itch.io

Cool project, I love all the unique characters and the art style. The restocking -> sales loop works well, and expanding through the slots fills it out nicely. My only critique would be that I didn't understand sometimes why the bee disagreed with my plant choices, sometimes I would fulfill one role but maybe missed another that seemed unspoken? Or included a role the bee deemed unnecessary? A little clarity there would make the game much more readable. Sort of a quibble though. I enjoyed your game a lot!

This was pretty cool! I liked the little characters and planting the trees felt good. I kind of wish the enemies put up more of a challenge. Maybe all those trees could have made for more of a maze-like experience eventually, like a hedge maze, with certain key trees the critters wanted more than others. Just riffing on some ideas. Hope you had a good time making this!

It's open-ended, you can kind of do as you like. I suggest you load up on tools in Hamburg and sell them in Gdansk, then deliver grain from Gdansk to Hamburg. After that, you're free to sail around, explore the world, find new trade opportunities, complete contracts, buy new ships, or pursue the major story objectives revealed over time. Objectives are in the upper left corner, you can also view them by pressing O. Hope this helps!

So sorry the game wasn't to your liking. Thanks for the honest feedback though, it gives me something to reflect on. 20 minutes to make a sale is indeed a long time! The game's instructions do tell you right away to sail eastward to Gdansk and instructs you how to make an easy and profitable trade, Hamburg Tools for Gdansk Grain, it should be completed within the first minute of starting the game. Perhaps I didn't make it clear or compelling enough. Thanks for checking it out in any case.

Thank you so much! Comments like this make the whole process worth it. Yeah, games like Civ6 were a bit inspiration here, well-spotted. So glad you enjoyed the game!

Hugely ambitious project! I really like to see teams swinging for the fences in longer scoped game jams like this. I really like the atmosphere you guys created and the unique world-building in the narrative. I might suggest a slightly brisker pacing at the start to get the player into the thick of things a little sooner, it's a bit front-loaded at the moment. I suppose my game has the same problem. Thanks for the game, I enjoyed it!

Thanks for playing, plasol!

password: climate

Reminded me a lot of Coffee Talk. Great art style, unique characters, a lot to like here!

Whoops, might've destroyed the world this time, sorry y'all. Your keen sense of restraint here takes this game very far. The short lines of dialogue punctuated by explosions and dramatic music is all you needed to keep me glued to my seat. I'm going to take some narrative notes from you, I think.

Nathaniel, thanks for playing! I found this great typewriter soundpack on Freesound.org and decided to base the game's whole soundscape around it. Originally, I designed the game to be how you imagined it to be, where each number can only be used once. That was way too hard, so I decided to allow numbers to be re-used and wrote a more gentle solver / puzzle generator. Then when I came up with the modifiers, I realized I could use my original solver again for players who wanted a challenge. Always interesting what players can see no matter how I tried to obscure it.

Thank you!

Instantly a vibe. Nice variety of cute minigames. I dig the pixel art style

Oh, I love Jackbox but hadn't even thought of that connection. Great insight!

Great concept with a very cool sense of style

Thanks Diego! Yeah, I was definitely thinking about all those hip puzzle games like Wordle when I was making this for sure. I did start with a single level, but it seemed a little short and clumsy that way. I conceived of the Liabilities to also get a player-driven difficulty curve in there for players who really want to test their math skills. Thanks for playing!

Oh man, that's just how life goes sometimes now isn't it? The minigames were all self-explanatory, except the red yellow green traffic light tripped me up, what was I supposed to do there?

Reminds me of William Blake, jamming poetry into a medium where no one expects it to belong

You're so right about the scope, I have to watch myself. I'm working on UX / UI tonight! Thanks for playing!

I really like the charming hand-drawn aesthetic, as well as how her 2d sprite just turns and walks on the beach haha. This felt quite complete for a prototype, you're well set up to expand and polish this over the next 12 days.

That's a great idea I would have most certainly overlooked. I appreciate it 🙏

The game design from the video is already clear and readable from this very early stage, I think that's quite a good sign. I can see the goals are going to be those meters in the upper right corner, and I'll be investing in technologies to care for them. I think the decision to focus on one mid-sized community is wise and will play out well for you. Best of luck to you!

