Ydunian Prune by MateusBoga

A story-driven clicker with a twist!

The Ydunian Tree, believed by most to be simply a myth, is so by a simple reason: it's fruit makes whoever eats it regain their youth. Regular consumption of this fruit has the ability to make someone live forever! But at what cost...
However, while strolling through the forest, you came across a sapling of this legendary tree! It is now in your hands to make the most of this.

Ydunian Prune is about gardening, the chase for immortality, the tragedy of the commons and ruthless kings.
| Link | https://mateusboga.itch.io/ydunian-prune |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/ydunian-prune |
Ratings
| Overall | 125th | 4.037⭐ | 69🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 188th | 3.858⭐ | 69🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 681th | 3.326⭐ | 68🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 651th | 3.689⭐ | 68🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 58th | 4.551⭐ | 70🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 69th | 4.254⭐ | 69🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 36🗳️ | 68🗨️ |
The only thing I would want is a way to upgrade multiple times at once, since getting into the 1000's made it a bit tedious to get to the next noticeable boost in gathering speed. I really loved playing this, amazing job!
I was almost about to feel like this game was going to be limited in terms of upgrades the player was going to get and it almost did feel repetitive, aside from the few harvest robberies. But when the third broker came in, and I hired a guard to defend the tree, that woke me up real quick, as a siege was about to happen, and I ended up losing, getting the bad ending.
In all, this is one of the better games I've played so far in this jam! Amazing work! :thumbsup:
How many endings are there? I kind of want to see, but it does take a while.
The only thing I miss is the possibility to buy things in bulk, like 10, 50 at a time and perhaps a fruit/water per second-label as well.
Overall, really great work! Thanks for sharing, will definitely remember "the tree game"!
Loved the endgame haha, great work!
The tooltips doesn't seam to work every tipe.
I wish more people could see that game, thank you for this title, I really enjoyed playing it!
Maybe the continue button from dialog should be in a different place then where you spam click to collect from the tree 😅
But i like the game ! I am the most influential person of the kingdom :)
@ossi Thank you! Yea I've received a lot of complaints about this, I need to add a way to buy things in bulk, maybe Buy 10 button or just a macro.
@aeveis Thanks! The game has 3 endings, including the one where you lose the battle. Speaking of which, yea I'm sorry about the balancing of the battles, they need to be slower x)
@boaromayox Thank you so much! Yea hireing a single guard as is right now is basically a death sentence lol, as I said above, I need to do better balancing on the battles, or at least explain to the player that they need to always have at least a dozen guards. Again, an option to buy in bluk would be a good addition.
@lucavazz Yea I've also received complaints about this, I might make a delay so you can't click the button for about the first .5 seconds or so.
@nyanpierre Thanks! Sorry about your finger!
@okamit Thank you so much! As I said above, I am going to add a way to buy things in bulk, I think that was the biggest criticism I got of the game so far. I'm glad you enjoyed all the endings ^^
@yogurtthehorse Thank you so much! I will be playing a lot more games soon, and try to stream on twitch too, but right now I'm still too tired for that.
Thanks again everyone!
This game really parallels how RTS' feel to me, whether its AOE or SC. You start off just harvesting and having a great time watching your city grow. But eventually armies come in and ruin your day and you realize you need to spend time and resources building an army - something you don't really care to do but you have to do for the sake of your economy. So I think you actually modeled an RTS experience down to a raw, incremental format which is very cool and not something I've seen often.
The shading of the fruit on the underside of the tree is such a nice touch that I don't think a lot of people would have considered.
I really like that even after you got the castle, there is still room to grow the tree, and exponentially slower at that. It's nice to feel safe and grow the tree in peace rather than ending the game as soon as you got the castle.
Having to deal with an actual threat put a lot of pressure on me to optimize which is something you normally don't have to deal with in an idle game. I thought this was one of the best incrementals I've played in recent times and very much enjoyed it, well done! You should check out my game too, it's also a visual incremental and a similar style of ending :)
