Grove Guardian by chaotikza
You wake up in a magical grove at the center of the forest. You have been here many times before, but somehow it always looks different. Most plants seem to grow and die more quickly than normal as you move about, but the trees around the grove all seem old and well-worn. They seem to exude a sense of safety and peace, but you sense that they may be more fragile than they seem. You set out to explore, certain that the forest still hides many wonders...
Controls
- Move: Arrows
- Open Spells Menu: X
- Use Action: C
- Options: ENTER
Hints
Many people seem to struggle a bit to figure out what to do in our game, so here are a few hints: - Flowers and trees live and die every turn based roughly on the rules of Conway's Game of Life. - When flowers die they drop seeds. - Seeds power your magic: basic spells / inventory can be accessed with X; for more powerful spells go visit to the great stump at the heart of the forest.
Changelog
2020.04.26 - V4:
A small bug fix / balance tweak for the jam version as we noticed the more interesting late game content wasn't spawning and squirrels had about a 25% chance to be useless for a good long while.
- (balance) Increase danger check frequency between 200->150 and 300->200 turns.
- (balance) Increase chance to spawn danger by 10->30% if no hit, so you are guaranteed to see danger after about 450-600 turns.
- (bug) Added flower formations to the W and E, otherwise your squirrel would sometimes spend a long time running left and right without finding any seeds.
2020.04.20 - V3:
The original jam entry without any fixes. If you consider the changes in V4 too much to be fair please rate us on V3 instead by downloading that (web is V4).
Ratings
| Overall | 1944th | 3.167⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 2189th | 2.75⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 1251th | 3.271⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 1996th | 3.229⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 1501th | 3.417⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 909th | 3.333⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 1886th | 2.147⭐ | 19🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 1768th | 3.053⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 19🗳️ | 20🗨️ |
The game: The gameplay is a bit comfusing, but after a while I got the idea. I made a gameboy game during ludumdare so I may started playing it with the wrong assubtions. but the idea that you could walk out of the screen was not obvous to me. Many old schools consoles do not support this big size of a map, and specially not with just empty land. Old consoles also do not support changing the background or sprites that fast, so everything velt very modern and strange. But overall really nice game you have implemented a lot for this small amout of time.
Missing animations of course, but I saw you were prioritising gameplay and features.
I like the style, gfx, sound, gameplay.
You have captured the retro rpg feeling. I Like! :thumbsup:
@timo-strating :
Empty land could be just empty, you only have to store the objects. PICO-8 is limited in pixels, colors, sound and memory, but you have lots of computing and rendering power which is a bit wierd at first... Coding for PICO-8 truly is addictive! I had way too much fun creating my own entry... :sweat_smile:
Unfortunately I was a bit lost and didn't quite understand what I had to do.
I kept dying, but the music and graphics are great.
It is still a neat game though!
There was a lot going on and I only understood when I died.
As mentioned above, working out what to do is a little difficult; maybe a couple of sentences explaining the various mechanics would be helpful after the starting screen, or in the game description?
Aside from that, it's a really good submission :smile:
@samboyer276 Good idea, I've added a hints section to the description above, maybe that will help people figure out what to do.
One problem was that I didn't know the size of the world and where the stump was, especially because too much trees had grown. It would be good to have a map or some indication of in which direction the stump is.
It's easy to miss the messages since they disappear after the next movement. I missed where orcs where coming from many times. Also, the number of trees (shown in the stump) isn't always updated.
All that being said, it's a great game! At some point, I noticed the way things changed was familiar... Great use of game of life =D Good job!