I couldn't figure out how to build on the grid, I tried clicking on things like solar or battery and then the grid, but nothing happened? Maybe I'm doing something wrong. I tried both Chrome and Firefox. I also noticed your game doesn't quite fit in itch's iFrame, you need to increase the vertical pixels on the Embed options a little bit and/or add a fullscreen button for players to see all the build options. I'm intrigued by what you've got here, it kind of feels like it has potential to be a limited space factory builder like Opus Magnum. That's a rich genre to explore. Your focus on real science and permaculture is a great implementation of the theme as well. I'll be watching this project.

I checked out your video, I liked how you two put a focus on the fantasy and role play at this stage, I think that's more important that some board game designers realize and can do a lot to inform design that players actually care about. I see that the mechanical focus is going to be resource allocation and event cards, I think that's a solid battle-tested loop, actually my game is built on a similar loop although its a video game and not a board game. Best of luck on the art pass and tutorializing, I imagine those will be the major hurdles ahead.

The pixel art is looking very good and immediately makes me want to play more. I assume the flowers will somehow pay for better weaponry at some point? Interested to see how this evolves over the next two weeks, I will be back :)

Thank you for taking a look! I agree that I need to tweak how time affects the ports, I'm puzzling it over myself. Tricky because I eventually want to have more ships moving around so I don't know if I can pause for each port stop. Right now the big consequence is that crew wages are due at the end of the month, so if you're not paying attention, that can really bite, kinda like a time limit I suppose.

Yeah, I've got some half-baked systems in here and no direction to speak of, I'm sure it's a bit confusing at this point. Still, I really appreciate you stopping by to offer your feedback. Great to have an outside perspective actually.

Really nice pixel art. Some smooth styling already on the UI so early is going to pay dividends for you as you develop this further. If I were to make a recommendation for you at this point, it would be nailing down the swimming of the mermaid, the full stack from input to feel to animation. I think making her swim feel amazing now and getting it just as you imagine its full potential is going to be the best force multiplier for your game and show you which way to go from here when it comes to level design and everything that comes after. I am also intrigued to see how the dryad garden will evolve. I imagine our heroine will pop her head out of the water and deposit her sea treasures for them to make use of? It's a clean loop with some real nice potential and fits the climate themes nicely.

Password: climate

Definitely aspects worth thinking about and perhaps playing to. I suppose it depends on how radically different the future is imagined to be from the present and on what timescale. Barring unmitigated disaster, I would attest that international trade will continue in one fashion or another. I want to speak to a pragmatic vision of what that might look in a healthier way than it exists today.

Thanks for checking it out! 🙏

So you'll be shooting the invasive species with weedkiller and flamethrowers?  Well, I'd play it. Kind of reminds me of Plants vs. Zombies except it's more like Plants vs. Plants. Scope seems the right size here. Good luck!

Thank you for playing!

The second weapon is so good, I guffawed. Also I love the animation on the initial finger blaster. I had some pretty huge stutters at some points, but the level was pretty big so maybe that's to be expected. Especially noteworthy here is the music. One of a kind, love that cat soloist.

Nimmy! Thank you so much, that's high praise indeed! I'm glad you enjoyed it.

Solid little tower defense game. I like the stripped down pixel art style, and the fishbowl CRT lensing is a nice touch, not to mention the nostalgic UI choices. I didn't quite understand why I should shut down rooms, and at one point all my turrets shut down, I think your tutorial is maybe just a little too front-loaded and I couldn't absorb that. But I imagine it would work well as later difficulty twist, I assume it was something like I should shut down turrets to save resources for others. That's my off-the-cuff review, I hope it's helpful for you! I enjoyed playing your game and defending our one and only glorious and benevolent ChatGPT for one more day.

Thank you Drawbert!

The engine is your Browser! This is pure HTML + Javascript

Thanks Yevhen! I'm glad you enjoyed it. 😊

Yeah man, sometimes I just want to get the player into a flow. Looking at your game, I think we've got something in common there. Thanks for the kind words and for stopping by to check it out!

This is sick. Did you write this music? It goes hard. I think this game would have done serious numbers in the Very Serious Juniper Game Dev that just wrapped up, the theme there was Spin to Win. I loved the style here, how it ramped up, suddenly there's blood everywhere, what am I doing here really? Good good stuff.