Deep Roots by myrmyxo
Your are a tree. Dig for water, but be wary of poison and not wrangling yourself up in your expansion ! A brain-tangling puzzle game made for LD48 !
Controls :
Arrow keys to move the roots around.
U and J to scroll Up and Down.
POST-JAM VERSION ONLY! B to undo an action (you can use this multiples times in a row to undo multiple actions). You can undo an action that killed your roots (growing into poison tiles).
Poison tiles kill you instantly.
If you try to move two roots but one of them its path blocked, only the unblocked root will move (poison does not block roots).
Inverters invert left and right (but not up and down) for the one root that went on them. Others do not get inverted. Going over an inverter again puts the root in it's "normal" state (before inversion).
POST-JAM VERSION ONLY! Inverted roots have an inverted symbol floating over them now so you don't have to remind yourself of their state/count.
Let us know if you find any bugs !
Note: If it is ok for you it can be better to use the post-jam version for more difficult levels due to the presence of the undo button and inverter signalisers
| Jam version | https://oddarock.itch.io/deep-roots |
| Post-jam verson (with undo button and other QOL updates) | https://oddarock.itch.io/deep-roots-postjam |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/deep-roots |
Ratings
| Overall | 174th | 4.034⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 109th | 4.052⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 112th | 4.069⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 333th | 4.052⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 749th | 3.81⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 261th | 3.893⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 1363th | 2⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 618th | 3.704⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 41🗳️ | 35🗨️ |
Really innovative idea, great level-design, very challenging puzzles, cool graphics, good looking animations, nice particle effects, great sound and awesome music!
It is very hard to come up with suggestions what you could improve. Maybe the UI could get some nicer graphics instead of blue boxes as buttons - I don't know :D
Amazing game, good job!
Your have rigth, I wanted to make a hallowen atmosphere level to diverse. We’ll add that kind of details in the post jam version, it's important.
One small quality of life feature could be the ability to quickly move a root by holding down the movement key. Not a necessity in any way though. Well done!
Another small detail is that I skipped a level at some point and couldn't see which, because the level select doesn't show which level was solved. Still a really cool root game, if you like puzzle games you might enjoy joining the thinky-puzzle-discord, folks are talking about puzzles there like, all the time!
I haven't solved level 6 yet so I haven't even seen all of the levels, but because you said we should report bugs:
I find it annoying that the level starts scrolling slowly (and jumpily) up- or downwards any time I move the roots. I really wish it would not do that automatically and just let me scroll manually to wherever I want to look at and then stay there until I scroll manually again.
I'm not sure if this is intentional or a bug but I would have more fun if it was fixed.
Actually the camera movement is intentional. The camera automatically focuses when you move your roots to display all of them. Maybe it was not the best choice. We'll try to find some compromise, once the player moves the camera inside a level, it won't refocus automatically.
Thanks for the feedback.
And congrats for reaching level 11 !
I think you could tone down the use of invertors since moving 3 roots already messes with my head enough, they make it near impossible to figure out what the heck is going on. At the very least you need an undo button so you don't have to go back to start because you hit the wrong key
@wolfier @gharliquebread Thank you for your feedback. We are working on improvements for the post jam version. We will probably improve the scrolling, add an undo button, clearly mark "inverted" roots. We were really short on time to implement all this stuff on the first version. We may add as well more challenges and intermediate levels.
Btw I completed all the levels. If anyone wants I can post a walkthrough on YouTube or something, some of my solutions were quite interesting, to the point that it may seem a bit...broken, maybe the development team will want to look into them.
Yes yes yes we are really interested in your walkthrough. We would like to see if your solutions are (or look like) the ones we planned, it would be a lot of fun. Broken solutions are really interesting. You can perhaps provide us a youtube link ? Thanks again !
You might want to check out my solution to Level 15, I am certain it is not what you intended.
I will admit the inverter is pretty hardcore, but I think it's a valuable piece of the puzzle. It takes it from difficult to absolutely mind-bending. It makes the "slurping" noise all the more satisfying when the roots hit the water.
Nice work.
PS - I actually thought about deeper and deeper tree roots for my game, but ultimately decided on deeper and deeper shades of a color. It's awesome to see other devs thought on the same lines as I did with tree roots and made such a wonderful game with this interpretation of the theme!
@bereg for this jam we had some very "basic" level editor where anybody could create a level with just a basic string of characters, so the whole team could create and very easily share levels, there is a creator button at the startup screen to enter level data. We used a google spreadsheet to visualize the level and then cut and paste into the input field.
(I also had a look at the post-jam version and those quality of life improvements looked excellent, undoing moves instead of restarting makes all the difference!)
Don't have much in the way of suggestions, maybe just that it'd be nice to be able to use keyboard controls for the menu UI as well.
Well done!
https://youtu.be/1kaWgTZK9g4
Great work! I think the movement flipping mechanic is a bit too much, the game was super easy to manage up to that point, but I feel like it added an element of memorizing which ones were flipped at a given moment, and I wasn't a big fan. Overall, one of the best puzzle games this jam. Nice work!
The tiles have a really nice style to them! I also like the fluid animation of the water (it kinda reminds me of rain world)
It also has nice peaceful music.
Unfortunately I couldn't get past the last level.