The Consequences of Gardening by JMad
Feed your plant, Gertrude, by all means necessary. It might require some sacrifice...
Notice - The inventory system isn’t useable per se, the right dialog will trigger as long as you have the object on you
"Evolution is weird." That's probably what Kaz would say. But he doesn't really care anymore. You see, he's in a bit of a situation. He's dealing with it, though. Would you? Hard to say.
Kaz loves plants. He's got a bunch. One of them grew. Grew a LOT. And things went a bit out of control. Gertrude, Gert' for short, is big now. Real big. Water and insects are not enough. Kaz's left arm was not enough either. Gert' wants flesh. Human flesh. A lot of it. So be a good boy, and fetch Gert's lunch. By all means necessary...
Dev : Kalarth, MrKebab, Maus3rSR
Puzzle design : Thorqueor
Music : Eqkter
Sound design : Leo 'Moondude' Lemberger
Story : Thorqueor, Eqkter, J.Mad
Art : J.Mad
Additional concept art : srccevert
Changelog
21/04 10:58am BST - Fixed 2 sprites that moved one pixel to the right for a single frame, and the end trigger condition. 26/04 3:14am BST - Fixed 3 sprite displays & several textboxes, and moved the inventory position for better readability. NEW - WebGL build added! :confetti_ball:
Ratings
| Overall | 385th | 3.87⭐ | 79🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 1126th | 3.367⭐ | 77🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 1573th | 3.108⭐ | 76🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 689th | 3.907⭐ | 77🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 237th | 4.34⭐ | 80🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 193th | 3.98⭐ | 78🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 314th | 3.721⭐ | 79🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 455th | 3.818⭐ | 79🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 119🗳️ | 145🗨️ |
Small bug at the beginning where a white box was covering some of the objects and I couldn't read it.
Really cool way to approach the theme! Loved the graphics, animation, and audio, they all worked really well together. One thing I'd like to see is a little more UI to let the player know what they're doing, unless the player figuring it out is part of the mystery then this makes sense!
Our polishing backlog on trello has quite a long list of things we wanted to improve, but it'll have to wait for after the ratings.
Pixel art was *really* nice. As others have mentioned it's curious to see a team of seven! That sounds like my personal idea of hell trying to co-ordinate that in 72 hours! It definitely shows in the amount of quality assets in the game that you were able to spread the duties out to people with a single focus on them.
The music is really nice and sets the mood well. The whole package definitely has old school Sierra type point and click vibes, especially due to the art and the slightly mysterious nature of everything thats going on. I'll reiterate how impressive it is with the depth of content here. Gert feeding on his victim was a nice little move which juxtaposed nicely with the lounge music I was hearing before the horror. I really liked the atmosphere on display.
All in all a really nice package! Thanks for sharing and congratulations on your entry!
I am actually honestly surprised to get so many reactions on our number! We coordinated nicely, and it felt very normal. Very lucky to have gathered such cool people together, and that we decided on what idea to go for in just above an hour.
I agree with all the feedback from @madebychaz , and it's hard to add more beyond that. The expand animation and sound did bother me a bit as I played through it, but otherwise the dialogue was rather enjoyable even if sad considering where all the characters end up.
Thank you for such precise feedbacks! I am totally agree with you about the dialog animation. I ran out of time to polish this part unfortunaly however be sure it was in the polish backlog :). The sound designer had asked if he should recreate a sound for the dialog open/close and we just completely forgot about this. We thought it wouldn't be that disturbing and that it could go well with certain characters background lol...
Thank you so much you rock guys.
Wonderful art and sound!
A minor issue.
The sound of opening and closing the dialog window started to get really grating after a while. and the animation felt like it slowed down moving through the dialog. I am a little sensitive to audio stuff though, so this might just be me.
But it would be great if we could ... pass dialogue that we had already read... (don not clic that woman in the bar second time !!!)
I don't know what to think about the scenario. I couldn't get any empathy for that psychopath giving to eat innocent people to his abomination x) (My purr-efferred cat-racter was Ghosty :p)
Are there multiple endings ? cause the water-can didn't seems to be useful at all. If yes, then I'll go back test another round. If not, the game is a bit short after all. Wish I could see more.
