Nurturer (Compo) by Zanthous

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#
| Youtube | https://github.com/zanthous/Nurturer |
| Youtube | https://zanthous.itch.io/nurturer |
| Youtube | https://zanthous.itch.io/nurturer |
| Youtube | https://zanthous.itch.io/nurturer |
| Youtube | https://zanthous.itch.io/nurturer |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/nurturer |
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🗨️ |
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.


@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.

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.