A World in a Jar by Zeknir
Have you ever wanted to grow your own small ecosystem in a glass bottle?
Now you can! Just choose some soil, and seeds and let the magic happen. By using different soils and breeding seeds you can discover new plants. Your companion, the Plant-o-pedia, will give you hints and provide some random facts about the plants. (May not be scientifically accurate)
Use your puzzle skills and complete the Plant-o-pedia! :seedling:
Download
Windows, Linux and Mac: Itch.io
(If Mac doesn't work, please let us know.)
Opt-outs
We didn't create the sounds and music on our own, but used CC0 licensed files.
Screenshots
Ratings
| Overall | 10th | 4.333⭐ | 20🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 65th | 3.895⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 99th | 3.789⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 51th | 4.158⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 26th | 4.632⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 402th | 2.533⭐ | 17🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 40th | 4.158⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 15🗳️ | 0🗨️ |
As I’m writing this, we’ve played for 20 minutes and will surely play more.
*(We'll be back again on Sunday when the judging starts)*
// Rasmus & Isak ([LiquidBrain](https://ldjam.com/users/liquidbrain/))
The music was very relaxing and fitting, and reminded me a bit at Oblivion or Minecraft from the mood. The sounds also nicely supported the gameplay, and were not annoying even after 20mins of playing.
Also cool idea to use the book to give the player hints. Maybe there could have been additional hints if you get stuck, but maybe the absence of this will lead to a metagame, where player exchange combinations.
Really cool, innovative game, I could play for a long time! :)
The art and music are of a nice quality, and the sound options were a nice feature (something I've neglected to put in my own game now that I think about it). A solid effort for the jam, and I'm really pleased to have not missed this.
I hope you continue developing games of a similar nature.
Best of luck to the author!
The music fit the mood perfectly and the plants all looked really nice, contributing to a fantastic mellow mood throughout.
The puzzles were mostly just the right difficulty, with the hints given in the plant-o-pedia being just cryptic enough to be solvable without going over the top.
I managed to get all the way to the end, and at no point did I feel I was at a block or that the game was slowing down at all.
Had a great time with this, can't wait to see what you guys do next.
It looks like a pretty complete thing though, tag me if you maybe fix it :)
I just tried out the lastest build of the game on Ubuntu 17.04. It is working here. You can see the main menu but can't press any buttons on the screen? Which Linux distribution are you using?
The one feature that I found myself wishing for was a way to see what combinations you have already tried. For example, when you select one plant, the game could highlight the remaining plants red/green/gray for doesn't breed/in plant-o-pedia/not tried yet. This would cut down on some of the grinding when you've got one you can't figure out and you don't remember what you've tried already.
I just tried it again on my Desktop PC (same setup), and apparently it's a fullscreen problem, when I make it windowed it works.
This game seems to have a lot of content for a LD entry and looks and feels whery polished, great job!
I'm also not sure if it is hard or I just don't have a lot of intuition concerning plants :stuck_out_tongue:
A lot of content (I played an half hour, and I only discovered radioactive battery plant)(I try to have all in order), and interesting puzzle game, great job!
Everything in this game go well together, from the art style to music to gameplay.
Near the end of the game it get quite repetitive though, and the combination started being random. I would love it if there's certain "relation" between the product plant and its parent, that way there's more "thinking" in the game (like in the original doodle god game which I loved), rather than just exhaustive fail-and-repeat - which is kinda boring.
If I could pick out few couple issues I had, they were:
- Some of the hints are misleading. For the cake pops, for instance, you mention that the plant involves something "colourful", which led me to believe that I had to breed a seed with the candlebra in order to make a colourful plant with fruit. But nothing was working, and I could not for the life figure out what else the hint could be for. I actually looked at your timelapse video in the end, for the clue. It would have bee more helpful to the player if the descriptions of the plants were a bit more relevant to the hints in the plant-o-pedia.
- While I think the sound effects are well done, there's something about the music that doesn't really sit right with me. Although calming, the loop feels rather short, and since this game is quite lengthy, the music starts to get a bit grating after a while of playing. Maybe I was just too into this lol, but I dunno, a game of this demeanour needs background music that is longer in length and not as repetitive. I know you've opted out of the audio category, but this could be something to consider if you were to continue working on this.
- I didn't like how the plants weren't ordered, in the seeds menu, by the same order they are in the plant-o-pedia. I guess it does allow the player to see the plants in the order they've collected them, but it makes it a bit confusing when it comes to trying out different combinations. Often, when following the hints, I would end up with a plant that was completely different from the one I was trying to unlock. It seems, on the plant-o-pedia, that you have it set linearly, and having the seeds on the seed selection screen ordered in that same way would have made it a lot quicker to try various possibilities without being confused by plants you've unlocked after. I don't think this would have been as big of an issue if the hints were less ambiguous.
Overall, I was quite engaged in this and probably spent a lot of time with this than I should have. I just have to unlock all those plants, lol. Good art, good sound effects and nice atmosphere.
// Rasmus