But again, wonderful artwork and music (I liked the hidden add for @eqkter :p )
The graphics are just amazing, great pixel art. Everything is easily recognizable even without the texts. Also the fact that all alive things have idle animations. This gives the world so much more depth. It really feels alive, like a real, pixelated world.
I like how you worked around the lack of time but the game still feels very polished. The characters just sliding back and forth instead of walking, the dialog box faces still pencil drawings, the people who get eaten just become one generic shadow of a shape in the dying animation. I noticed all these but they don't interfere with the overall feel of the game. Really good prioritization of things I feel.
The background music, sound effects, speech noise and the two songs on the headphones - your audio department did an amazing job as well. And yes, that Eqkter track is really nice.
I like the controls, nothing fancy, just one button and a very classic adventure game mechanic that I immediately understand.
The story is interesting, I looked at everything in the world (except I did not find some easteregg) and I must say the writing was done very well. An adventure game stands or falls with its texts. I have seen LD games with endless robot-like texts that nobody would ever say like that. I have seen the opposite, not enough information to get through the game. But yours just works. It does not feel clumsily written, it has something interesting to say all the time. This starts with your intro screen. What could have been "This is our game. You must feed humans to the plant..." (which always makes me go: "Oh really - this is a game, huh? Nice immersion!") is a snappy story that leads you into this other world.
The progression is fun, not a hard puzzle. Hard puzzles in adventure games are terrible. I solved everything the standard adventure game way - grab everything I can and talk to everybody in a loop until somthing new happens. Old formula that works well on your game. This might sound like a con but is a big pro. I can play and enjoy your game without getting bored or frustrated. I finished it in 15-20 minutes (I guess, did not look at the clock, maybe I was so immersed that it really took longer than that) which I feel is the right time for the size of your world. It can be hard to find the right balance between a game that is over to quickly and the player thinks - wait I have still stuff to explore - and a game that drags on for too long and the player gets bored to death. You found the perfect balance of this.
Really an awsome game, 5/5, great job you all!
We was accustomed to dialogues so it got out of our mind, sorry !
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Thanl you for the ratings guys ! <3
Congratulations on a great piece of work!
The gameplay works well, even if is missing a dialog system and real usage of object, the game is fun to play, it's really a good start.
Well done !
The story was kinda cool but it really lacked depth. Obviously this is something well out of scope for a jam though. Like the whole hand thing was barely mentioned in the actual game. The lack of deeper introduction to the protagonist and his motivations made him very unlikeable made the whole story feel bland. After a bit, it was very predictable too. The idea was there but really would have required some meat around the bones. I would have also split the intro text to be fed one line at a time. Wells of text are never too fun.
I really liked the art. The only annoyance in that department really was the ugly yellow squares around the objects on highlight. If they had the same kind of shaped outline as the characters it would have been several times better. The UI should scale with the screen size too, it was borderline unplayable on full screen...
Well the font was kinda boring too...
The pick up menu also had this very annoying bug where if the item was still behind the take/inspect button, it would glitch out and just reopen the menu instead.
And speaking of items, didn't like the fact that the items either were complete red herrings or just used themselves automatically. It removed that tiny bit on actual interactivity the game could have had. The puzzles weren't that complicated anyway that one wouldn't be able to solve them quite easily but would have made it feel more like a game. Of course this would introduce quite a huge task of more narration for trying to use different items on wrong spots but would have more organically given more places to add some more clever quips the game already had a few of.
There was this funny bug when you trigger something while an animation was still playing...
The repeating conversations were a bad experience. Happened first with the girl and then because of that mashed through the repairman convo and didn't quite understand what made it change. I don't think I had any new items between those two tries either. Should have just added a simple bool flag to keep track if the conversation has already taken place and replace it with a shorter one on repetitions. And of course one that would smoothly transition to the branching plot when you have met the requirement. Also lacked some other permanence like the dude already being gone...
