desperately needs animations; the gameplay was interesting, but i felt like i was aimlessly wandering with a plant that hates me. at one point i fell forever, so my adventure stopped there

Kept it safe! Like euix said, could use animations and sound. Cool game.

Thanks @euix and @eva, of course I'd love to have added those but time is an unrelenting march :)
Thanks for playing!

Nicely done. I liked your pixel art style and use of color and negative space. I enjoy explorational platformers like this. I didn't hear any sound, not sure if I was supposed to. Great theme application. A bit of animation would be super cool. But as you said at the end of the game, "jams are jams." Good job overall!

Thanks @unept, there's no sound in the jam version. The [tileset comes from here btw](https://adamatomic.itch.io/caves-of-gallet).

Cool game! Nice graphics.

Cool game and idea. I love the tileset and sprites, I'm sure with more time you could have put in some animations and sound to make a truly impressive little game.

Thanks @cometoverdrive and @dankar, and I agree, I can't wait to add polish and make it really atmospheric!

I was going crazy until I discovered you could double jump :sweat_smile: :face_palm_tone1:

After that I enjoyed the journey towards the sanctuary. The plant was falling a bit too easily, but that was the point and eventually you figure out the way to minimise drops.

Nice choice for visuals, I really liked the tileset. Like the rest, sounds and animations would be cool, but I think we all know by now how time has the nasty habit to fly over the weekend.

Great job! :)

Thanks for the comments @ithildin ! I had a few people get stuck without realizing the double jump was needed. I even added it to the description on the itch page last night. :sweat_smile:

There's also a throwing mechanic (Q) which broke at the last second because of another bug fix, but the idea is that throwing the plant across gaps and then leading it with a jump is a valid strategy, so you can do trickier gaps without damaging the plant. I didn't put any of those jumps in because the mechanic wasn't working right, but I hope to add that in soon!

I enjoyed it, a nice well polished little variation on the platform genre. Having to keep the plant alive during your exploration. With a few extra mechanics that could be built upon the existing game it could become quite a good game.

Thanks @kjscott !

Really nice looking game. Good job but I think the game needs a little better tutorial. Overall nice :D

Thanks @lishnor! I'm curious what parts did you feel like you didn't get from the tutorial that's there at the moment?

this is great! The main mechanic is a cool idea and leaves a lot of interesting play available, regarding how to transport the plant and where you can go without harming it. I could see a lot of neat level designs arising from what's already here. The second area is already fun to play around in!

Thanks @torcado ! I do hope to expand it a bit more to at least sell the ideas better.

This game has a good atmosphere, it felt very mysterious. The UI elements / text prompts that appeared are stylish. I think some sounds and music definitely would have helped though. There was also a point where my character dropped the plant from climbing up rather than falling down too far. Might have been a bug, or maybe I was landing on the wrong type of surface and didn't realize.

hey @thebreakfast thanks for the thoughts. The plant drops from any excess bumping, which includes running into walls or jumping up ledges and hitting into them. It's intended that it can fall when climbing! I'll be adding polish and sounds soon.

really nice graphics and I like the tight controls. I found it a little easy, however, and in one of the levels I ended up falling out of the playable area.

This was a great little game, the controls as well as the art both stood out. Everything felt right here, but the lack of music or sounds causes it to lose some of the atmosphere and urgency. But of course I understand that things happen in gamejams and features get dropped during crunch time! As a test, this game is a perfect proof of concept and i'd love to see it taken further.

Great work and see you next Ludum Dare!

I don't know how to rate this game on graphics (good job, Adam Saltsman!), so I chose not to rate it at all in that category. This game definitely engages with the theme, albeit in an obvious and straightforward way. Maybe it's the detailed tiles combined with the unanimated character sprite, but I found the player character hard to control, even though the controls weren't floaty or slippery.

The overall idea is great, but I got soooo frustrated with the plant that fell from my backpack for no reason some time. I mean, while double jumping, from time to time, it would decide to leave me :(

No rating in graphics though, you should probably opt-out if graphics are not yours.

I used Luxe back when it was written in Haxe and have been following the development of the engine since. I'm excited to see something built in it!

I did experience a couple things in the engine that I thought I'd comment on because they seem more useful to you than game feedback :)

I was getting some artifacts in the text boxes. Looks almost like a debug draw or the edges of the triangles.

The physics were solid for the most part, but I did have some weirdness like I would randomly drop the plant while double jumping if I was near a wall.

I also noticed that things like the plant and my character would tend to drift off of the corner tiles we were standing on. That might just be an interaction of the circle (?) character colliders with the rectangle (?) tilemap collider. It felt like it would happen from very far away.

