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(+1)

Interesting, very interesting, but I didn't get any honey.

Move tool - I expected I could move the whole rock at different points on the screen, like moving a camera, but that didn't work. It seemed it's only needed to catch the flying pieces of rock.
Rotate tool - is that just for rotating the whole rock, so different parts of the rock get water?
Scissors tool - is that the tool I would need to use 99% of the time?
Digger tool - how do I make a pond? It just threw pieces away from my rock, why would I want to do that?

What do I do with the flowers? I cut them with scissors, so I get more plant?
What does the bees and some other insects do? I could use the gun on either one.
What are brown hexes and is the gray hexes just dead rock? Are these I should dig out?
How do I get honey? What is meat for? Are the plants meat-eating plants?
So many questions, so little answers.

Wouldn't it make more sense that the grass grows on top of the hexes, not behind of the hexes? Later in the game, I lost the flashlight that was illuminating the hexes, not sure how. Would also be useful if the tools can be accessed from numeric keys.

(1 edit)

Hey, thanks for the review. 

The move and rotate tools probably could've been implicit tools, I agree. Yes, the shovel tool is for creating ponds- ponds form in rain when you have at most 4 contiguous empty tiles on a hexagonal ring, where (0, 0) is the hex centre (in axial coordinates) and is the centre of the planet ("plantet"). Ponds hold more water than grass (1000 vs 255) and transport water to surrounding hexes much more efficiently, the idea is that with a large pond you don't have to wait for rain. In hindsight how to dig ponds is really unclear; I don't think anyone has actually managed to successfully form a pond. Having ponds only form on empty tiles in a hexagonal ring was just easier to program, honestly- but it does seem to be too constrained.

I intended to have a fly eating plant that grows on hexes where meat recently decomposed, but I didn't have enough time to add that unfortunately. As a result, meat is just fertilizer. Flowers produce nectar. Some flying pieces of rock carry honeycombs- when a bee occupies a honeycomb, that's when they start transporting+turning nectar into honey (they do a bit more than this- but that's their essential role). Again, apologies that none of this is clear or intuitive- I intended this to be a bit of a puzzle game, but I think the pacing and player-interaction-feedback loop needed some work. The shopkeeper gives hints on some of this when you talk to him, but he only arrives every 5-8 minutes.

With a little more time, I probably would've added a couple more events, man-eating flowers and either tutorial or some way to nudge the player to correct behaviours. I was probably a bit ambitious on what I wanted to achieve for my first gamejam in just 6 days. Numerical hotkeys for tools was something that was always on the back of my mind, but always said to myself "I'll add it later." As you can see I never added it later, lol.

Again, thanks for the constructive review. This is my first gamejam and I learnt a lot.

(+1)

Add the list of such features to you game page (you can still edit the text during voting) and mark the features that currently not fully implemented. Would be helpful to see the definitive list of possibilities in one place.