Blooming Heights by Jakupf
Blooming Heights is a game where you play as gardener on a floating island. A pretty careless gardener at that. The island itself is held toghether by a special crystal plant. However the plant dies one day, and being unprepared, you spend almost all of your money to buy a new sprout. It will take some time to regrow and island itself slowly starts to collapse.
Your task is to grow plants and sell them for profit while island around you collapses. Less space means less plants, less plants means less profit. In order to win you need to survive until the crystal plant grows fully. You can't fall off the island and you can't allow your house or crystal plant to collapse. Plants will yeld you shards, which can be used to purchase more seeds, as well as island repair kits (You can use those to bring back 1 tile). Be careful what you plant though. Some plants will affect your islands integrity which determines how often landfalls occur.
You will be required to manage space for plants as well as your money, so you can buy island repair kits and repair the damage. If the tile with plant gets removed, the plant is also gone. However tiles will only collapse if they are on the border of the island (Red grass colour). You can protect your house and plants by building around them. You lose if landfall occurs while either your house or your crystal plant is on the border or your character is standing on a tile that is about collapse. I recommend playing on easy difficulity first so you can get familliar with the plants and then move to normal or maybe even hard.
| HTML5 (web) | https://jakupf.itch.io/blooming-heights |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/blooming-heights |
Ratings
| Overall | 494th | 3.474⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 410th | 3.417⭐ | 20🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 99th | 3.833⭐ | 20🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 85th | 4.132⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 729th | 3.238⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 21🗳️ | 5🗨️ |
There is a lot to read, maybe look at cutting down on the text in the shop, the clock is ticking even in easy it's difficult to read about everything before the game ends.
For example:
"Kit containing everything that you could need in order to repair damage caused by
landfalls, can also be used to expand your island, It will allow you to place 1 tile."
It's flavorful but could be just, "Landfall repair kit - allows you to place 1 tile (click empty tiles to use)"
@trevor-hayes Thanks for playing my game! I initially planned for time to stop when in shop but I thought you would be able to somehow abuse the system (Which propably doesn't matter.). It is going to be first thing in post jam version as it is very simple thing to do! You are completely right about text being to long in shop, instrucion is also very cluttered. It was getting really tired and that was last thing I did before uploading so I decided to just make wall of text as explanation. I will try to lessen the amount of text in shop and move the descriptions somewhere where you could read them without worring about time. Having in-game tutorial would be great but I don't know if I will be able to make it clear, at the very least I will split instrucion into multiple pages so it is easier to read! I'm glad you enjoyed it!
I thought the game was well-polished overall, with a clean, functional UI and helpful graphics and sound effects. There were a few very minor issues I had, which you might already be aware of, but for completeness I'll list them:
- It would have been nice to not have the clock tick down while you're in the shop to let the player read the explanations (maybe just on easy mode?).
- Like some people above, I also had trouble using the island repair kits at first (I was clicking on the red squares instead of the empty squares).
- There were a few times I had to click the X multiple times to exit the shop. I'm not sure why that happened, but it did cause me to lose once when I had to buy a repair kit and place it in 10 seconds but couldn't stop shopping.
- Speaking of exiting the shop, I would have liked a keyboard shortcut for doing that, as moving the mouse over to the X is surprisingly difficult when you're trying to do everything as fast as possible. Maybe also keyboard shortcuts for buying seeds.
- (this is a tiny change, but for me would make the biggest difference) Multiple times when playing, I would click on a square to plant or harvest and it wouldn't work because I was too far away. I would have really liked a sound effect for this (or some indication of which squares you can currently interact with), as without feedback I would often click on the same square multiple times before realizing that I needed to move closer.
I would be really interested in playing a more fleshed out version of this game: right now, even in hard mode, I think some strategy like "econ as fast as you can until you have 10ish plants, then only buy repair kits" will always win, which doesn't require the player to worry about which specific squares are falling or run around much to tend to all the plants. I also ended up never using the crystal plant. To be clear, I think what you have is very good for 72 hours, but with some tweaks/additions you could force the player to e.g. strategize on the spot depending on where the land is falling, or plan out where they need to run to get things done, which I think would make for a more difficult but also more rewarding game.
Overall, this was an interesting, well-executed idea that I had fun playing, with a lot of potential for expansion as well. Keep it up!
@cristihjk Thank you!
1. As I said it is already planned to be added to propably all difficulities as I don't see reason why it shouldn't.
2. I would like to change red tiles into something less but I don't know what would work for "still a tile, but in danger". I couldn't think of anything that would also be possible for me to do so I just changed the colour.
3. That's strange, I have never experienced that bug myself. Game just checks if your mouse is over the X and if you pressed LMB, so I have no idea why that would bug out.
4. There technically already is shortcut for exiting shops, all you need to do is just to move your character and the menu will automatically close (And to be honest I used that all the time to exit the shop so you propably have the point). Shorcuts for buying seed is great idea tho!
5. Again, there is already something like that but I guess it wasn't telegraphed enough. When your cursor is out of range, it will turn opaque. It also turns red if you move your cursor over house or plant but that is pretty obvious so I think that red cursor would fit better for "out of range".
About crystal tulips, I think that is actually really interesting because in my successful hard playtrough I only used bushes and heathers but my friend took a completely different approach and used orchids and tulips only. I like that different people have different ways of solving problems. If I were to expand game in features, I would like to add different terrain types and random generation. Examples would be sand, only bushes can grow on it and it is more likely to fall during landfall than grass. Or for example water tile which boost growth of nearby plants but none of the plants will be able to grow on it (Unless I add some water plants).
I will say this again, I greatly appreciate your response, it has a lot of useful constructive criticism and I have now better idea what to focus on!