Squirrelativity by cassowary
Two rival groups of squirrels are stocking up for the winter. Each group can only eat a certain type of fruit, but the tree that produces the kind of fruit they like is in their rivals' territory! What is to be done?
The two rival groups of squirrels will need to work together to be sure that they can survive the winter. But, of course, they'll demand everything be split up evenly so as not to give their rivals an advantage...
A relaxing sort-of-mostly-deductive grid-filling-in-type puzzle game with a fun organic twist.
How to play
- Use the mouse to drag paths that the tree branches will follow. Trees can only branch away from their starting point (i.e. branches from the top tree must always point down and branches from the bottom tree must always point up.) There are walls in the grid which prevent tree branches from moving through a space.
- If you move a tree over a green "seed" point, it will produce a fruit, which hangs straight up or down towards the tree's starting point.
- You can then use tree branches to create a path for the squirrels to retrieve the fruit. Squirrels will move along the branches of their tree, but will only grab a fruit that matches their color (which comes from the opposite tree.)
- (Note: You can continue to draw branches while the squirrels are running around. They're smart, they can figure it out.)
- In order to complete the level, you need to create fruits from all the seed points, have the squirrels harvest all the fruits, and ensure that each squirrel team has an equal number of fruits in their possession.
- There are 15 levels in total.
- You can use the buttons in the lower left to undo the last branch you added, or to restart the level. You can also use Z and R on your keyboard for undo/restart, as well as M to mute the sound.
- Your progress is saved automatically, but you can delete it by pressing X and then pressing W and then refreshing the page.
Tools used
- Programming: the ongoing saga of my custom javascript game engine, which now has a real name: zucchinibread.js
- Audio: Audacity + acoustic guitar / kalimba / sink / fingers on wood / mouth sounds / birds at the park
- Graphics: Aseprite
- Level design: Tiled + ulvl
known issue
There seems to be a minor graphical glitch when running the game in Firefox on my Windows (artifact by the squirrel running, visible in the gif). I didn't have this issue on Linux, which is a little worrisome. Please let me know if you encounter the issue elsewhere.
post jam fix: fixed bug where game wouldn't load on chrome with cookies disabled
| Link | https://github.com/cassowarii/ld52 |
| Link | https://cassowary.itch.io/squirrelativity |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/squirrelativity |
Ratings
| Overall | 7th | 4.315⭐ | 64🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 18th | 4.177⭐ | 64🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 3th | 4.525⭐ | 63🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 83th | 4.024⭐ | 64🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 66th | 4.048⭐ | 65🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 41th | 3.91⭐ | 63🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 89th | 3.274⭐ | 55🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 26th | 4.058⭐ | 62🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 26🗳️ | 26🗨️ |
very nice work!!
Had the most trouble on level 12. It also seemed that it produced the most flowers when I finished it, are those related or am I seeing connections where none exist O.o?
The only thing that sometimes bugged me was that I would try to start dragging while a previous growth was going on, and it wouldn't always work. I seemed to usually draw a line, release the mouse, then try to draw another line (instead of doing a full drag with a bend all at once), and some percentage of time I was too quick and it didn't work -_-.
Sprites: it is not procedural, but the leaves are separate sprites that get layered over the branch sprites in certain ways, so while each branch tile is a unique sprite animation, there's actually only 8 different leaf animations (four different directions for two tree types) that get combined in different ways for the corners/Y-pieces/etc, so it's not quite as crazy as it might seem. I did spend a lot of my time budget on drawing sprites though, lol.
ETA: oh yeah, the top tree sprites/leaves are also actually a flipped/reshaded version of the bottom tree sprites, so that saved some effort as well
Flowers: you're not imagining things, that's actually technically a bug in the game where branches that you draw and then undo will also produce flowers at the end, lol. Even though it's a bug, I might keep it because it's kind of cute that it makes a bigger reward for levels you struggled with, haha. (Though I might fix it after the rating period ends to prevent flowers from appearing on empty tiles...)
Drawing: you can't draw a new branch while a branch is growing out, but since the leaves are separate objects that are just cosmetic, you can draw new branches while the leaves are still appearing. If I make a post jam version, I'll probably fix it to let you draw new branches whenever you want.
It would have been nice to have the usual bells and whistles for this kind of game, for example to be able to mark which tiles must definitely be red or blue, even if the exact tree shape is not yet clear.
The graphics and animations were cute. I also experienced the tiny spritesheet glitch: it feels like maybe a piece of the adjacent sprite is being shown, in which case just spacing out the sprites on the spritesheet could help?
It was fun to try to get as many squirrels moving on the screen at once, e.g. in level 9 where I could make three start moving with a single new branch. I realised after a couple of levels that I don't have to wait for the squirrel animations (only the branch ones) before I can make my next move, which is nice especially for the easier levels.
It was fun, I won't tell anyone the secret :zipper_mouth:
The puzzles themselves, I loved them! I felt like they were slightly easier than your last game's puzzles, and therefore right at my level haha. I was able to solve up to level 14 without breaking my head; looking forward to continuing later on!
Thanks for your submission!
My only concern it that, I think, during the game, nothing tells you that branches cannot go backward (i.e. blue can only go up and red can only go down). When I discovered it it made me restart the level.
And i will keep what you know for me ;)
Level 5 was super hard, but thank God for the random walkthrough in the itch.io comments, lol. I didn't think I was gonna get past that level without it. Didn't need a walkthrough on the other levels though a few of them tempted me.
Bugs-wise, I can confirm from a separate computer the Firefox visual glitch. Also, it doesn't work on Chrome, at least for me. After "Click to Start", it fades to black and never comes back, on both regular and incognito versions of Chrome.
I don't know if it's also a bug, but I like that click to continue is still functional on the post-game screen, but it just fades to black and goes back to the same post-game screen lol. Looping back to the beginning to replay or unlocking a post-game level select would be a nice touch.
Overall, really great job!
Also yeah, I didn't realize how hard level 5 was until it was too late lol. Will definitely have to reorder the levels in any kind of post jam version haha.
Last puzzle was pretty hard but I got all of them. I won't reveal your little squirrel secret, don't worry ;)
Only thing I could wish for would be some new mechanic so there is some more variety.
there was a bit of discontinuity within the first levels to me (e.g. level 3 seemed way harder than level 4 and level 6 seemed easier than 5, at least in my opinion), but after that, the curve is really good. the last puzzle is really hard but i finally did it!
excellent work on everything: idea is great, art is beautiful and animations are cool, i loved sound (but it seemed like it stopped at some point?)…
if only there were like hundreds of levels… hahaha
The animation and level design is great, and the sound design and calming music is perfect. You've got a great mixture of mechanics that steadily build up the difficulty at a good pace, and keep you learning new things each level. Very, very good work on this one!