Liferoot
- 3D navigation using the mouse inputs are fluid as hell. Very easy to look around—though I wish there was a pan function to better strategize movement. It happened a couple of times where I seemingly went past the world boundaries.
- The environment and plant generation is strong mechanical work. Good job!
- The all-important tutorial label is cut off past the bottom of the viewport (at least on fullscreen).
- Without a backstory or any type of player motivation, I couldn't really digest the gameplay, so initially just clicked tiles wherever available towards the nearest water source, and progressed like that. Once I figured out the idea is to do likewise and navigate adjacently to the required plants, this infused more strategy on my part.
- The jump in metrics is too abrupt, I feel, and it's difficult to get a sense of how much you're going to get taxed or incremented health-, projected decay-, and turn-wise.
- I wish some thought was put into what this world is, to more organically tie into the "Decay" theme. As it is, it feels very shoehorned in.
- The bright, cartoony 3D graphics and solemn music are very nice individually, but seemed a stylistic mismatch.
- Animation work solid! The way the herbs sprout from the tiles makes the game feel polished.
- Clicking "Setup" through the escape menu irreversibly forces the player to start a new game (was just exploring the UI).
- Like the font and style choices of the UI, though detest the awful template that's been going around on this scene for a while now (which shouldn't be allowed anyway, on the same basis that AI-generated code isn't permitted).
All-in-all, Liferoot is a solid effort by Godot Wild Jam veterans that makes up in style where it lacks in substance, and shines a light on the often difficult-to-achieve need for coherence. Evaluated separately, fantastic 3D graphics + animations, functional gameplay programming, and thoughtful sound are sure enough reasons to sample this submission.