Grandma's Garden of Crystals by LDJam user 280509
https://xlores-liang.itch.io/grandmas-garden-of-crystals
Let me put the link at the top in case it becomes hard to find.
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O harvest! Isn't it a sweeter name of death?
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It is a fairytale about crystal flowers and the magical guardian of the world.
Look at those flowers: their wispy haulm shivering. Soon will they bloom, and turn into crystal. The world is protected by them, by the power of crystal. And you are owner of the garden, as well as the guardian of the world. In the past 80-years life, the flowers sprout and grow.
Finally, they are blooming. It is time to harvest.
In memory of my grandma Wang Lan-ying, a kind and chatty woman who devoted decades of her life as a teacher of the elementary school of town. She stopped her years of suffering from lung cancer in peace, after the first few hours of 2023, before the dawn.
In her last years, she always complained about not hearing clearly, and rested a lot on the bed. I thought it must because she was busy saving the world at somewhere beyond, making her tired, and often too far away to hear the voice from this world. That was the original idea of this game.
She's a super hero. She planted so many beautiful things in her life, and here came the harvest.
Part of the visual materials are generated by novel-AI.
🐱 Special thanks for Russell, my cat, casting Chris and Ross. She's cute, isn't she? 🐱
| Web | https://xlores-liang.itch.io/grandmas-garden-of-crystals |
| Source Code - Godot Project | https://xlores-liang.itch.io/grandmas-garden-of-crystals |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/grandmas-garden-of-crystals |
Ratings
| Given | 19🗳️ | 4🗨️ |
Obviously a narrative game is one of the worst choice in a crowd-voting jam, since everyone is too busy to get started with it (which is much slower than other game types). Maybe it's just dumb enough to make it somehow cool XD
wrt fixing bugs: you can fix the audio and its not too late! you are allowed to fix things like this, you just have to call out what you did on your submission page [^1].
```"Certain Bug Fixes are allowed. You can’t add new features, but if something broke or didn’t work correctly as you were finishing up, you can fix this after the deadline. You are asked to highlight the changes you make in your submission (a short change log). You probably wont get a 2nd chance with some players, but at least it wont be a problem for future players."```
[^1]: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/rules see 'bug fixes' near the bottom
and now awwww... what a great game and story!
P.S. I see in the subtitle what just happened a few days ago and I'm sorry for your loss. *hugs*
I didn't go to the end as narrative games are not my cup of tea. I had some issues with some characters though :

Overall a nice submission !
To me that was actually the best thing about the game. Got me thinking how life gets hard for some people when they get old, and how hard they try to get around it, maybe even hide it, and how to us we might get annoyed or frustrated with them.. totally personal interpretation now..
Without reading your submission, it took me a while to understand where you were coming from. Once I did, it completely changed how I was relating to the story. It would have been nice to somehow glean that from the game itself.
I think you're right that it's slow/long for a game jam entry. Maybe having more choices and having those choices impact the game in a more gratifying way (other than repeating back in B/C sides) could have made the pacing more palatable.
These kind of games are not my type. But I loved the graphics, the mood and the sound scape.
At first I wanted to make a "deaf grandma simulator" in which the grandma can only guess the dialogs and make choices. But I found it off the theme so I changed the gameplay. Thus, these 口s can be confusing since they are no more the main gameplay and lack of explanation.
I should figure a better presentation for it. Thank you though for pointing out the problem!
My first thought was to let the grandma guess EVERY sentence in dialogs and choose a response. Then I found this gameplay cannot work well with my thoughts of "harvesting karma at the end of life".
And the second thought was super-hero grandma saving the world. It can be an action game (which my last paid job was making) or a vampire-survivors-ish game. Then I found again it is not very good with "harvesting karma" unless I can make art designs like *Persona*, presenting "karma" as something fightable. I have no experience of painting.
And then, I found 12 hours has passed. Looking at my empty design doc where everything was strikethroughed, I gave up and made the LAZY choice: just finish the story, make it simple, or my poor coding cannot make it before the due.
I think it was intended to be there, but something with the text went wrong:

I didn't feel like the monster gameplay was necessary though! I feel like I wanted more feedback from my fight choices. But more of a nitpick, not the focus of your game.
Thanks again, take care :)