Hi! This LD I kinda went in wanting to make an eco-farming game, where it was more important to make sure the environment was good for a plant than it was to sit there watering it. I kinda failed at that, but I did make a game where you place plants and water and grow things to stop bulldozers, which is cool. You also get to save animal friends.

You can play it here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/anyas-valley

I always feel kind of disappointed in myself when I finish a jam, so many I'm not the best judge of my own product, but this one kinda felt particularly bad. I started off kind of aimless, "eco farming" doesn't map nicely onto "inevitable" in my mind. I went through a few little ideas but I settled on this "dozers are coming to kill your valley and you have to delay/evacuate people". Nice enough, but I didn't ask enough questions about what I wanted to do really. What was "eco-farming" mechanically? I had a lot of random ideas, but eventually it became plant grow based on water + sunlight + the plants around them. I wanted to add stuff like pests and keeping pests away bit it fell out of scope. What was "evacuating people". I kind of cobbled it in as making little environments for a couple NPCs in a nearby valley, but I wanted it to kind of feel better? Just a lot of things I didn't really think through. So it started with a muddy, unclear scope.

I'm happy with how a lot of the little bits of the game went. I like my work on the character art, they all look very nice. Watching plants grow feels good. The idea came through. The music is nice (though I didn't get to SFX). But I think for now that's kind of what I have to take from this.

Next jam I really need to go back to the way I used to think about these. Start with a small, clear scope, and find ways I can expand on that. This time I didn't have a playable prototype until 4 hours before the deadline! And "playable" was marginal, at best. I'm a lot happier when I have something playable the first day, and I can spend the rest of the time improving it and making content.