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Grow to Perfection's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Top Marks | #1 | n/a | n/a |
| Creativity | #19 | 4.577 | 4.577 |
| Overall | #43 | 4.333 | 4.333 |
| Style | #133 | 4.462 | 4.462 |
| Enjoyment | #240 | 3.962 | 3.962 |
Ranked from 26 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
How does your game fit the theme?
A humble colony of ants achieve the perfect scale
Development Time
96 hours
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Comments
Very very cool use of the theme!! Wish you could ants a little bit more as QOL?? The zoom in and out is great btw. Played at https://twitch.tv/hedge_in <3 vod Day 4 @ 3:17:46
Hey, thanks for playing and linking the timestamp. Your playstyle gave me an interesting perspective.
But just so you know the main point of the game is to place all the necessary paths at once and completely automate the production of ants (instead of commanding them manually). So level 1 ants are always producing level 2 ants, which means you can produce level 3 ants faster, etc. Kind of like a factory game.
Awesome entry! Loved the zoom in at the beginning and slowly going back to the top. Took me a minute to figure out purpurite (was searching for it on the final level lol), but then I appreciated how it made me go back and reroute things.
I had some issues with how ants choose between paths, thought that some of them were underused, but maybe that's just my perception.
Btw large ants appearing when zooming back and forth creeped me out sometimes :D
Overall, it's a great idea and great execution, also very pretty.
This was a really fun and interesting game! I loved how many levels of scale their were, and each one fed into the next. Brilliant! :3
Ants in space! I really enjoyed the different strategies you could use to make and gather resources. Overall, really good game and beautiful art and music! Hope there's a part 2 with more intergalactic ants and crazy transformations haha.
This is super awesome, I loved the visuals, the art, and the gameplay, and they all fit together very well! I think this is one of the most creative and interesting takes on the theme I’ve seen in the Jam so far. Good work all of you!
amazing
This game! This is the best submission I've seen so far
I absolutely love it! I think it deserves much more attention
What an awesome submission. The theme is implemented beatifully, the game design is on point and the visuals are fantastic! The ant controls were a bit unintuitive at first, but I got the grasp of them at the end. I love the introduction of an endgame resource to make the player go back and optimise everything further. It really scratched the same itch I had with Factorio. If there's one nitpick I can add, it's that I would've wanted to have the ants' legs be animated smootly (via code maybe?) rather than snapping to positions. Very incredible game!
Ah, a fellow Factorio player. I was partially inspired by that game so I'm glad to hear it scratched the same itch.
The ants must grow.
Returning to say congrats!! Was very happy to see your game making it into the top 100!
Very well deserved imo
Ants are everywhere, and I like it. It’s a fun factory-ish (I guess) game, even had some room to optimize the routes for maximum APM (ants per minute).
Looks like the font is missing some characters, such as capital letters, so I had to lick the nest.
Also, maybe being able to set routes that don’t require returning to the nest would be nice for throughput, but not sure if it contradicts your design goals.
Great job!
That's really strange. I don't think the font has capital letters, but it substitutes them with a default font on my computer. I'm not sure why it's different for you. But thanks for playing the game and letting me know!
Might be because I’m on Linux (and most games run fine through Wine), probably also I don’t have the font is’s supposed to use as the default
Supremely creative take on the theme! Very well done art, sound and user experience too. The game has all qualities to let me play it idly for a long time.
Things I think could use some improvement: the crafting mechanism, as others have also suggested. It's just too unintuitive - alternatively, you could have a proper tutorial for it in the game.
All in all, this is a really great job! Well done!
Wow, I was immediately hooked from the beginning, and when I figured out crafting I really liked it and played until the end. I had a blast, and I have no notes, for me this is a 5/5/5 game.
The art was very cool and the fact that you zoom out every time you gain a new size is really interesting and satisfying. The crafting is quite weird though, I feel like there's a better method that could've been used.
The art and concept were great. However, I had a bit of trouble figuring out the crafting, which didn't feel very intuitive. The overall concept was great, though; good work!
I really like this idea. Loved having to zoom in at the start and then zooming out as you progress through the levels. Nice game
Wow. I'm so glad I dropped into your stream to have you play my game because I wouldn't have seen yours otherwise. This has to be the best interpretation of the theme I've seen. No other game had a bigger sense of scale. I love how the music gets more layers as you zoom out, and seeing the feet of the larger ants scurry by when you're zoomed into the smaller area is cool. I enjoyed scaling up my production after unlocking better recipes. However, it was wasn't very clear how to use the deposit points at first - that took a bit of experimentation (which isn't necessarily bad). Great job, guys. It's absolutely criminal that this game only has 9 ratings.
