Wither by Marc Grabow
Take care of a withering garden.
Originally planned for the compo, life got in the way, so I had to extend to 3 days. Didn't spend more than 20h on it in total though.





| Link | https://42bytes.itch.io/wither |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/wither |
Ratings
| Given | 9🗳️ | 12🗨️ |
Nice entry!
I like the satisfying sound effects and the sound of squashing bugs
Unfortunately I didn't get long because every time it turns night I couldn't control the player anymore, he just stands and watering the same plant (a very happy plant) the whole night.
Good job anyway on creating the game in 20 hours :)
Great entry - and an alternative idea .. really good job.
Maybe work on the game balance... it seemed a bit harsh :thumbsup_tone1:
As someone who has killed many a basil plant, the line "Based on a true story" got a good laugh out of me :)
I agree with the other commenters that dealing with the bugs was a little bit overwhelming, especially because I didn't realize you needed to pick up bug spray to kill them until the second day! 😅
One thing that was a little bit frustrating was how you could queue the same action multiple times. I would frequently accidentally click on the same plant twice or more, especially as I was learning the controls, and was stuck watching my character water a plant several times in a row. I really like the idea of being able to queue actions, I just wish the queue was a little bit more forgiving of misclicks.
Overall though, great job, especially for a solo game that was almost a compo entry! :)
@boon @purpledartfrog Yeah I went a bit overboard with the bugs, I wanted to keep the play time under 5 minutes, but I noticed it feels a bit unfair. I might balance it a bit more and publish an update if I get in the mood :)
@smiley @marin0104 Seems I have put more bugs in the game than I wanted... thanks for letting me know, I'll look into those problems. Watering the same plant seems weird, the FSM must've gotten stuck somehow.
@justuspan Whilst the bugs are crawling you can squish them or you need to grab the bug spray from the table and spray the plant.
All in all, the original idea with the bugs was actually way less bugs that infest your plants but they multiply on the plant and once they reach a threshold on the plant they start spreading from there to others. Didn't have time to do that though so I just sent in the (bug) army... I mean, in the end, this is just to delay the inevitable, right? :)
Going into the game I was expecting a chill game about gardening, but it seems that wasn't the case. It's surprisingly frantic - which goes against the norms of most farming games I've played. That said, it works very well and I really enjoyed it.
I liked that I could queue my moves, it was really handy when there's so much running around to do. I did get myself unfortunately stuck one time when I clicked on a plant too many times trying to figure it out. The player just got stuck in a loop watering it a dozen times because I was too eager to click. It also wasn't very clear at first that I could switch my equipped tool by returning to the tools table.
There's a lot of character in your shop descriptions. The best watering can being the BFWC was a fun little easter egg!
I managed to keep the garden alive for 3 minutes before everything withered away because of all of the (literal, not game) bugs!
One critique I have is that the upgrade window for the day needs to be a bigger, I couldn't read most of what was being said. Aside from that, the gameplay's great and simple! I will admit, I was confused at first, but I caught on quite quickly.
Nice concept and well made. Too hard for me though.
And the command queue may be too long so that, if I clicked the wrong place, I cannot change my command.
Well done!
But yeah, the core here is great!
On the other hand I like the upgrades and the very simple controls.
Good job!
So yeah, I had a fun 10 minutes with it (not in one run though xD)
Also I feel like something went wrong with the screen size, because I see this in the normal browser window:

And this when I put the browser in fullscreen mode (by pressing f11):

I'm using firefox, haven't tried it in other browsers, but it's nothing game breaking anyway, since every thing relevant to play the game is visible.
just in case you care =)
Oh and I found it to see another garden game, because we also went with the "care for plants and everything dies slowly" idea, but ended up with a very different game, which was cool to see :D