The Little World by JayTord
Game is based on "The Little Prince" fairy tail. You will be able to feel yourself as Prince, who is doing his daily routine on his home planet.
Game difficulty increases each day and reaches it's cap at Day 30. Thus, even though game is endless you can consider Day 45 as Game Clear.
Links:
Windows version download: http://rgho.st/6SBWwF9MT
Source: http://rgho.st/7YtKMwKzm
Screenshots:


Ratings
| Overall | 456th | 2.815⭐ | 83🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 456th | 2.593⭐ | 83🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 337th | 2.963⭐ | 83🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 169th | 3.667⭐ | 83🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 445th | 2.642⭐ | 83🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 444th | 2.58⭐ | 83🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 42🗳️ | 47🗨️ |
Good realization indeed, a shame that there is no audio :(
Still! Good Job! :grin:
:warning: There are 3 game over screens:
Green - baobabs are grown too much.
Pink - rose wasn't watered too long or you accidentally uprooted it.
Orange - volcanoes were not cleaned for too much time.
Pink is probably most common, since you really need to pay attention to that rose ;)
Perhaps the difficulty could ramp up a little faster. Even around 15 days I didn't have any trouble. Perhaps add some kind of notification near the top of the screen for what day it is.
I would have loved to have some gentle music to accompany the gardening, the lack of sound definitely hurt the mood of the game. But it's Ludum Dare so can't be too harsh on that.
The baobabs always spawned on the start of a day. It may have felt a bit more natural to have them sprout at random times, maybe with a subtle scale increase (spawn at scale=0.1, lerp to scale=1 over a second or so).
The volcanoes had a warning system if they were about to blow, but I would have liked some better visual indicators of the 5 stages of dirtiness. Maybe something like changing up the height of their spout.
I hate to encourage people to conform to the norm, but it felt like you were aiming for a specific gaming experience so I might as well bring a couple design practices to your attention that I've seen accomplish something similar. You seemed to want each day to be a little more frantic, and force the player to switch between a couple different tools to solve problems ever more quickly and with ever higher quantities. But, despite the switching of tools, at the end of the day the game only actually involved clicking on each thing a couple times. It would have been nice to have a more involved procedure for cleaning out volcanoes and rooting out baobabs. Something to the style of typing various quotes from the book to clear out baobabs, or having to hold the mouse close to the rose while watering it.
Still, it's a sweet little game, and with just a bit more variety in its mechanics it shows a lot of promise. Thanks for your work.
Could use a bit more feedback on what you're doing and what you're forgetting to do. Audio could help with that.
The planet looks a bit bare, graphic-wise.
See my jam game here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/limited-space
The idea is, in all honesty, brilliant. An ever increasing challenge testing your dexterity, quick wits and carefulness. The problem here is many fold.
Selecting the right tool for the right job is really easy, thus the carefulness aspect is a dud.
If you needed to change the tool in between a task, for instance clean :rose: twice then water once, carefulness would play a much bigger role in the proceedings.
Quick wits aren't really needed as each task clearly signals its urgency, meaning the order of doing things is obvious. This is good UI design by the way so challenging the decision making part of the brain should be done some other way.
We are left with dexterity and, boy, that sure is required. Got to around day 30 and at that point, trying to click a :volcano: 5 times in a row is a bloody nightmare! Maybe the complexity and amount of tasks could increase instead of the rotation speed of the planet. After all, why is the speed increasing in the first place?
Well, I do still like it due to the strong idea and competent execution. It could be really something special though.
@bram-ve Yes, I agree that more visual effects depending on what user is doing would've been nice, it's not like I didn't plan to add them, just was short in time a bit, so in the end I've decided to keep things simpler to deliver game in time (barely managed to). It was first time when I was working with 3D and models, so it could seem easy to add few simple effects, but actually I've struggled with them a lot T_T. Now I think I should've made post-compo version with audio/visual improvements, most likely will add one for my next LD game.
