Unique concept. I had fun playing!

Cool take on the theme! I really like the art, and wish there was a way to do more then 1 action in a turn. I could totally see this expanded with different types trees, weather effects, ect.

This was really cute! Love the little helicopter character. Managed to get victory, but i didn't really understand the effect i was having with the wells

It's a very neat concept to explore, it was fun to see things grow, and decide where to place wells, over all, very good game, kept me playing until the end, keep it up.

A fun game. Wasn't sure when it would be best to cull for mulch or for seeds, but I must've figured it out because I won!

Pretty unique! It was hard for me to grasp the mechanics of what the wells did though, maybe a tutorial of some kind would be nice.

I agree with @bebadboi I wasn't really sure what the wells were doing, but I got victory as well. Fun little game! :)

I was going to say that I was confused and had no idea what to do when I first started, but perhaps that's the point? Figuring out what was going on was interesting. As far as I could tell, the desert tiles were removing "health" from adjacent tiles each tick, and the wells were adding it. It seemed like there were maybe some more complexities to the rules, but I didn't entirely figure out what they were. I would have liked the end-of-turn numbers to stay on screen longer, even until dismissed, so I could ponder them. Was an interesting experience nonetheless!

First things first, I had no clue what I was supposed to do. The game graphics were alright and the game mechanics were good, but again I had no idea what the premise or the goal of the game was.

Is only way to gain seeds cull the grown trees? because i stuck at some point but nice visuals and solid gameplay, good job!

Thank you everyone for the feedback! We definitely need to work on making our objectives and tile effects more clear. If we keep this going, it would be our first change and something we're already talking about. We wanted to give the effects (particularly the wells) direction indicators and more permanent visual cues, but ran out of time.

@alec We'll probably expand actions per turn if we do more/bigger maps. Hoping we can add some more diverse types of trees and weather as well.

@bmacintosh We have a tendency to make games without much explanation. My personal goal is to focus more on affordances so even if there isn't text, the set-up guides the player better. Thanks for all the feedback!

@mlkvr The plan was for the player to cull young trees to grass or mature trees down to young trees, but a mistake in our code put mature trees all the way back to grass. We only found it after submission. Oops.

Nice game, pleasant graphics and music.
It can be fleshed out further I think.
The Settings button in the main menu didn't work for me, when clicking on it nothing happened.

Keep it up.

Great game! I found all the little tiles worked well to complement each other, that's good design. A do wish there was a tutorial, it took me 2 rounds to figure out what the tiles did (and I'm still not sure about the well after 10 rounds lol). Something small like a tooltip before I plant seeds or add mulch would help alleviate this a lot. Overall still a fun experience, great job!

pretty fun game, i like the graphics and audio. like the other said, i do confuse at first play too. i think adding short tutorial will make this game great. could see your hard work through the game, good work to you:thumbsup:

I'll add to the voices :). I liked the graphics, the color scheme is glorious and the music fits the colors like a glove. Love the cover art, by the way!

Gameplay, if simple, is still confusing. Not because it's hard (it is rather easy :)) but because you don't really know what is going on. What do the floating numbers mean (is it water running away?)? Why do I have only one mulch, shouldn't it go on every tile I want a tree on? Tooltips when you hover over stuff or just a short explanation screen would go a long way here.

Also, I couldn't click on "settings" on the start screen. Not sure if that's a bug or settings were just not implemented ;).

I liked a lot the purpose of your game, "lets revive the forest", it is a cool message, especially given the current state of the environment !

To return to your game, I had fun to replenish the forest ground, the graphic is nice & cute, I liked also the animations !

I think that the only missing little element is a feedback sound when we end a turn, for me, it would add more importance to the end of turn. And a last note, on the difficulty, I think that we shouldn't be able to move after doing an action, currently it makes the game a bit easy.

Overall very good work !

Nice little entry, I like the "Cover art"

I loved the cute graphics and it was fun to try to figure out the game mechanics, like what does the well really do etc. A tutorial would have made the rules a bit more clear but I still had fun finding it out on my own.

How the hell you were able to do that level of amazing art work on that like.... I am amazed i wish I could do that too... :sob: . Overall I really liked the game and a few minor polishing would be great.

I am a sucker for games where you have to grow plants and keep them alive so when I saw it I immediately had to play it.
The art is really pretty and I loved the relaxed background music which really made it a fun experience for me.
The only thing which kinda confused me was when a tree was fully grown the soil underneath turned yellow-ish which immediately made me think of the desert so I cut down the first few saplings thinking I did wrong. Maybe a few little flowers or something which really screams life would make it clear that you where on the right track could prevent such confusion, but that was only a minor thing.
Great game!

