The PIT by Wouter52
Here it is! The PIT!
A puzzle game where you need to grow and collect your own pieces. In the alien gameworld are 15 flowerpots that can contain a plant (there are some weird ones). Plants can grow flowers/seeds, which can be used to grow more of that plant. Make sure to keep the pots filled!
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How to play:
- If you want to stop playing: Press P and then ENTER while puzzling, only then you can send your score to the server (as it is hard to go game-over when playing smart)
- Use arrow keys to explore world
- Press Z or A, to plant or harvest seeds
- Press X or S, to harvest plant
- Press DOWN key to open playing field (under the bridge)
- Use left mouse button to place pieces on the playing field
- Use right mouse button to rotate pieces
Some things to keep in mind:
- Points are collected if you complete a row or column in the playing field.
- Bigger plants result in more points. But be careful: if a plant grows too big, it will be very difficult to place it on the playingfield.
- Seeds can be used to plant new plants, but can also be used to fill those little gaps in your playingfield. Choose wisely!
Trivia:
- Fun fact: I programmed a lot of RNG in this game regarding plant growth. The seeds acctually contain "DNA" to create the same plant (including grow pattern) with a little mutation. So, if you only plant green seeds from a plant that grows to the left, then you'll end up with lots of that kind of plant.
- There are some Meeps hidden in the background. Kudo's if you know the reference!
- PIT means, a hole in the ground. But in Dutch it is also a kind of seed often found in fruits!
- Tools used: Paint.NET 5, Notepad++ 8, FileZilla, Firefox, sfxr and Beepbox
~~Bugs~~ Features:
- ~~You can walk away with a plant in your "hand", effectively creating 6 inventory slots. Be careful! If you can't place that piece, you have to end the game.~~
- Each piece on the board is worth 3 more points than I was intending. So... HARVEST MORE POINTS!!
- ~~Switching between the keyboard and mouse will reduce RSI.~~
- Have you heard about the Meeps yet?
Changelog
- Oops, forgot to disable some debug code, so everyone would get the same plants all the time. I changed that. Now you'll start with random plants.
Version 1.1
- Post-Jam toggle added (do not rate post-jam version). In post jam mode, the following changes:
- Post-Jam tag in highscorelist for everyone who achieved a highscore in post-jam version
- Starting plants are a little younger (not as big)
- Bug fixed where player could walk away with a piece outside of the inventory
- Better controls, WSDA is used now, so players don't have to move their hand away from the mouse
- 10 new plants! You can unlock them one by one by scoring at least 100 points at once. plant the newly given seed to find out what plant you got.
- Attempt to fix magenta pixels. It took too much performance. You can manually enable it by inspect element, and changing start.js ~ line 1158 and set "false" to "true"
Version 1.2
- Post-Jam mode only:
- Issue where magenta pixels are seen around plants: fixed
- Tweaked controls, W takes plants and plants seeds now, S is used for getting seeds
| Link | https://wouter52.com/PROJECTS/LD52/SOURCE.zip |
| Link | https://wouter52.com/PROJECTS/LD52/ |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/the-pit |
Ratings
| Overall | 290th | 3.648⭐ | 46🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 372th | 3.42⭐ | 46🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 32th | 4.159⭐ | 46🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 110th | 4.193⭐ | 46🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 496th | 3.42⭐ | 46🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 395th | 3.05⭐ | 42🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 496th | 2.658⭐ | 40🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 461th | 3.369⭐ | 44🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 37🗳️ | 58🗨️ |
Also hate is a strong word, but I don't like that I have to switch my hand between the mouse and the arrow keys. I would very much prefer to control the player with one hand (A/D to walk and W/S for plant/seed or somethng like that) and have the other hand just for the mouse. But maybe that's just my preference
Keeping that in mind, if you woudl complete the board below with seeds, then you'll get 99 points :-).
It goes a little like this: there are 5 types of plants (green, purple, mondrain, pipes and bushyboys), and 4 types of grow preference; (tall boy, normal, left preference, right preference). When a plant spawns, it will use the random seed it got to: determine 1 of 5 types and 1 of 4 grow preferences, tweak grow preference a liiitle bit (that is the mutation I was talking about).
Every second a random plant will "grow":
- every plant piece in that plant will do a check if it will grow and which way it will grow. (with a number between 1 and 100). It can't grow to places where it would get two neighbouring pieces.
- the amount of points per plant piece will increase by 1. (see comment above)
- for all plant pieces, the likelyhood to grow again will be devided by 2. The first piece will start with an 80% of growing. When the plant grows, it will become 40%, the 20%, then 10%, etc.
