I couldn't manage to find enough energy to get the plant to grow. Searching for energy felt a little random? Any tips?

I liked the concept for sure, I can definitely see a nice game here.

Congratulations dor your first entry. I think some challenge or reward is missing. You can click infinitely always when your income is more then your spend

A very nice concept, very original. Though I feel that you something to encourage exploration, as it seems that you can just connect to the first water node and then just spam skip for the rest of the game XD

Nice game. I think there is a lot of promise here. I liked how the planet upgraded your root system. You do have to play it and lose to know where the water is. Good job.

Yeah, balancing the game was kind of hard and i just left it there at some point.

Congratulation for your compo, that's impressive. It's fully playable and understandable, great job !

Cool idea, maybe needs something other than the highscore to incentivize more exploration and a little less randomness in the exploration, also would benefit greatly from fullscreen and mouse-pan :wink:

1259 Days is all it took for me to grow a very nice plant ;)

This was pretty cool! I really enjoyed the bit where you follow a long trail of water droplets and find a big clump of water tiles at the bottom. I think this game has an issue where the way you lose energy over time when you're not doing well makes you really want to spam the "wait" button when you're winning so you have a big stockpile just in case, and unfortunately that means the player ends up not exploring as much.

This would probably fall outside of the scope of the compo depending on how you programmed it, but if I were to fix it it would be by lowering the upkeep cost of of roots (to maybe 0.1-0.2) while still making it cost 1 to explore, and by making the water give diminishing returns (so 10 the first turn you land on it, 9.9 the second turn, 9.8 the third, etc) until it eventually gets sucked dry. This would make it so the player can't stay in one place for too long, but the reduced upkeep costs also mean they don't have to.

I'd also probably place a few more water tiles toward the top so the player lasts their first round long enough to feel like they learned the game.

I really liked how once you grow it it asks you if you can do better than the amount of days it took. That made me want to play again and do it a little smarter. It's a small thing but I think it helps discourage "cheesing" the game by waiting for a thousand turns.

A fun game with an interesting play style, gave me some early flash game vibes. Nice use of a resource system while still trying to expand your root network.

ITS VERY INTERESTING GAME
I LOVE THIS GAME
ITS AWESOME ....

This game is interesting!I like that skipping is an option, but I feel like there should be some consequence for spamming it too much. The reveal mechanic is a great addition.

@isiah-brighton thanks for the detailed feedback!
I like your suggestion on letting water source dry out. I also had another solution in mind - increasing root upkeep when the plant is level-up. I thought it would be too punishing though.

I like the game! The mood is nice; it's very calming and the music is very fitting for that. I enjoy the progression of the game and how you slowly get more abilities as you grow the plant. There's a lot of variety in the abilities, which is really nice.

Design wise, it seems very easy for a player to just get a greater income than spending and just skip days until they win. That is, you could expand your roots three spaces down at the start of the game and skip until you win. Although that might take quite a few days. So if the goal is to optimize and win with the fewest days possible, then maybe this is not so bad.

It's a very solid entry, I had fun playing this game! Great job!

This was so fun!!! I was a bit confused at first, but once I got the hang of it, the gameplay got super fun and even addicting! I played through it a few times and ended up finishing in 274 days on my last run. The music was pretty good too! Overall, great job, this was really fun!

Day 42 was the best I could get, quite bad as I see the other comments. But I only tried to get deeper. Good concept though!

That is a neat entry :) simple idea, simple gameplay but pretty efficient. And a complete game for a compo entry is always a great job!
The main issue of the game is its randomness. In a game where you have to manage an entity, that is dying a bit more whenever you click to go further, you have to make sure the difficulty increases at a correct pace and the exploration is not completely random, especially on game starting ! I died twice because I could not find energy, before having the chance to find enough to grow my plant. Also, being nice to the player on game start will make him like the game, realize what he can do and how, and notice that the plants indeed grows (visually). And then, you can make it harder because you know the player will want to see what the plant looks like when it is grown more and more, and that he will play again because he did not die because of the game randomness, but because it was just his first try and his strategy is obviously not elaborated enough.

But overall it was great ! I liked it and it has potential :)

Fun, but lacking balance. It took me 11 tries to grow 1 time. After that, I suddenly seemed to have better income, but I also couldn't find any more energy. Cool idea overall!

Our submissions are shockingly similar​! The overall concept is great, your incentivized ​to grow out and around and find patches of water, but you also don't want to spread yourself too thin because otherwise you'll starve. I also like at the end you're told how many days it took you to complete and your encouraged to do better. I dig it!

The turn-based/grid-based aspects of it are interesting. They make the whole thing feel organized and methodical, especially once you unlock pruning and the ability to reveal other areas. It really felt like you could min/max your way to victory if you planned ahead.

However there are a few little gripes I have that get in the way of my enjoyment. First off, I wish there were hotkeys for pruning/exploring/skipping. Clicking "Prune" and then clicking over at the one root I wanted to remove, and the repeating that process over and over was really tedious.

I also think that the "grow through stone" upgrade and the "reveal area" upgrade should be swapped. By the time I had the reveal upgrade, I had already hit "rock bottom" in the sense that I had nowhere left to explore that wasn't blocked off. So the reveal upgrade didn't do anything for me except for taunt me with areas I couldn't go to yet.

That being said, this is a really solid submission overall, especially for the compo! It looks like this is your first game on itch.io, which I assume means you're pretty early in your gamedev career. If that's the case then you're off to an amazing start!

@saering, @dgibso29, @notexplosive thanks a lot for the feedback! I wish I had more time to tweak the balance.

@notexplosive can you give a link to your submission? I'd love to see your take on plant growing :)

I like your game. The graphics look nice, sounds are fitting and gameplay feels good.
On my first try I ran out of water pretty quickly, but on the second one I grew a nice plant :) I do not exactly why I wanted to explore the borders of playing field, but I did so and discovered the ground water. I think at that pint the game broke in some way, because I knew I could pretty much do what i want at that point without thinking about water conservation. I am not sure if it would be more fun if there was no ground water. It might be interesting to test that ;)

@alex457 My game is at: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/lay-down-your-roots

(linking it gives me a warning about how linking my own submission in the comments is rude, but you asked lol)

For future reference you can click on my name in the comments and go to the "Games" tab, it'll be the left-most one because it's the most recent.

This game had a nice zen feel, and I enjoyed it. I think the cost of pruning and revealing went up so fast as to penalise the actual gameplay and making it more random, but it's a few tweaks away from a delightful game