@huvaakoodia @amras0000 Special thanks to you guys, I really appreciate that you gave me "deep" advises that could also improve my future games of same genre.
@connor-mcgrory @giusex27 I can't really agree with a score system here, these types of games usually use seconds/number of "wave" to indicate how long player last, the game use day number for this. I don't want to give player different scores for doing work faster or something like this, it should only matter how long your planet survives. Thus you will have approximately same score at the end of the same day and on my opinion it's more suitable to show the day number in that case. Maybe just like @move127 said I should've duplicate number of day from the logs to the top left corner of the screen.
One suggestion for next time: and this goes for everyone that submitted something, (including myself). Think about "Why would the player want to play this?" and "Why should the player care?" and "How can I keep the player engaged and give them real depth of gameplay?"
- I like the tutorial, although it should have been separate (not after every restart)
- The planet rotates way too fast for me, at least before I got what I should do (and i literally 'git gud')
- Concept and idea of the game is good, but doing same things all over again makes it boring after a short while. Although in the end is somewhat innovative by introducing spherical geometry, it still misses something more in the concept itself to make it from good to awesome (although yes, it is a Ludum Dare game - so as a concept it is nice, if you're going to make something more out of it, think about mid and late game).
Overally, congratulations on making a game. I enjoyed it and thanks for sharing!
What I liked:
* The core gameplay loop is simple and introduced to the player in a clear and easy to understand way.
* The idea is pretty unique, I like the idea of maintaining the planet in real time.
What I disliked:
* This game sorely needs visual feedback. It's impossible to read the text to know what stage of doing something you're on when the game speeds up near the end. I'd love to know if a volcano is clean or about to blow without reading the text.
* The loop is very repetitive and not very satisfying. Rather than having the game speed up, it would probably be cooler to introduce more volcanoes or baobabs or maybe even more roses as the game progresses.
Great job on your entry and good luck in the competition!
It feels like a "submission" game similar to rock band or other rhythm game where there aren't really decisions to make but more responses the player has to make. Perhaps some extra elements to reinforce this would make it fun such as particle effects on success or music and rhythm.
Thanks for the game!
不错的游戏!故事有点像小王子。游戏性非常简洁有趣。我最后不小心把玫瑰给铲了T-T
I noticed that the baobab all spawned at first stage, maybe some difficulty progression could be added with them spawning in later stages? I played for good 5 minutes and it didn't appear to happen, but I think there were more of them. Good job including a tutorial! The icon at topleft didn't respond to the selected tool, but I managed just with the cursor icon.
It would have been better if we could walk freely on the planet, but aside from that, good job.
Anyway, I'm on Mac, so couldn't play your Windows build, but thanks to the source you provided, I could open it up in Unity anyway. I made a Mac build for you in case you want to put it up!
http://ava.levelism.com/tmp/TheLittleWorld_Mac.zip
Don't want to keep it there indefinitely, especially since this is web space I'm borrowing for free, so please tell me once you've downloaded it and hosted it yourself, and I'll make my link invalid again. c:
Game was a bit confusing at first until I played a few times and got it—again probably something that's clearer to anybody who's read the book. At first I thought I was turning the rose into a baobab by watering it and then the volcano by digging, not realising these were three different things that the first "level" was teaching me about and what tool to use on them, but I got it after I had played the actual game a bit!
No idea where/if it said how many days had passed, so not sure how well I did, but I definitely didn't reach your 45 day goal, that's for sure, haha. At first glance, I thought it would be kinda similar to our game Blomst, but then I realised it was really fast-paced! Quite difficult!
Too bad you didn't find the time to put any music in there, but that happens. c: Great job overall! Wish I'd read the book first so that I could tune a bit more into the references!
I played this on stream at https://www.twitch.tv/videos/143780402 - time 0:39:10
Thanks for including my game in your stream, about mixing tools...You actually lost because you have used shovel on rose and you had a lot of grown baobabs because you were watering them ;)