The initial screen was the most precious thing ever. Good job <3

A neat idea. I liked the ambiance of the music and art style. It took me a bit to appreciate the "roots only grow down" mechanic but its a clever constraint. I did find it hard to click on the roots to extend them. Maybe adding some tolerance to that so it doesn't have to be so pixel perfect would feel better.

A very nice aesthetic, quirky, but presented in a very... quaint way. I wasn't able to quite wrap my head around the scoring system, as it didn't seem to play a part in the game. The various objects made me chuckle, and the bottom came pretty quickly. Overall a cool mood, but short lived because of a fairly small area to explore.

A wonderful little game - I loved it! The art, and the gameplay, and the music, it was all so charming and relaxing. Drawing out your own roots was a really neat idea, and being able to control it myself and discover things was nice. One nitpick is that it was hard to control, and I kept dragging outside the lines at first and getting nowhere - especially at the beginning, where I wasn't sure if I was supposed to be following some set path or not, or if I was going almost horizontal and moved my mouse up slightly. Once I got the hang of it, though, it was actually great fun to control and I loved then discovering everything buried below - there was some great humour there. All of the variety really helped add to the experience, and there was a lot of it!

The art and graphics were brilliant and very well polished - great work on those! I loved the look of the forest above, and everything buried below looked great too - the white outlines really helped things stand out against the background. The gooseberry bush growing with the roots was a nice addition and helped add some sense of progression to the game. As for the music, it fit very well with the general feel of the game, and was nice and relaxing - perfect for this kind of game. The background noises too helped the atmosphere, and the sound effects when finding something new very satisfying. And the ending was a lovely finish for it all - cute and creative!

I loved this entry in all ways - it was a great experience, and I thoroughly enjoyed my time with it. Phenomenal work!

Add a web build so I can play it, please!

@cheesepencil Our game is built in PyGame so I'm not sure if there's an obvious way to do this, but I will look into it and let you know if we find something!

Thank you @eharp @bitdecay @cakestorm for the feedback! We will be looking to improve the game by incorporating your feedbacks and making a separate post-submission build :duck:

And to any future commenters, we thank you in advance for playing our game and any feedback you may have, and we will be reading them and seeing how we can improve!

Fun idea, the different unexpected items I bumped into add a lot to the experience imo. Small little details : sometimes it's a bit hard to click the root when I want to expand it, an artificial slightly bigger hitbox would have been a nice touch I believe. Still very much playable and enjoyable!

I LOVE THIS.

Wonderfully simple and well presented. The music and art are lovely, and the proximity of the goofy trash that people have left behind cuts against the beautiful aboveground nature in the best way. Drawing out new root systems is such a calm, interesting way to explore this space.

You mention that you'll be incorporating feedback into a post-submission build. I would ask yourself: what kind of experience do you want the player to have? The current build works well as a short experience. So for a more fleshed-out version: what more do you want to do with this concept? If you want it to feel more "game-like", maybe add in a limitation to growing new roots. Maybe think about what kinds of objects or creatures would actively disrupt your existing root system, like moles or parasites that damage the plant. Are there reasons to grow your roots in a particular direction? Are you always searching blind, or are there incentives to grow in one direction or the other?

Or maybe it's more of a story or atmospheric experience. When discovering objects, are they related to one another? Why and when were these objects left in this place? How do they relate to the goose?

There's a lot of places you can go with this concept, and you've already got a strong execution. I'm excited to see what comes next!

The most relaxing game I've played in a while. Theres just enough exposition to give the gameplay some meaning. I was at the point where I felt like I had found everything and run out of things to grow roots in when I came to this page to rate it. I literally went back, drew one more root and I got to the ending. And how adorable it was. Great job!

Great Game with fitting and relaxing music and gameplay! Good job!

A very pleasant relaxing experience. The music combined with the background sounds of nature and the graphics worked great :).

Nice game. Honk.

This was such a beautiful and neat game! Felt like I was exploring the depths for treasures. The music was calming and everything fit so well together. Well done :smiley:

Everything is cute in this game ! And it is very educational too, I always wondered in which kind of tree goose grew, and now I know !
Relaxing gameplay, cute graphics, with some ecological message, everything is good in this game ! Except maybe the fact that the ending triggers really late, I almost stopped a bit before it, thinking it would never come. If you had not mentionned it in the game description, I would never have found it.

nice game. Thanks to the relaxing music I finally got 'em all ;)

I really liked this game, the graphics were super cute to it, and the music made the whole thing very relaxing. The only thing I do have to say about it is it did take a while for the ending to appear, it made the game a tad but tedious to play. But other than that this was super good and well made!

Finally, I know where the little geese come from! I knew this whole egg business is a sham :)!

This game is extremely pleasant and relaxing. The setup is just adorable, music is great and graphics are superb and very consistent. I really enjoyed playing it and all the crazy things you can find underground. It indeed takes a lot of roots to get to the ending - more than you'd think you can reasonably fit in the allotted space.

I wish the game had some resolution control, as the window gets quite tiny on a larger resolution screens.

Oh, and I found The Key to the Forbidden Knowledge! It was bound to be somewhere :)


Its got quite the the atmosphere!
I like how after doing it for awhile you end up with some really cool patterns from the roots.

Lovely concept and great to have a goose at the centre of the story! I really liked this, especially the unique root-growing gameplay and art. Nice work!

As the owner of two big white pekin ducks, I've got a soft spot for fat white birds! Glad to see that it was a happy ending.

Nice game! It was fun to play.

the art was really good and the atmosphere was very comporting. i had a hard time controlling the line to making it go where i wanted it to go, there was probably something wrong on my end tho. overall good game.

I am trying both dot exe versions but no way to work.
Have you thought about putting the game to be played by the browser?

@leyaotang we've certainly tried! The game engine that we used (PyGame) isn't really meant for the web so we couldn't get satisfactory web builds going :frowning2:

@leyaotang what setup do you have? does it give you any errors?

I thoroughly enjoyed experiencing the majesty of nature through this game. It had a really nice atmosphere and was fun and relaxing. It was also one of the funnier games I've seen this jam.

After hearing about pygbag I set aside a day to sit down and finally managed to get a web build going for this game!!! Unfortunately we didn't create this game with touchscreens in mind so it doesn't work on mobile :/

https://jryzkns.github.io/ld48/play.html