Nice game, very nostalgic feel, I enjoyed it! And especially congrats on successfully making it through your first game jam! Also, it was awesome having you on stream :) Here's the VOD if you want to check that out again: (yours starts at 19:32)
Play game
The Very Thirsty Plant & the Labyrinth of Ghosts's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Presentation (visuals) | #59 | 3.640 | 3.640 |
| Overall | #90 | 3.320 | 3.320 |
| Theme | #101 | 3.360 | 3.360 |
| Concept (gameplay) | #127 | 2.960 | 2.960 |
Ranked from 25 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Comments
Ah! Ghost pushed me into the bushes and I got stuck :( 
I couple of suggestions mainly because it made the game take a bit to start:
1. The controls are not listed so I was not sure how to move/interact at first
2. For some reason, though the focus should be on the game, my browser page kept moving while I played since I had to use arrows which made it hard to play :P
Other than, cool little spoopy game
1 year ago(+1)
The controls are listed on the title screen, but they are not listed on the page. I do agree that they could be clearer.
This is an issue with Chrome (and other browsers that don't respect focus on the canvas element), and it is a bug I have noticed in other games that only use the arrow keys. You can play the game in fullscreen, and it won't have this problem. If I were to go back, I would make it WASD for controls.
I mean, it is not un-salvagable. All of the things you have stated are fixable problems, and I am definitely going to go back and make a better version of this based on the comments left below. I cut a lot of corners to actually get a completed thing in the time period, and I was kind of learning things I went, so I burned a lot of time just doing trivial things, and I made a lot of simple mistakes.
1 year ago(+1)
If I were to go back now, I would make the collision for the water jugs the same as the collision for hearts (they automatically pick up when you collide with them).
I understand what you are saying about a reachable goal. The goal is simply to not die, which I realize means that there is no win condition. There's nothing that you are trying to get to so that the game can end. I could have added one, but I chose to not because I preferred the open ended nature of it technically being able to go on as long as you can survive and not be caught by ghosts. Collisions on map transitions are a nightmare, and they make me realize that I should have just declared an entry point for each map which would have never had this problem instead of using the players current x and y to calculate where they should be on the next map.
I understand your reasoning. I would then just put in a timer and a "round" marker of how often someone watered the plant.
As for the transitions.. just instantiate the player on the center position each time on a map switch. Then you will not run into such an issue. Might not be the best choice, but it should work.
1 year ago (+1)
I didn't realize that Chrome did this, but it seems like an obvious problem in retrospect. I enabled the option to play in fullscreen which should eliminate the scrolling, but yeah, I should have probably used WASD and tested more in Chrome.
Leave a comment
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.