The sound work was great! Especially the music. The piece had these noises that I at least associated with Gert making noises while at first chilling at home so it was weird hearing those too everywhere else. Might have just been my brain doing connection where there shouldn't have been any.
Might be a good idea to proof read the whole script at least once before the end of a jam...
There also was this invisible butcher shop which I'm guessing was cut out of the game due to scoping issues.
All in all, good job! :thumbsup:
When it comes to Kaz, the idea was never really to make him likeable or not. He ended up accepting he had to do this, and just does. And so does the player. I like the idea of people playing through actually disliking him, the game then definitely is a different experience. Very sorry if you felt it was bland! There are actually 2 lines about his hand in the game, for it to stay a detail that would stay a bit obscure.
I totally agree with the wall of text. We sadly were running out of time, and had to put couple things together very quickly, including intro and credits. Same goes for the highlights of objects, it was a work-around since I did not have the time to export each object as a seperate element, neither did the dev for putting everything back together in Unity. Using items was also one of the things we did not manage to put in the game. Butcher shop was left as a hidden "easter egg" - not yet drawn. It's on the list for post-jam polish, though. We'll hopefully be able to fix these issues and make the game like we imagined it. Maybe even adding more to the story.
The only repeating conversation is with the girl at the bar, all other conversations with useful NPCs are different right off the bat if you do have the correct object. Great idea for the shorter version, thanks!
There were several rounds of proofreading. Sadly, there are always some things that fall through the net ._.
Cheers!
@thedouche This *might* just actually be happening. :wink: We already have ideas for improving and polishing what's already there, and add to it. I'll try to post some news on here, but best to follow the game page if you want to catch a future update!
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I didn't quite answer every single one of you personnally, but thank you so much for all the feedbacks. I am completly overwhelmed. Glad to have such a wonderful first LD experience :purple_heart: Everything said here has been taken into account for the possible future of the game.
Such a great amount of content and effort for a jam game. ^_^
I think this genre only works with witty and interesting dialogues, and you pulled that off very well. I also appreciated the humour. And the two tracks in the store were bangers!
Good job!
The graphics were prtty and the animation too, I like the artstyle :)
I experienced a bug that when I sometimes click on assets I can't pick them up when I click on "Pick up", but rather the box moves to the right and a bit down, for example the wallet, it worked after clicking on it for several times though!
Music was sounds were great and added a lot to the mood, I just couldn't use the stuff in my inventory? I tried clicking and dragging but it sadly did nothing. I loved all the little infos you've put on a lot of assets, felt very Point&click-y
The controls were okay but I would advise to base them more on other Point&Click games like Monkey Island or Deponia, because I've intuitively made something I know from those games, like clicking on the edge and that also brings me to the map etc, also going around a bit would have been nice :)
I managed to bring the IT guy to Gertrude and felt so bad haha because he was so nice (side note: on the other hand, I would have let him repair my PC first and then fed him to Gertrude :PP)
I also liked how you added music to be played to the headphones in the shop :)
Cool entry, congratz on finishing your game! :D
P.S.: If you want, you could check out our game too, I have a feeling you might like it.. ;))
The art as I said looks really nice, pretty well done for a short amount of time! There were a few things that stood out to me, like when you clicked on the npc when walking into the market scene, the player would continue the walking animation on the spot. The fact that I could take the lamp before even talking to the sales man and i think the choice of dialogue sound didnt fit.
But otherwise I loved this and made sure to finish it! Thanks guys, good job!
Jokes aside, it's really polished and investing entry, reminds me of "Lone Survivor" very much. Great entry!
I liked the art and loads of detail and the background music was also nice.
However, the text effects were driving me crazy. Craaaaaaazy :laughing: I feel both the text pop up and the text reveal effect are totally unneeded and somewhat don't fit to the rest of the atmosphere either. And they can really be tiring, especially if you are clicking through the conversation you already read before to get to the continuance of the story. I also think that the text pop in animation is not really needed, but that may be just me ;).
Great job on the game overall! I hope that Gerty will not eat Ghosty!