The general idea of this is really cool and creative. Cute retro style bug city builder? AWESOME. There's a lot going on here that could be refined into a sweet little game. It took a fair bit of effort to figure that out though.
The controls aren't very intuitive and it could also really use some clearer instructions. I got stuck placing down water for a while and wasn't really sure what the goal was. The numbers swing up and down so quickly that it's not immediately clear how best to play. I broke my economy a few times with negative income on accident. I eventually figured out you can just leave it running and keep accruing money infinitely without any in game events requiring you to intervene, which let me explore the mechanics freely but without a fail state I quickly lost interest. Also the music is pretty repetitive and grating. It almost made me stop playing entirely so thanks for including a mute button!
I wanted to like this a lot and with a few tweaks to the way this is controlled and how information is communicated I think this could be really awesome. Right now it's a little too unwelcoming for my tastes.
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A Bug's Garden's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Graphics | #18 | 2.467 | 2.467 |
| Overall | #21 | 1.933 | 1.933 |
| Audio | #22 | 1.600 | 1.600 |
| Gameplay | #22 | 1.867 | 1.867 |
| Most likely to make an impact | #22 | 1.667 | 1.667 |
| Best use of the theme | #22 | 2.067 | 2.067 |
Ranked from 15 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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BioRain Games
Comments
Directions unclear, controls are a bit buggy even on a controller (seems to get stuck in the plant menu once you unlock the city and you have to enter the city menu to reset it)
I like it being a bug game, there's something cool here, but even with the skin of bugs and changing art for the seasons, it didn't really feel thematic to me.
I quite liked the art though, it was a nice touch that the trees changed color too
so creative couldn't figure out the gameplay for a while
Interesting concept, but I think I'm missing a core part of gameplay as I seem to be getting stuck past putting down water. I'm happy to give it another go!
Here are my notes I wrote as I played:
cute title screen
music and style reminds me of an old arcade game
oops accidentally closed the tutorial info
having a start button is confusing when it needs selection, keep trying to use my mouse
need a way to see commands in game, have to keep restarting to see them all
placed water but q and e don't let me go through choices anymore
water circles overlap at the very far left, looks like it's a tile and a half
ooh bugs spawned - intro + a few dots made them identifable, simplistic but effective
it's really fun to hit arrow key and directional key to zoom paint a bunch of water
what does autome mean
r doesn't seem to open city options
I feel like the tutorial text needs to stay for the duration of the game. I was often confused by what to do next.
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