Nurturer (Compo) by Zanthous

[raw]
made by Zanthous for Ludum Dare 46 (COMPO)

screenshot2.PNG

​​How to play:​

The goal of the game is to plant trees and get to the highest difficulty level possible and there is no real end condition. The game gets more difficult as you play, in the form of faster decreasing health, as well as slightly more sparse energy further from the center. The world blossom's health deteriorates as its protector golem expends energy to create life in a newly forming world.

Controls:

E to deposit energy

WASD to move

Scroll wheel or keyboard 1-3 to select an object

Click to place a structure (on an indicator)

Objects:

Energy:

​Picked up by walking into, you can bring energy to the world blossom or connected trees to the world blossom. Press E to deposit energy. Energy can also be generated by plants.

Trees:

Trees make connections to the world blossom in a straight line, which act as additional deposit zones for energy. Additionally, the golem can move efficiently between connections to the world blossom, so the world blossom's health does not decrease on these tiles.

Plants:

Plants are an expensive structure that generate 1 energy over the course of almost 1 difficulty stage. To produce energy, they must have a free space in one of the four cardinal directions. Priority is left, up, right, then down.

Rocks:

Rocks obstruct pathing, as well as connections between trees. They don't have any function at this time, but were planned to be used to trap enemies.

Changelog:

Within the first hour after submission I submitted a bug fix to the game (https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/rules). Included in this fix was stopping a bug where the player could turn in energy even if they weren't holding any, indicators not updating on object place, and an issue with indicators at the edge of the world. You can view the code changes I made on the github page.

Made with unity/c#

Ratings

Overall 447th 3.5⭐ 22🧑‍⚖️
Fun 432th 3.4⭐ 22🧑‍⚖️
Innovation 498th 3.325⭐ 22🧑‍⚖️
Theme 378th 3.825⭐ 22🧑‍⚖️
Graphics 738th 3.095⭐ 23🧑‍⚖️
Audio 360th 3.3⭐ 22🧑‍⚖️
Mood 427th 3.325⭐ 22🧑‍⚖️
Given 36🗳️ 21🗨️

Feedback

mehrdadsh
20. Apr 2020 · 07:03 UTC
nice game
kjscott
20. Apr 2020 · 07:25 UTC
Would have been useful for the game to restart after the game over screen after a while so I didn't have to keep reloading the page. Once I got the controls and the gameplay figured out it was quite fun to play. It would have been nice to see some sort of enemy you had planned in the game.
🎤 Zanthous
20. Apr 2020 · 18:57 UTC
@kjscott I agree unfortunately I had to implement some of the content within the last hour (scaling difficulty, extra ui, plants + game over screen) because I ran out of time so some of these things are not implemented perfectly. Enemies were planned to destroy structures but I ran out of time and adding the required code/assets would have taken a few hours I estimate. Ended up spending around 26 hours working on this during the jam.
🎤 Zanthous
20. Apr 2020 · 20:54 UTC
Post your end game screenshots!
🎤 Zanthous
20. Apr 2020 · 20:54 UTC
.
Likai
21. Apr 2020 · 05:08 UTC
awesome game, audio, and mood
43sam
22. Apr 2020 · 07:41 UTC
I love the idea of this! The whole game has a great atmosphere t it between the colours and the music/sound. It's interesting to come up with strategies to progress as well. Having an indication of when the plants would emit energy would be useful. Enjoyable game overall :)
BluShine
24. Apr 2020 · 02:59 UTC
It seemed simple at first, but there's a really fun gameplay loop where you're trying to decide when and where to place trees. Background music is really nice and helps set the mood along with the pleasant color scheme. I like that it's a fairly chill game, you're just strategizing about building tree networks and exploring, don't have to worry about enemies. Lots of chill gardening vibes. I'm not sure the plant mechanics worked as well. I planted a bunch of them along my tree paths so I would automatically walk past them as I move around. This seemed to work pretty well, but I couldn't quite figure out if the investment paid off or if I should have just planted a lot more trees. I wonder if I could have cheesed the system by just pacing back and forth on tree paths and waiting for plants to grow energy?
I'm just really impressed by how fun the core tree planting mechanics felt. I think you did a really job of creating a sort of gardening/survival game within a short time span.