- 20% of the time, a flower will grow. (if the number is under 20). So, a plant in its late stages of growth, will be more likely to grow seeds, IF it grows.
When getting seeds from plants, the actual *"seed"* on which the RNG is based on, will be stored in memory. When planting that seed, the same plant (more or less, because of the little tweak I mentioned) will grow back.
Hope it makes a bit of sense ^^"
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Thanks for your feedback! do you have suggestions how to change the controls? Maybe use left click to harvest, and rightclick to handle seeds? And move the world exploring to A and D? Or do you have other suggestions? Sometimes, if more people give the same kinds of feedback, I make a post jam version which you can activate from within the game :-)
This would be a nice addition.
All in all, goed gedaan Wouter! ;)
Any ideas for new plants? :grin:
Well, I started by telling myself there is no way I'll figure this out, but I managed, and ended up running around committed to the game's loop for some time, while not achieving a big success at the puzzle part though. As a personal preference, I do love to see genetics in games and stuff sprawling from seeds in deterministic ways, and plant's tiles are very pleasing to the eye, but tbh I kept wishing this potential was used in some other way than the core puzzle, I don't know in what other way but that's just me being among 1% of people who don't enjoy the connect-to-make-room style of puzzles. Also, as plants grow to absurd shapes I kept wishing for some way to use only a branch rather than the whole tree.
Other than that it's a really clever idea, and you seem to have managed to achieve your exact (I guess?) vision while relying on your code alone, and that is very impressive, great work!
Well... I said to you that I would refuse building a game themed around farming haha ^^" Did not go to plan. But the game is indeed what I imagined, I think this one is the least compromised of all my entries and I had fun making it, so there is a big plus! There are some things I imagined diffrently in the beginning.
- The idea originally was to make it a tetris game.
- Also, the pieces would be smaller (7x7, instead of 9x9), as it made more fun looking patterns.
- I had plans for powerups, like scissors. (and waterbottle, and POKON) With the scissors you could take branches. Just like you said. But that would be veeery hard to implement in the timespan I had left.
I see your score was not added to the highscores btw! Did you post them? Or did you just close the tab? Otherwise I could add your score manually.
What do you think? Shall I make a special mode where you can just harvest plants, drop them in the field (no puzzling required) and collect the points? That way the player can just focus on growing the diffrent kinds of plants. I did a similar thing to my LD50 entry.
Oh, I wanted to add some new plants too in the post-jam version. I have some ideas, I need 7 more ideas for plants :-)
And ye just growing the plants mode would be enjoyable I think.
What do you mean about the seeds staying? When you freshly planted them? Or do you mean the seeds on the plants?
I love the concept, but found it more difficult than I anticipated. All the plants grew very quickly into ones that would not fit on the board, and it took a lot of tedious use of seeds to clear the board out. That being said, while it's difficult to fit the pieces on the board, it is also not that challenging of a game. I was able to reach the top of the leaderboard just by having the patience to play long enough for my score to get that high lol, the leaderboard is more a measure of patience than skill.
The plant DNA is very interesting. I think it would be cool to be able to crossbreed certain plants. It may also improve gameplay if the amount of seeds you can get from one plant is capped, since again, the leaderboard is easy to cheese by waiting for more seeds to grow and clearing enough space for the occasional medium-sized plant lol.
I really like the looping world and the fact that the line clears are calculated vertically in addition to horizontally :smile_cat:
Edit: Damn, scrolled up to read comments. Didn't realize you needed to hit another button after 'P' to actually save your score... I think I was at 4118 when I quit.
After hitting P, you need to press enter indeed. I trust you, so I wanted to add your name to the leaderboard. But now I see that you already are on the number 1 spot with indeed 4118 :-) So, I guess you hit enter all along. (or did you do a GET request to the server by inspecting the javascript files? ~~shhhh, this is LD code, not acctually safe code~~ )
I'm not smart enough to do a GET request to the server lol, I didn't take any web development classes in university. Best I could do is tell you that's a database request of some type :')
I'll look into it :-)
A GET request you can do in the URL bar of your browser. Something like: https:\\\\www.wouter52.com\highcore.php?score=69420&name=wouter52
The "grid" game is nicely implemented and you could make something nice with this concept. Again, I think it misses a small thing to be a bit more exciting (could be a timer, could be a max number of moves, or so many other things).
After reading your Trivia part on this page, I paid attention to how the plants grow, and I must say this is really cool!
I'm especially impressed by all your animations in the menus, or transitions between screens. The in-game visuals are very good as well, and the rotating playground is a great idea. Visually, everything looks perfectly polished, it's amazing!