I like the one action per turn, I seldomly see that in video games!
There was something with the sand mechanic that isn't clear. I understand that you can’t plant on it, and that it spreads, but do I plant plants next to the sand to take it back to grass? And what do I do when a plant's tile turns into sand, add mulch?
I also got a bug when the character started to walk on the underside of the level!
Anyway interesting concept, would play it more in a later version with more mechanics interacting :)

Reminds me a little of the Forbidden Desert table top game,a nice take on the theme.

wow I liked the graphics so much. good job

Thanks for the great feedback everyone! Sorry it's so confusing. We're planning on expanding it and breaking this stage up into a few tutorials. We're hoping to keep the early stages more exploratory so we'll probably leave some ambiguity in there, but limit the number of options available on tutorial levels so the player gets a better sense of cause and effect.

@kkrac and @fabula-rasa Thanks for the catch on Settings. I always miss some debugging checks.

@edalbung Great suggestions! Putting "end turn feedback" on our to-do list now. For future versions, we were planning to let the player do a few move/actions per turn as maps get bigger. But we would definitely put a cap on the total distance traveled.

@chief141 We used Blender for the graphics. It's free if you want to check it out. And it helps that one of us is a professional animator.

@nabo369 I didn't even think about the color change. Thanks for the feedback. We're definitely going to tweak that.

@ristoretto Huh, we thought we fixed the walk-off-the-map bug in early testing. Next time, we'll add a location check to seal the deal. It is possible to take back desert, but it needs decent soil and water. We haven't found a good way to show that, but we're working on it.

great game bro!!!

Some really good work on this one! I love eco style games!

I would have loved some more clear instruction, but had fun trying to figure out what to do.

Interesting core concept here, though the actual effects of the actions could have used a little explaining. I had no idea how to correctly make use of the mulch, and it took me a while to figure out that the trees on their yellow tiles weren't dying, despite the resemblance to the desert/sand tiles. Honestly, just adding some basic indicators there would go a long way. But like others have said, there's lots of room for development and expansion here with weather systems and different plant types, etc. Hope you have the chance to develop it further!

Very cute game! I love playing sweet little gardening games, and in this I really liked the art, music, and straightforward controls, though I did have some trouble working out how all the systems interacted together. If you keep working on it I'd love to see an in-game tutorial and/or more levels!

Very unique game ! I liked the concept a lot, it's quite sad you couldn't polish it I would have loved to play a version with more levels and were everything was balanced and implemented ! The graphics serves the game pretty nicely and give a cute feeling to the hole thing. There is a sound for everything some of which are great. I'm not so fond of the low poly style i would have prefered some smooth shading, but that's an opinion. A tutorial would have been nice, even if the game is pretty simple to understand. Nice job, keep going !

I just realized that I already played your game (after you rated mine and I came here to play yours lol) I remember not having much clue as to what effect the wells etc were having, but the artwork is AMAZING! I definitely think you should continue developing this into a more fleshed out game. Great entry!

Interesting game. I liked the art and concept. there wasn't much direction so it was a bit difficult to figure out what I was supposed to do. The art was nice and caught my attention when finding a game to review.

I really like the idea of a game about saving the forest, but I do not really understand gameplay.

I didnt understand the gameplay but the game looks cute. The sound is also nice

Nice idea! The look and feel of the game are solid, it was very easy for me to figure out how to move and do actions etc.

It was perhaps a bit too easy gameplay-wise -- first run-through I just kind of made it up and won by accident, so a bit more of a challenge would be good, but it's hard to get the balance!

The little background tune was nice! It does very much sound like stock MIDI piano though, if there's anything you can do to make it sound slightly more unique that would help it to have a bit more identity :)

I'd like to see this extended to more levels and more puzzle-y challenges :)

A good idea for a puzzle game! I love the theme of growing the forest to fight the encroaching desert.

I see other people have already pointed out that the game doesn't really explain itself well. If you don't want to make detailed instructions or tutorials on everything, instead letting the player discover everything themselves, I think changing the end turn number display would work.

Right now, when you press End Turn you get a wall of numbers for a few seconds, without a chance to figure out what field did what change and why. I think you could separate that for each field type: first the player sees the effect the desert has on its neighbours, then the wells, then the plants. That way it would immediately tell the player the effect each field has on others.

All in all, it's a lovely game. The audiovisual side of the game is wonderful. The gameplay is solid. I enjoyed it. ;)