Word Salad by kristinamay
How are stories made?

If you think "they are written" - that's true, in part. But ACTUALLY they are made from lovingly cared-for wordfruits which are harvested and then used to create stories.
That's what you do in this game: raise up your wordfruits and then use them to create a story!

The first part of the game is raising and harvesting wordfruits based on your need.

The latter part is arranging those wordfruits for a story display for the county fair.
Instructions in-game. (and don't forget to say hello to the dog!)
All art, code, and music made by me!
I had plans to implement additional stories, but unfortunately only had time to finish one story from start to finish. Perhaps future iterations of this game will include other potential stories to complete!
Sidenote: this was a MAJOR down-to-the-wire effort - please let me know if you find any bugs. If I make any post-compo-deadline fixes I'll list them below.
| Source code | https://github.com/kristinalustig/ld52 |
| web version on itch | https://kristinamay.itch.io/word-salad |
| windows on itch | https://kristinamay.itch.io/word-salad |
| mac on itch | https://kristinamay.itch.io/word-salad |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/word-salad |
Ratings
| Overall | 54th | 3.895⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 84th | 3.684⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 6th | 4.342⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 35th | 4.263⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 61th | 4.079⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 107th | 3.471⭐ | 19🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 24th | 3.947⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 130th | 3.444⭐ | 20🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 8🗳️ | 14🗨️ |
I didn't know what to expect after harvesting for the first day or two. I didn't know if I wanted nouns, adjectives, etc. But when I got to story making everything clicked and I thought "oooh, I wish I had planted more adjectives! and verbs!"
Love the intersection of farming with words and the wholesome ability to make my own madlib. Well done!
@candlesan Thanks for playing my game! I definitely think that shortening the first phase and then adding replayability in the form of additional stories or whatever could add to it, since based on my testing, people tend to enjoy the madlib part more than the first part.
And I got a "sharp" eggplant. I hope it won't turn into something R-18 (Luckily the final story does nothing with eggplants.)
But it may be more interesting if the species of crops can be meaningful, instead of being an indicator of nouns or verbs.


The amount of scenes you implemented, and dialogue guiding me along the way, is really impressive for a compo. Did you even sleep? I often scope too big and fall short, but you're like "nah I'll just do it all". Impressive!
I did have a little trouble harvesting my vegetables, but I really enjoyed the art style and I always ended the day with all 6 words/phrases, so no complaints there! :slight_smile:
One thing I would say for your audio: the music speeds up regardless of the timer, because the sped-up music is built into the loop. That made me feel a little stressed during the final stage, even though I knew it wasn't timed because the instructions said so. So my recommendation would be to:
1. Make two music loops, one for the harvest game and one for the madlibs mini-game, and
2. Swap out faster music for just one SFX to indicate that your time is running low, OR implement a system that shifts to faster music only for the last 10s of each harvest day. (But given that you were in charge of all things in this game, I think just an SFX would be the easier/more efficient route to give consistent information.)
That's just nitpicky stuff. Overall, thought your game was super thoughtful and really engaging. Wonderful entry! :four_leaf_clover:
Overall a great take on the theme and a fun and original game. Well done!
