This game was a lot of fun, however the many different types of plant make it more complicated than it needs to be. It would also be nice if you can see the plots that are currently used by the plants already placed. The highscore system also didn't seem to work, but that didn't really matter.
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I kind of think that the lack of clear instructions makes the game look harder than it is. The rules can be boiled down to this:
- Flowers determine which tiles are affected by their pollen, affected tiles get highlighted when dragging a seed.
- If two plants have different stems, their pollen is toxic to each other.
- If two adjacent plants share the same leaves, extra points are awarded.
- To win you must plant every single seed and have no dead plants.
Are these instructions making the game look simpler? I was also planning to highlight the influenced tiles when the player puts the mouse over a plant, due to lack of time I didn't add that and yes, the highscore system is bugged. Thanks for the feedback btw!
Yes thank you, that makes it a lot more clear. I thought that none of the blue tiles could overlap with the ones from the plants you have already placed. And it is quite difficult to remember which tiles are already occupied (blue) by the plants that are placed, so I thought it would be helpfull if the player can see which tiles are already occupied. But how do you know which plants are toxic to each other and which one aren't?
They are toxic to each other when they have different stems. Think of it as chess, pieces of the same color (stems in the case of symbiosis) cannot kill each other. I didn't have time to implement a feature that shows affected tiles by a plant when you mouse over it, the best way to check that would be by replanting the seed or memorizing the patterns, which are pretty simple. There's only 3 different flowers in the game so the player would only need to learn 3 patterns (the eye flower affects all tiles in the same row and column, the diamond flower affects tiles diagonally and the carnivore flower forms a ring).