![nurture_end.png](///raw/ab7/1/z/32ecf.png)
MachWerx
24. Apr 2020 · 03:05 UTC
Nice concept! I liked the innovation of trees that create highways between them. I wish it was more clear where the off-screen trees were so we could align the highways more conveniently. Also, I couldn't figure out the plants even though I got to difficulty 2.
twobitadder
24. Apr 2020 · 03:29 UTC
i found this a very interesting idea! i liked the ability to chain safe paths and deposit spots with the trees, and placing down plants along the way to help supplement the future levels was a neat touch! i think it'd be interesting to expand upon this concept with different shapes of safe zones, or different kinds of inputs/outputs for energy. overall though, i really like the concept you came up with and the implementation!
ghast_neoh
24. Apr 2020 · 03:29 UTC
This was great! I loved the dynamic between building your home base and going out and gathering energy on the ground. Really cool how the systems came together here. I got to a point where it seemed like I could've played indefinitely, so I decided to end it at difficulty 15. One thing I noticed is that sometimes trees don't connect to each other even when there's an empty line between them. But this was fun! Here's my base:
![home_base.png](///raw/dfb/c2/z/32ee0.png)
🎤 Zanthous
24. Apr 2020 · 03:54 UTC
@ghast-neoh thanks for playing + the writeup. I haven't balanced out the numbers super well at this point but cool to see your base. Trees currently only make 1 connection and it's determined pretty randomly (I think just in the order it ends up checking)

@twobitadder thank you, I'm not sure I will continue the idea but check out the source code if you are interested

@blushine time doesn't tick for plants walking on the red paths currently, thanks for playing + the long writeup

I'd like to add trees having multiple connections as a post jam thing and maybe balance the numbers a bit when I clean up the code base. Another interesting mechanic is planting plants on red paths, or to the right of them so energy spawns on top of paths. I'll have to give it a long playthrough and see if the difficulty scaling is too lenient. I'd also like to make moving around easier if possible so people don't kill their hands.
xart2012
03. May 2020 · 03:29 UTC
good game, but need some time to understand what to do: )
mypalmike
03. May 2020 · 11:49 UTC
I love games with a few simple rules and emergent complexity. This is kind of an economic sim which evolves into kind of a farming sim. I spent waaay too much time playing, trying to fill the whole world. The tree-connecting algorithm was robust. Great work!

![Screen Shot 2020-05-03 at 4.41.39 AM.png](///raw/f38/d2/z/33b4d.png)
🎤 Zanthous
03. May 2020 · 18:14 UTC
@mypalmike it would appear I vastly mis-estimated the correct values for this game oh well, I'm amazed though lmao, thanks for playing
mypalmike
03. May 2020 · 21:37 UTC
@zanthous Yeah there seemed to be like 2 phases where the balance was "right". First, a phase where you just try to gather energy without dying. Then a phase where you try to balance the cost of planting plants versus going off-grid also without dying. If you get past the second phase, the plants produce a surplus of energy which can be increased indefinitely. But even after that I found it was really fun just figuring out ways to optimize energy production, minimize time spent gathering, and expanding the area of control.

Also, the walls ended up being pretty useful in the late stage because you can use them to block things off and control which tree a new tree connects to.
🎤 Zanthous
04. May 2020 · 00:45 UTC
@mypalmike that's really interesting to hear, I'm glad you found a use for them
JDK2209
04. May 2020 · 22:42 UTC
At first I didn't quite get what I was supposed to do, but the moment I understood I fell in love with the game. Such a well designed gameplay flow, great audio, fitting graphics, randomly generated levels... This game has it all. Congratulations!! Amazing job!!
cheesepencil
05. May 2020 · 01:24 UTC
Cute and chill. I'm not a very good golem but I did my best. Well done, GG!