Also, sometimes when I would die and the screen would fade out and the game would throw an error:

'''
plant health 3
index.html:141 plant health 2
index.html:141 plant health 1
index.html:141 plant health 2
index.html:141 plant health 3
index.html:141 plant health 2
index.html:141 plant health 1
index.html:141 plant health 0
index.html:141 oh nooo
index.html:141 game / area / area change => `scenes/area2` ...
index.html:141 game / area / loading area `scenes/area2` ...
index.html:141 Arcade / TileCollision / attach / asset is `tiles/area2` 102801316
index.html:141 Arcade / TileCollision / attach / made `226` solids from tag `solid`!
index.html:141 Assertion failed: !has(e), at: /Users/ruby/dev/luxe-runtime/runtime/world/luxe.world.tags.cpp,164,create
index.html:158 Assertion failed: !has(e), at: /Users/ruby/dev/luxe-runtime/runtime/world/luxe.world.tags.cpp,164,create
printErr @ index.html:158
index.html:158 exception thrown: RuntimeError: abort(Assertion failed: !has(e), at: /Users/ruby/dev/luxe-runtime/runtime/world/luxe.world.tags.cpp,164,create). Build with -s ASSERTIONS=1 for more info.,RuntimeError: abort(Assertion failed: !has(e), at: /Users/ruby/dev/luxe-runtime/runtime/world/luxe.world.tags.cpp,164,create). Build with -s ASSERTIONS=1 for more info.
at abort (https://v6p9d9t4.ssl.hwcdn.net/html/2175096/ld46-0.0.1-web/game.js:1585:9)
at ___assert_fail (https://v6p9d9t4.ssl.hwcdn.net/html/2175096/ld46-0.0.1-web/game.js:1826:7)
at luxe::world::Tags::create(luxe::world::Entity const&) (wasm-function[1395]:0x645ee)
at luxe::world::create_tags(luxe::world::AnEntity const&) (wasm-function[1394]:0x6449f)
at luxe::script::world::luxe_world_Tags_create(WrenVM*) (wasm-function[2937]:0xfa3ad)
at runInterpreter(WrenVM*, sObjFiber*) (wasm-function[4372]:0x19b03c)
at wrenCall(WrenVM*, WrenHandle*) (wasm-function[4371]:0x19a81e)
at luxe::script::tick() (wasm-function[2679]:0xdeb02)
at luxe::runtime::tick() (wasm-function[2220]:0xc786c)
at luxe::runtime::game::bind::loop(void*) (wasm-function[3391]:0x12e935)
printErr @ index.html:158
game.js:4857 Uncaught RuntimeError: abort(Assertion failed: !has(e), at: /Users/ruby/dev/luxe-runtime/runtime/world/luxe.world.tags.cpp,164,create). Build with -s ASSERTIONS=1 for more info.
at abort (https://v6p9d9t4.ssl.hwcdn.net/html/2175096/ld46-0.0.1-web/game.js:1585:9)
at ___assert_fail (https://v6p9d9t4.ssl.hwcdn.net/html/2175096/ld46-0.0.1-web/game.js:1826:7)
at luxe::world::Tags::create(luxe::world::Entity const&) (wasm-function[1395]:0x645ee)
at luxe::world::create_tags(luxe::world::AnEntity const&) (wasm-function[1394]:0x6449f)
at luxe::script::world::luxe_world_Tags_create(WrenVM*) (wasm-function[2937]:0xfa3ad)
at runInterpreter(WrenVM*, sObjFiber*) (wasm-function[4372]:0x19b03c)
at wrenCall(WrenVM*, WrenHandle*) (wasm-function[4371]:0x19a81e)
at luxe::script::tick() (wasm-function[2679]:0xdeb02)
at luxe::runtime::tick() (wasm-function[2220]:0xc786c)
at luxe::runtime::game::bind::loop(void*) (wasm-function[3391]:0x12e935)
'''

Hope that is useful! Good luck with the engine!

@chambre19 Thanks for the thoughts!

@okkolobr the plant falls from impact, so it's part of the idea that you need to platform carefully in order to not drop the plant. single jump won't drop it, full height double jump will, and from any higher will do damage as well as drop it!

@minibobbo thanks for the feedback and support.
- That text bug is real interesting, seems to be sampling something along the edges of the triangles :thinking: I'll peek into it but I've never seen that, thanks

- Jumping up and hitting into a wall will jostle the plant. That's the whole idea of the game. Don't bump into stuff! :) It applies both vertically and horizontally as well as up or down, at different thresholds for each.

- The callstack for the game over screen is already fixed locally and will be live soon, you can remove it from your comment as it's long and messy and no longer relevant, thanks!

- The collider for the player is a rectangle and for the plant is a circle, everything else is a rectangle so it shouldn't slide off for the player. If you manage to capture that in action I'd like to see it because it doesn't gel with how the physics works.

Thanks everyone for playing and rating!

Solid platforming with a unique (and thematic!) twist, good work! I'd love to play it again with some sound and music.

Thanks @randomhuman !

I like the graphics a lot! And the design is cool - it's a good concept.

* Some sound effects and music would go a long way to heightening the atmosphere
* This might be a personal pet peeve but I strongly prefer a fixed pixel size with pixel graphics - e.g. the little bits of grass being scaled differently always looks off to me.
* Animations on the water would be great

Thanks @neontropics !

I really really love the idea of a twitchy platformer in which you have to be gentle! Congrats on a job well done!