Algernon's Flower by bentglasstube
Help Algernon take care of his flower.
You are just a rat in a maze, but you have a flower to keep you company. Give the flower water and compost and keep away from spiders and snakes.
Controls
Arrows/WASD - Move
X/J - Run
Tab - Drop Item
There is also some controller support, but it's not really tested so your mileage may vary.
Gameplay
You need to manage the health of your flower by providing it with water and compost. You also have to maintain your own energy by eating cheese. The HUD shows indicators of all the important values.
The flower attributes decay over time, but your energy only decays when you move. If you are running low on energy, you should avoid unnecessary movement.
Known Issues
- Audio is kind of hit or miss in the web version, sorry
- The title scroll doesn't reset, you'll have to restart the game if you want to read it again.
Tools
I used the following tools to make this game:
- Game engine was done with my own SDL2 based framework, gam
- Art was made with aseprite
- Music was made with my modular synth
- Sound effects were made with the venerable sfxr
Ratings
| Overall | 821th | 3.075⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 880th | 2.775⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 795th | 2.95⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 477th | 3.725⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 733th | 3.1⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 442th | 3.175⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 659th | 2.444⭐ | 20🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 727th | 2.947⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 31🗳️ | 13🗨️ |
**My likes:** :smile:
- Fun challenging gameplay
- Nice sprites and animations
- Background track/audio is great (I played on the web version btw)
- Menu/Intro/Game Over screen are all well done
- Loved the classic pacman style mushroom power up
**My dislikes** :cry:
- Not killing the enemy that hurts you means a snake will often just straight up kill you. Was this a deliberate decision?
- Water/compost spawning felt a bit too harsh at the start especially given the random nature of the maze gen. I was swamped by enemies and not enough to keep the flower alive some runs. However that is also the nature of the beast I guess!
- Enemies movement/AI felt less polished than the rest of this but again a minor criticism!
A really quality compo entry! Kept me coming back to play!
The snakes can definitely be tricky to get away from, but that is by design. Since they only charge straight at you, you usually will need to run and take a corner to get away from them. I tried to make the invulnerability after you are hit long enough to get away, but it's difficult when you play the game a lot during the course of development to know how hard it will be for other people.
The spawning is pretty random, so it can definitely make the game difficult or impossible. The game does adjust the spawn chances based on what you need, but I probably needed to weight things more heavily in that regard. Getting swamped by enemies is just bad luck, sadly.
I had plans to do more with the enemy AI, but I ran out of time, naturally. The best laid plans of mice and men...
There's some issues with the difficulty, the maze can be really hard depending on the random gen (items spawning in dead-ends with monsters blocking the way, or only few possible ways that can easily get blocked) and the snake is a bit too mean (it should wait more before rushing again instead of potentially hitting us 3 times in a row).
Also, discovered the How to Play screen after playing as i checked the title screen again. It's a nice thing to have (+ it's a complete and well-explained one) even if the game is pretty intuitive, though it's kind of hidden as it is (the title screen prompts us to press any key, launching the game, while the how to play screen requires you not to do that).
Good job. I liked the game.
But game itself is cool, idea is nice gameplay is fun. Music get repetitive quickly but its not a problem fo compo entry imho.
You can see the generation algorithm in action on the title screen, although it skips the wall removal step.