Evergreen by RAFFE
Protect Evergreen's last tree from the horrors of nature. You will face many conditions and must complete different quests to survive the worst and save the Tree of Life.
This was easily our most intense and ambitious Ludum Dare yet, and pushed us way too close, and you can see it in some things. There was a huge amount of work put in over the weekend and honestly we're pretty surprised we made it as good as it came out to be. We really hope that you complete the entire game, you won't regret it :)
Ending comes at the end of the third year
As always, feels like an extra hour or two would've made it a whole lot more polished and better game as a whole, but that's Ludum Dare for you. Anyways we hope you enjoy this game of ours and thank you for playing, we really appreciate it. Feel free to leave any kind of comments below and destroy us with criticism.
In this game jam we had a bigger group than usual, as always, we had
@JustMars with an insane amount of programming,
@RAFFE with all the artwork, art direction and sound effects,
@Jokku with a bunch of programming and some design,
@HappyTomato (https://soundcloud.com/itshrme) with the amazing musical pieces,
@eleeve also helped with programming and ideas, and
@kalle-aro with some assisting help of his own.
Please comment your feedback down below so we can learn and playtest your games =)
Changes in version 1.1:
- Reduced the file size by compressing sprites and audio and removing unused assets.
- Fixed sound effects not playing on button click
- Decreased the resolution of the custom mouse cursor
- Fixed a bug where insects underground could be seen through in specific circumstances
- Made attack button at the ending only clickable once to prevent game from breaking completely with spam
- Added a message to the end to inform that keyboard must be used at a specific point in the game
- Made weeds/grass pull-able at any point in their growth instead of only when fully grown
- Fixed checkmarks being shown on top of wrong quests when completed
- Added a toggle for vSync to the start menu (top right corner, on by default)
| Youtube | https://justmars.itch.io/evergreen |
| Youtube | https://justmars.itch.io/evergreen |
| Youtube | https://justmars.itch.io/evergreen |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/evergreen |
Ratings
| Overall | 1107th | 3.544⭐ | 47🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 1943th | 2.956⭐ | 47🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 984th | 3.4⭐ | 47🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 700th | 3.9⭐ | 47🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 1072th | 3.733⭐ | 47🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 601th | 3.589⭐ | 47🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 1481th | 2.613⭐ | 42🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 849th | 3.591⭐ | 46🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 36🗳️ | 52🗨️ |
The art is really nice, and combined with the music gives a really calm, peaceful feeling. There are tasks you have to perform, but it's relatively relaxed and low stress. Then the second phase happens, and you're thrown for a loop.
I really liked the seasonal cycling and the variety in tasks (bugs in two places, weeds, clouds, etc). I like how you introduce them in a subtle way, just by mentioning them in the quest book. Once the player knows what to look for, the interactions are intuitive.
I did have some trouble with the weed hitboxes (or perhaps I just couldn't tell visually whether they were fully grown or not). Other than that, the interface was smooth and intuitive.
Well done for 72 hours!
When did my relaxing tree tending simulator become a game of Typing of the Dead?
I'm still confused.
Plus, I agree the weed hitboxes are funky.
But I feel like I have to say one more thing. And that one is: we also made a game about defending (*insert drum-roll here*) The Tree of Life. Great minds think alike :grin:
Very well executed for a jam game. I thoroughly enjoyed it.
(Glad I know touch typing, tho. Soz for semi-spoil.)
Alright, there's a lot to say about this game and it's a very good first point. :) I had a lot of fun protecting the tree from the elements and hungry insects, though I'm kind of confused on the whole difficulty and on how long the game is. On normal speed the mood is really great - with the rythme of the music fitting perfectly the speed of the sun and moon and really make you feel the time flying by - but pretty easy, and also a bit long for a repetitive game in my opinion. To make it more challenging, it would have to be on double speed all the time, and even like that, it's really hard to loose. The double speed button is a neat idea though for this concept. To sum up, a game a bit harder and a bit shorter would have felt even more whole in my opinion. (Needless to say I'm being picky here, the game is great)
The art, music and overall mood are a perfect mix, it's relaxing and keeps you on alert at the same time, making the atmosphere nice job here ! (The leafs are soooo great). The UI is simple and efficient.
And my favorite part, the end, and how you manage with some magic trick to make something like that coherent with the first part of the game. My guess is the game is coherent in his "incoherence" : it's a clicking game, it's a quests game, it's an atmospheric game and now what ?
It felt like torturing my keyboard when trying to press all the keys at the same time, and was really funny (not the torturing part of course but the no spoiling part).
Anyway thank you, you caught me off guard, it was fun and I very much enjoyed the all experience. A lot of work done here in 3 days, a bunch a congrats for you all. One of my favorite game for this jam
Graphics, music and sound effects are excellent. The controls are also very good and my clicks are always registered correctly. I also liked how you used the theme in the game to show the life of a tree. Similar to how we showed the life of a Youtuber in our game :smile:
The game felt a little repetitive, but due to the rather short play time and the possibility to speed the game up it was not really bad. I enjoyed the quest book. It does not add anything to the game because you basically complete all quests if you survive until the end, but it gives a nice feeling to seeing these items ticked off the list ;) We also planned an achievement system for our game, but the time was too short...
I was really missing a way to pause your game. I don't know if there was a key for that, but there was no button in the game. Pausing a game is important if people have some issue that comes up and has to be handled immediately and implementing it in Unity is not that hard ;)
Similar to our game, your game was also not really challenging, at least in the first part, because you have enough time to click on the threats. The second part was a little shock, because the gameplay really made a 180° turn. However, I enjoyed the challenge the game provided in the second part and the attack animations were just too funny :D
I was a little angry that I fucked up the last letter of the 5th sequence and had to attack another time, but I managed to win the fight and complete your game.
However, I have to say that I'm not sure if the fighting part is tweaked correctly. I have played the game on a 144 Hz Monitor and the letters for the 5th sequence had no space inbetween and for the 6th sequence the letters were all on top of each other. Is this intended or have you missed a Time.deltaTime somewhere?
To sum it up. Really nice game jam game you have created there. Keep up the great work.
Yes, we should definitely have had some pause functionality included, but simply ran out of time. I know that it's basically just setting the timescale to 0.00000001 or 0, but still.
The no spacing between the letters was actually not a bug xd. We just didn't have time to balance the difficulty curve, so it was left like that. It would probably be the first thing to change in post, but as it's a jam game, and still beatable, we didn't patch it. And yes, I believe we did use the Time.deltaTime there too^.