The Land I Live On by Danilo Freire

ABOUT OUR GAME
The theme of the LD46 is Keep it Alive.
Imagine you are an onion gardener who has just sprouted in a ruined castle garden located on the back of a flying giant tortoise ...
Despite its magnificent appearance, the flying creature seems weakened and its gardens seem to have seen better days. Luckily for her, every self-respecting gardener doesn't sprout around without carrying his water gun.
Since you have nowhere else to go and your new partner seems to need some help, grab your water gun and say "I will help you! This is The Land I Live On!".
HOW TO PLAY
"The Land I Live On" is a chill 3rd Person Shooter where you need to shoot flower sprouts with your water gun to help them grow while exploring platforms sections through the turtle's garden, keeping her plants alive.
WASD to move around
SPACEBAR to jump over obstacles
LEFT CLICK (hold) to shoot water on flower sprouts
MOVE MOUSE to look around
GAMEPLAY FOOTAGE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rvQEYeAVHw


| Youtube | https://play-that.itch.io/ld46 |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/the-land-i-live-on |
Ratings
| Overall | 1275th | 3.482⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 1277th | 3.286⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 1041th | 3.375⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 1738th | 3.411⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 853th | 3.875⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 369th | 3.786⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 1286th | 2.788⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 847th | 3.593⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 22🗳️ | 21🗨️ |
++ great art across the board! So cute!!!
++ the sound effects make things feel fun and responsive
++ I loved how you took one core mechanic and changed it up to work in a variety of ways
-- from a gameplay perspective it didn't feel like there was much urgency. Some sort of way to "lose" would help make this more fun, I think
-- the camera/shooting has some issues, but for the most part was pretty solid
-- the platforming was really hard because of the controls. I feel like some tuning here could go a long way
- Sometimes the camera was doing strange things. It was kinda going into first person and then back to third person.
- The gun wasnt really shooting where the cursor pointed. I know that in some games you have to aim a little bit above the target because of the gravity, but in this game, it was more like aiming below.
- The speed of the player was a little bit hard and the jump felt little bit unresposive.
Nevertheless I had a lot of fun while playing the game.
The main/watering mechanic was enjoyable at first, and I was excited to see it, but it got repetitive fairly quick, even though your attempt to make the game progressive (by adding spinning and floating platforms) made up for it. I would highly rather have upgrades to my water cannon, though :) Splashing with 2x the speed/radius, or even higher water capacity.
I didn't reach the ending, but I progressed quite far (1-2 stages after that castle with the 4-in-a-row flying platforms). The bug with the jumping mechanic was quite frustrating at that point and it made me fail that jump a lot of times, which made me start wondering when does it end :P
I enjoyed it for the most part, but if it was me, I would have made the game to be a little bit shorter, even if it left me with a couple days of doing nothing Or even have a clear end -- maybe an indicator of the percentage of garden completed, or even some "Gardens cleared: 3/8" (I really prefer to avoid having the player want to quit, or start questioning "oh cmon, when does it end?!?", because from my jamming experience, this leads to lower ratings).
All and all I liked the game! Keep up the good work!
When I first read in your blogpost "relaxing 3rd person shooter", I thought to myself "Well, well, here's a paradox not to be ignored". But damn, you were spot on! The game is truly relaxing, meditative even. The platforming bits are not overly complicated and only add a bit of spice to our exploration of the turtle. I really liked how the elements of the environment appeared and changed.
At first, I had an impression that hit detection is somewhat off. But that went away after I got used to my water gun and how it works. The only thing that spoiled the experience a bit was a buggy camera. At times, it just moved strangely, showing me only my gun, disappearing the character entirely.
And I loved the intro! @

Watering the little plants was so cute! also the sounds and everything, made for a great mood! :)
The intro animation was amazing, I wish you would have added more of that 2D into the first level :D
(Sort of like how it is in the amazing world of Gumball, y'know what I mean? :))
The aim of the water pistol was kind of weiiiiird, like in the beginning I needed a solid minute to figure it out, so maybe tweak that some more. It's also weird that at a certain point you can't lower the gun more, I guess that has to do with the third person-zom-in-camera thing you have going on? Which I liked btw :)
Also, after watering all flowers I couldn't jump at the platform :( Half the time he used the water pistol, the other 50% it looked like it is just a teeny bit too low to get onto the platform!
Oh, I commented on your post before, but regarding the lighting if you still want to improve that, I'll copypaste my advice from before :D
Hi there, I feel like the lighting needs a bit more work, looks like the default state when you start up unity.
Here‘s a couple of really quick things to try:
Open the lighting settings (you find them under window -> settings)
activate Real-time GI (lights should be set to real-time in the inspector but since I assume you didn‘t change them this should work*)
then press bake light in the right bottom of the lighting tab and wait for a bit (the real-time light also gets baked, although it says „0 mb“ lightmaps afterward, they actually do ^^)
in the Setting from the Light itself (if you didn’t add any, it’s a directional light, you can search that inside of the hierarchy) activate soft shadows in the inspector
Hope that helps and that you like it :)
Oh, also change the color space from gamma to linear, you do this in the project settings under the tab „player“ (can be found under edit -> project settings or at the build settings)
*if you want to use baked lights and lightmaps as this is a huge performance saver, you need to look into the subject a bit more (lightprobes etc) in that case I can recommend some good and comprehensive tutorials if you‘d like.
This all be said assuming you use Unity 😄
Good job on finishing your game! :)