Nice music and sound effects! :)
Good job!
This is one of the most unique takes on the theme I've come across so far. Not to mention a pretty unique game in general.
I'm not sure if it was me or the gameplay loop but I found it hard to pay any attention to/take advantage of the evolution mechanic, maybe because it felt more rewarding to just harvest 1x3s with 1x1s and use those to fill in gaps left by giant plants.
I'll also put in a vote for a WASD/Mouse option, hand health is a worthy cause though.
Great work!
It's addictive. I really like the plant growing system. Very relaxing, play at your own pace.
Cool that you like the growing feature. There is a very early version where you can control the growth by clicking the screen. Maybe you will like that. You can find it here:
- https://wouter52.com/PROJECTS/LD52/NIGHTLY_BUILDS/NIGHTLY_01/
- https://wouter52.com/PROJECTS/LD52/NIGHTLY_BUILDS/NIGHTLY_03/
The menu animation was a bit of an accident, but I loved it so I kept it in. It was supposed to be a solid black screen, but the world and player sprite stayed on the foreground ^^"
The controlls I will look at, maybe WSDA + mouse is a good option indeed. Or maybe using click to harvest and take/plant seeds? How would that be?
P.s. I checked (I recognized your name), you are in a lot of my highscore tables from previous jams! Thanks!
We found out that it had to do with a feature in firefox and brave browser called "block fingerprinting". It is a very technical story, but it has to do with websites using a HTML canvas to store information about you, so it can track you and serve better ads. By manipulating the data in an HTML canvas with random noise, websites can't track you anymore. (that is what your browser most likely does) My game, however, relies on some values being EXACTLY magenta to work (in this case to not draw those pixels). So yea, that's why ^^ In my previous game I had a fix for that, but it took a big performancehit I was not willing to take in this game. Next time I'll look for a better fix!
PS: I played on FF, and transparent did not work (I had pink pixels instead) but I don't know if it's because of my configuration or another problem
*In a previous jam someone pointed that out too, only back then there was a collision system depending on the magenta to be not visable. So it was a big problem.*
*We found out that it had to do with a feature in firefox and brave browser called “block fingerprinting”. It is a very technical story, but it has to do with websites using a HTML canvas to store information about you, so it can track you and serve better ads. By manipulating the data in an HTML canvas with random noise, websites can’t track you anymore. (that is what your browser most likely does) My game, however, relies on some values being EXACTLY magenta to work (in this case to not draw those pixels). So yea, that’s why ^^*
My recommendations are:
1. Find a way to simplify the controls, maybe plant and harvest could be the same depending if you are holding flowers.
2. Setup a small training level.
I especially like the selective breeding aspect as that allows you to plan a bit more longterm and makes you think which ones to plant. I unfortunately got the keys confused quite a lot. (Maybe because the left (A) key was listed below the right (S) key and my brain was always swapping them. Which in the end led to me picking up some plant which didn't fit into the grid anymore.
my score
**Activate *"Post-Jam mode"* in main menu by pressing P**
@cievers , your plant suggestion made it in :-)
Also, there are 9 other plants added. You can unlock these seeds by scoring 100 points at once. @lone-wolf , This should be more rewarding to harvest bigger pieces :-)
@ss9, issue is solved where you can walk away with a plant still out of inventory
@lone-wolf and @BinaryPrinciple controls have been moved to WSDA and mouse
@shp and @LeReveur the magenta pixels should not show up again.
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### Full changelog:
- Post-Jam toggle added (do not rate post-jam version). In post jam mode, the following changes:
- Post-Jam tag in highscorelist for everyone who achieved a highscore in post-jam version
- Starting plants are a little younger (not as big)
- Bug fixed where player could walk away with a piece outside of the inventory
- Better controls, WSDA is used now, so players don’t have to move their hand away from the mouse
- 10 new plants! You can unlock them one by one by scoring at least 100 points at once. plant the newly given seed to find out what plant you got.
- Issue where magenta pixels are seen around plants: fixed
Really really cool though, and the graphics are great for this kind of thing! In the comments you talk about plants passing DNA to their seeds. That's really really cool! While playing I wasn't sure if the plant types themselves had different growth habits or what...
The appearance of the plants and the grow pattern are not connected. It is random. However, once you plant a seed, the grow pattern and appearance will be passed on to the new plant. Maybe that is why it was a bit hard to see :-)
So many unusual interlocking elements. Love seeing a game breaking new ground and mashing together a bunch of interesting ideas. Very cool, nicely done!
Thanks for the big compliments!