Inevitable Greenery by Apandso

About
Third person puzzle platformer about a panda in a world of giant plants. Investigate the town mysteriously covered in huge greenery. Find out what happened. Was it inevitable? And why?
Watering plants will help you move around.
Collect all 24 flowers to fully master your watering can.
Adorable game with a twist.
Controls:
WASD to walk, SPACE to jump, E to interact
Team:
batt_boo: Development, Sounds
Kergerait: Art
Apands: Game design
Made in Unreal Engine
More detailed instructions: Fill your watering can using wells. If you have enough water - use it on plants. Water small pink flowers to get experience points. Those upgrade your watering can allowing for more water intake. Water treelike plants to grow them into higher platforms. Blue succulent plant fills the watering can after it has grown. Get to the end of the level.
You get stuck at the cutscene and can't get one of the flowers.
| Link | https://apands.itch.io/inevitable-greenery |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/inevitable-greenery |
Ratings
| Overall | 1020th | 3.263⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 1119th | 2.947⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 1037th | 2.921⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 1284th | 2.895⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 597th | 3.775⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 518th | 3.447⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 1082th | 2.132⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 429th | 3.725⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 12🗳️ | 25🗨️ |
I did run into a few issues. When I opened the game it tried to launch SteamVR, seems like that might be because it's an UE4 development build. Also, when I got to the water tower I ended up getting stuck in a loop with the cutscene showing the factory replaying over and over. Because of that I couldn't get up to the flower on that platform. I also had trouble getting to the nearby flower that's kind of hidden among trees near the tower, it seems like there's an invisible wall in the way.
All that said, great work y'all!
Still a very pleasant game, chill and fun to play! Well done! :)

Even still I had a great time. Lovely and relaxing game.
This great! I wanted to play it because it looked so chill and it really was! Nice work!
FYI I got stuck here 😔

The gameplay does get tedious, going back and forth between water and flowers. The game is obviously divided up into areas, so what if, after finding the well in an area, you immediately have enough water for all the plants in that area? It might be slightly difficult to communicate that mechanic, but would make the gameplay so much more enjoyable. Another option might be to add a river so that a water supply is always close by, or increase the amount of water you can hold in the watering can every time you water a flower.
As far as theme goes, "Delay the inevitable" (or, as it appears in game, "don't delay the inevitable") is not very central to the game. You see the message on a few walls, but the urgency in the warnings clashes with the otherwise serene gameplay, and I think it falls flat due to that conflict. You might have leaned into the serenity, and then you'd be making me, who doesn't want to leave the beautiful panda garden, delay the inevitable of returning back to reality!
It's very pleasant to read :)
The gameplay was supposed to be a bit different. As you suggested you'd get a better watering can with leveling up - so you could hold more water. Unfortunalety due to a bug this was broken in our release vesrion. So yes, going back and forth became much more tedious than it was supposed to. We are planning to fix the game after the rating time ends.
As about the theme - it indeed does not push you to finish the game faster. Maybe only to find out what happened and why. Though I have to admit we didn't properly show the explanation at the end due to the lack of time... But hopefully all that will be done in the next update.
I'm very glad that you enjoyed playing our game!
Especially loved the environmental storytelling bits everywhere:

Loved all those carefully placed little notes and characters!
It was a clever choice to tweak the pandas body to make more species (cat, rabbit,...) to give this even more variety.
The world was cute and pretty. As an artist I have to critizise a liiiiittle thing about the main character, which is the face texturing of the panda pattern, I would have liked it better if you used a clean, hard brush (so no softening around the edges) and used symmetry on the face :) (the panda is still very cute, but I think that would have made him even better)
Take this with a grain of salt, the texturing of our main character also wasn't perfect because I had no time to fix seams, so yeah... haha, gamejams, amirite?
The green was a liiiiittle bit too saturised for my taste, I think a more gentle, soft pastell green would have complimented the dreamy look of your world even better :)
Also, the shadows were a liiiittle bit too dark for my taste (but that's all very nit-picky, I know that there isn't alot of time during game jams and you're glad if you even accomplish half of what you've planned etc. ^^)
I'm way less familiar with Unreal than with Unity, but if it's the same thing there you might want to look into Light Baking (in Unity you also have to do ith with realtime light, but it's quick) and Post Processing Effects to make your beautiful game even more beautiful :) (I love post processing effects - basically an instagram filter for your game, lol)
The level design was very interesting and well built and made me want to explore!
A few things that I understand probably simply wasn't possible in the gamejam's short amount if time, but would polish this immensely (if you wanna continue working on this)
-UI Elements would have been better as an overlay, sometimes they were sticking inside of the assets and I couldn't fully read
-add a little UI element to each plant indicating how much water they need (maybe divide it into parts, and for example your little watering pot can carry 2 parts of water, little plants need 1 part, the big plants need 3 parts, so you can fill it up partially or something like that, could add a fun element of planning your trips)
-loved the cut scene when you we're on the tower! Really great. (also with the radioactive tower - really great!) it just kept playing whenever I moved a little keeping me from entering the platform and being stuck on the "stairs" (plant) I tried to be patient but gave up after a couple of tried because I grew a little tired of watching the same 30 sec cutscene every time and gave up, so maybe set the trigger to play the cutscene only once (and maybe also add a skip cutscene function)
-maybe playtest a bit more and hide/clip certain meshes when the player is inside somewhere, as they can obscure your view and be a little annoying
But again, I totally understand that with what you've done this was a lot to do and simply wasn't possible to do in 3 days :)
All in all a very adoreable, fun entry that I enjoyed playing. you can be proud of yourselfes! :)