PlantArtica by OctoLinsolente
The planet is lost. Your expedition was to send in space the last forms of life that survived the deteriorating climate , and humans will not be part of it: all your colleagues are dead.
It is up to you to bring the missing link to the Spring Development Kit (SDK): vegetation.
PlantArtica is a platform game where the difficulty comes from temperature management. You can't stay still for too long: you'll freeze to death.
To avoid frostbite, move around, jump but be careful: each time you turn around, a little cool down will keep you immobile a quarter of a second.
To reach the end of the game, you'll have to combine speed and wits so as not to lose a single moment!



| Youtube | https://idaeldev.itch.io/plantartica |
| Youtube | https://idaeldev.itch.io/plantartica |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/plantartica |
Ratings
| Overall | 1293th | 3.475⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 1776th | 3.05⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 2153th | 2.75⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 1464th | 3.55⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 494th | 4.125⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 221th | 3.95⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 1837th | 2.222⭐ | 20🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 561th | 3.75⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 27🗳️ | 11🗨️ |
Good ideas and nice graphics
Aesthetically though, great job. Everything about the sounds and visuals feels super good, except maybe the siren noise in the music. It does help add to the dark toned moodiness of the level, but it sounds a little too much like emergency services. If the planet is lost and I'm the only human left (at least in this expedition team in the middle of the arctic), why am I hearing downtown police sirens?
I'm impressed by the power of a jam team. Having the option to change all those sound levels is fantastic, and the fact y'all have it working for some type of game controller is great, even if I don't think I have the one that works with it. For keyboard controls, I felt like control was a weird key for action. It only works with left control, which means I have to twist my tiny pink away from the WASD fingers to hit it when I would have preferred to use my other hand on the right control button. Struggling to position my hands to use the action button cost me a lot of deaths for sure.
This is definitely a moody story game I would love to watch YouTubers let's play, but it's not the kind of first-hand experience I enjoy.
The controls are a bit too strict for my taste tho (this said I do suck at platformers).
I feel that the game itself is pretty simple and functional, but sometimes the jump felt clunky and there is quite a lot of jumping.
Also the character design is super cute!
I like t he graphics, but I need more intro to the story. As advice for the future do not set the action key in the keyboard in the control, use E or F instead, it's quite weird and the browser was asking me to save bookmarks lol.
Congratulations for your entry :D
Great things :
- Unusual art style, fresh and original, works really well for the snow setting
- Very good ambiant music, fits super well, sets the mood just right
- Super responsive jump, all hail.
- Good level design mostly : no pixel perfect jump like many tend to try (spoiler alert, pixel perfect jump are never good)
- Me likeh
- There's a guy called Fred Bob
Issues :
- ctrl is not a good choice for an action keybind (and it's so very unatural to mash), E or F are better fits
- not being able to turn while airborn, thus being stuck in place if facing opposite direction
- not enough contrast between lower platforms and background
- weird hitbox for the edges of platform resulting in falling when it would seem unfair
- part of the lvl with two slugs after 3rd or 4th checkpoint slightly too unfair : player has to wait for the right timing to dodge the slugs, and can fail from not moving rather too quickly - can be prevented by happily jumping into the slug, though
- same as above, after the hard bit with the consecutive vertical jumps on desintegrating platforms, fading away comes really too fast when trying to dodge the slugs - and getting eaten now and then is not solving it this time - so I stopped because it was 2am.