, but there didn't seem to be much challenge or expressiveness to explore.
Dir3kt
03. May 2013 路 07:50 UTC
Liked it a lot, it was fun and somehow relaxing to play. The only thing is that it lacks challenge! I kept playing for a while but didn't seemed to loose.
馃帳 whitetigle
03. May 2013 路 09:25 UTC
First of all thanks for your critics and comments. You guys rock!

>deepnight: well it depends whether you want to destroy your plant, to make room for another plant for instance. In the same way, throwing water next to a plant destroys it. So when you begin to get seeds of other colors it can be interesting to plants not fully grown up to get more points.

Axcho, Dir3kt > Totally agree, the game lacks scoring feedback. But if you take risks, I mean if you grow flowers and pass new levels then you'll begin to see the challenge. Because the points lie there, both in passing levels and growing flowers from new kind of seeds.
shawn42
03. May 2013 路 18:17 UTC
Got into this one right away. I love the idea of big pixels and growing them! I hope you win!
ChuiGum
03. May 2013 路 23:07 UTC
Funny Loading Phrases!!! Great game too, very fun
tankete
03. May 2013 路 23:10 UTC
Awesome. I made it thru all the loading text! Should have taken a screenshot of the youtube link. The whole family was around me reading. Great stuff! Oh, and the game was great too ;)
cadin
04. May 2013 路 00:35 UTC
Beautifully simple. I like this a lot.
I wasn't sure if I was supposed to be growing my plants until they exploded or not. I also wasn't sure if the sun drops were hurting me or helping me. Those two animations are ambiguous about whether they are good or bad things.

Overall I loved it.
Stryphe
04. May 2013 路 03:25 UTC
Nice game, good work!
CyberYeti
04. May 2013 路 06:33 UTC
really cool mechanic and definitely fits the theme. the multitasking between planting and watering is really challenging and fun.
Tozy
05. May 2013 路 16:43 UTC
It's strange, the game was much harder the second time, after reading the instructions :s
dx0ne
08. May 2013 路 17:48 UTC
All stars maxed.(well except humor) This is what LD.Minimalism is about.
馃帳 whitetigle
09. May 2013 路 14:48 UTC
Thanks for your comments! You really are cool :)

Tozy > this is a bug I wrote about in my post-mortem. Statics are not reset so the second game will be harder.
BarrensZeppelin
12. May 2013 路 12:32 UTC
I love the insane amount of attention to detail. The particles, the gentle screen-shake, the small text-objects that pop up when something happens. Simply wonderful!
imagnity
13. May 2013 路 20:27 UTC
I so liked the concept. Never played something like this before. Nice effects. Nice game. Also the tiny music fits.
Sylvain.p
15. May 2013 路 00:59 UTC
Strange and very cool. I love this game and its atmosphere