GG!
Man, we have an idea where you pinch into a picture and zoom to find different things, but we're so unsure how that would work in a game so we scrap it, this is the execution of that game and I'm so amazed at how good it worked! This game is super good I love it. Thank you for submitting this I had tons of fun!
Wow this was so good! The art style and gameplay were so fun and interesting. I love the beginning zoom in too really great touch. It took me a little bit to kind of figure things out, but the slow introducing of elements was great. Overall definitely one of the best games I've tried so far this jam - well done to your team!
ah this was so nice, the opening sequence of zooming into smallest scene was super impactful. the objective is clear the theme is used in a really unique way. i really loved the audio transitions between the scenes and the use of spatial audio.
Would love to see the more complicated and intricate systems with resources and crafting. i kept trying to move between the scenes over and over again trying to optimize flow as much as possible it felt rewarding and enjoyed solving for the most optimal path.
played for longer than i expected! i don't usually stick with factory style games. i understood the way to progress immediately and was not too surprised throughout the game.
i think what will stick with me is that initial experience of having to scroll, scroll, scroll down to the smallest scale from the largest. it was a long enough scroll that i almost did not go far enough, but eventually i did.
there is also something here which i recognized but is not totally common in factory games, which is the way each layer feeds into the one above it. i enjoyed that part of the system, but ultimately lost my love with it due to its relatively rote re-use.
finally. i suppose that the unusual control scheme deserves some recognition. it's experimental and it basically works but is somewhat unpolished. things that i would find easier in other games are quite awkward in this game. i am not sure how to describe the full breadth of this awkwardness. i don't think that i personally took much from this experiment, but it's always possible for an experiment to highlight a more interesting way forward for a genre. (not that every experiment must lead to innovation - but i would like to note that i don't think it really spoke to me of the other themes of the game either.)
Hey, thanks for taking the time to write this.
I would like to know, what things do you find harder to do with this control scheme that you don't in others?
Also, I am curious, how often did you go back and optimize previous layers?
q2: a few times. at least once each until i got the ability for ants to carry two resources at a time. then i began to lose steam and figured it wasn't that important to further optimize everything.
q1: hmm. this is a good question but i am not sure i can give a good answer. so maybe i'm not right about my diagnosis and should have not made one? overall, paths seemed like a nice way to visualize specifying specific sequences of actions, but something about it bugged me. i will describe some moments from my play experience:
i yearned for a way to split the flow of ants in a more mathematically pleasing way, but did not want to draw a supremely excessive number of paths - e.g. perfectly optimizing a den that wants 16 of one and 18 of another is only possible by drawing 8+9 paths... i suppose that is not a control scheme thing.
at times i wanted to send ants down specific paths to balance numbers out but i couldn't do that without destroying paths which i didn't want to do.
i did not figure out how to add nodes to a path between existing nodes, i was kinda checking out mentally at this point.
i found a trick where i could send an ant to grab a resource and plant it, and have that one ant repeat the action in that path a few times, to craft quickly. that felt like an exploit, but a good/fun one.
i did not feel very rewarded for trying to make perfect flows. seemed like more of a sheer numbers/waiting game.
this one is hard to get my hands on, i'll try though. in comparing your game to other games i have played, the node-path-ant-control is the only way to gain resource and perform actions, so i must wait for everything. i like when i have a body, and the factorizing supplements that, makes me more powerful. (e.g. i can pick up and deliver coal myself, but it is less work to get ants to help me.) not sure if this is useful, as it describes a fairly different dynamic... as i said at the start im not much of a factory gamer and for me it checks out that the root of my complaint is "im forced to play a factory game with no player-avatar-action component" ;P
hope that was useful.
Hey, reading your replies it seems like you only got to play the game for a few minutes before losing steam and giving up. The main point of the game is to optimize things and it's vital to beating the final level in a reasonable time. Optimizing a level multiplies the efficiency of each higher level (by providing more ants) so it's quite important. Therefore giving up and brute forcing things after the second level will lead to an unpleasant experience.
Like you said, this was probably caused by your distaste for the genre so I'm glad you were still able to somewhat enjoy the game. And thank you for your feedback.
hmm. i'm not sure how long a few minutes is or what you mean by brute forcing things, but it doesn't sound like this describes my experience well. i understand that optimization is key and i did optimize at the deeper more zoomed in levels in order to produce more ants at higher and higher levels. i'm happy to leave it with the understanding that i'm not part of the intended audience but i felt a bit bad about my experience being described incorrectly so i am only commenting to clear that up! congrats on finishing something that others seem to be enjoying for the jam :)