It's hard in these variable-increasing games like clickers and RPGs to get the progression right, but the army part was just pointless. I had well over 100 guards, a bunch of walls and cannons, and it was literally instaclick to win. Then it was just sit back and wait for the next stage of watering. I didn't quite understand how to water the tree at first, but I figured it out pretty quickly. I'm not sure if watering the tree is necessary to increase the growth rate of the fruit, or to progress the story, and when something requires such substantial effort, that should be more clear. Moving on to the story, I think it's interesting, but I got ending 2 because it didn't sit right with me. I see the euphemism being made and I do not intend to let my political views affect my opinion of the story. However, it just didn't seem believable. I mean, the killing was only for defense. I was employing 1036 fruit pickers and 800 water carriers. I was creating lots of jobs. I can see the water being an issue depending on just where this tree is located, but if this is about the euphemism, the rivers grow larger as the wealth of the kingdom increases. And then, the fruits of this magical tree being the only thing to eat shouldn't be a problem. It is the fruit of our labour and it is everything we gain. If this were merely a literal fruit tree, it would not suck up enough resources to be unprofitable, and it would be far from the kingdom's only investment. We'd be buying orchards along with the aqueducts and walls. It's pretty hard to keep the euphemistic from the literal. In the city they mention, how do the people there create food, before the water dries up? Do they work? Or does it just... *grow on trees?*
Still, I don't mean to end on a sour note. I will again commend you on the art and music, and the idea is very cool. It's just that the story is a bit rough and not believable, and though it obviously isn't a large game, the less you have to say, the more important each word you speak is. Not that I believe myself to be the story master or anything. My game has a pretty low amount of dialogue in its context and part of that limit came down to my imagination. It's pretty cheesy too. :P Anyway, good job!
The only critique I can leave you is very minor: It felt... weird when the purchasable options disappeared from the vendors if I didn't have enough fruit to buy them. Others stayed in the list and turned red, which feels more appropriate. But again, that's a tiny tiny thing and really didn't take anything away from the game. Nice job!
If you’d like to rewatch the playthrough, you can find it here:
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1450162412?t=06h54m30s
Good luck on your ratings, see you next LD! :D
💜 Elysia Griffin AKA Button Feedback Lady
https://www.twitch.tv/elysiagriffin
I won't go into detail on pixel art as it is simply superb.
Eventually, I managed to get a True Ending, so I'm pretty happy with it. Great job overall :apple:
I loved it, good job.
My only criticism is that the battle happened in a flash, and I lost all my progress instantly. It didn't seem like I even had time to do anything.
Btw, thanks for playing our game on your stream, I really enjoyed your voice acting! :D
Like I said though, I'm glad I finished it! I really enjoyed the atmosphere of this one.
It took me a while to discover de Castle upgrade, because I kept using all the fruits, and the option only appears when you have 1000 fruits available.
Maybe you could always show it as an option, but blacked out if you have less than 1000. Perhaps only show it if the tree gets to a minimum size.
BTW, I thought that building a castle would make some king NPC appear. Reading the dialogue I was like "wait, I'm the king now?"
The fruit pickers above a certain number (300?) don't seem to make much of a difference to the picking rate, I had more than 1000 but they always missed many fruits on the tree.
Cannons are OP, maybe they should be more expensive heheh
Very nice graphics! I also enjoyed how the graphics evolved during the game.
Nice soothing music as well, although I think it stopped at some point.
I liked the hover-over explanations, but I missed them when I already had bought one of the items/services, because sometimes I wanted to check again what something did.
The guards were not se clear to me, so in the first battle I lost before I knew what was happening. The next time I just bought many guards, and then nothing happened for quite a while. At some point I had 250 Water Carriers, 1000 Fruit Pickers, 100 Fertilizers, a lot of guards, walls and a castle. It still took quite a while to find the true ending after that.
My hand hurts a little from all the clicking. Well done! Great entry :smile:
Mechanics are good and art is amazing! Really well done, I loved the twist for the real ending, haha :smiley: