itch.io

Thanks for the feedback. It was a 10 day game jam so yeah it's small. I won't be adding anything else to it though. It's complete and I have moved onto other projects now.

Yeah I bought their 2D course and I have finished most of it, though I do find their challenges to be a bit weak to be honest, even if well intentioned. On the other hand, I just joined CodeMonkey's GameDev Practice Lab and that has much more serious challenges which will certainly stretch me.

Yeah if you already have years of experience with a particular engine then switching to another would be hard. That's why I considered my choice so carefully as I knew that whichever one I picked is likely to be a very long relationship! Even just one year in, I would need an incredibly strong reason to move away from Unity now, and I can't see that happening in the foreseeable future.

No not at all, I knew from the start that MonoGame was just going to be a temporary thing, just to get me started on game development. Moving to a visual engine was just a matter of time, it just arrived a lot sooner than I expected! But I still learned a lot from my first few weeks with MonoGame and I have no regrets.

I honestly wouldn't even want to consider such questions for the two games that I mentioned, I don't want to think about them at all. For me it's an instant click away. If it were possible to block games on Steam, I would do so! 

Yeah I agree. Sometimes I find myself wanting to refactor something for no real reason other than a vague "to make it better" when there isn't really a need. That just tends to overcomplicate things with no real benefit. 

In my latest game though, which started off as a jam game, I really broke some stuff at the end of the jam and then I was absolutely forced to re-think the architecture and refactor the code to fix the problems. So yeah, I do need to avoid the temptation to just over-engineer and refactor with no good reason to do so.

I wrote that post about a year ago and what's interesting is that back then I didn't have any ideas but as I got into it, followed other people's tutorials, learned new things and started making a few little games the ideas started to flow and now I have a massive list of game I ideas I want to work on! I guess the creativity just flows when you're actually knee deep in the trenches so to speak!

It certainly looks like you've produced a lot so far, which is pretty incredible! So many people don't really ever get started. I think you're certainly a lot more creative that you give yourself credit for!

True, grinding can be... well, a grind lol! A short game with quick unlocks will be a nice flow of dopamine :-) 

Hi Erik,

Thank you for the demo, I really enjoyed playing it. Some feedback after my playthrough: 

• Could use a way to access the settings from within the game (change audio)
• The energy from the garden regenerates whilst in the upgrade screen so you can just go afk and let it build up which is a bit cheaty!
• Also in the garden, the flowers seemed much more cost effective than the grass, but I'm guessing that's intentional?
• I think perhaps overall the upgrades came a little too easily. Progress is nice of course, but I filled out the upgrade tree fast which would lead to quite quick gameplay depending on how much content there is.

Caroline

haha awesome :-)

Thank you! And well done for completing it :-)

This is covered in the following tutorial: 

Do you mean, how do you load another scene in Unity? Or are you asking about in this game? For the game, you go back to the village screen with the button in the top right corner. If you're asking about Unity, I've created a small course which covers the basics of Unity, including scene loading, which starts here.

Thank you for the kind words :-)

Thank you! I've already prepared a second non-jam version of the game that I am going to continue working on, as I actually really enjoyed it and want to carry on with it

Thank you for persisting with playing it even though it reset every time you went back to the village screen! What I wanted to do is have it so that it takes time to visit each resident or grab treats so you have to try and manage your deck and give the right cards to the right people but of course I didn't have time to do all of that, it still needs much work! 

Well I have used all the items I had in my inventory. I need to find matilda next I think! I feel like I have explored everywhere and clicked everything but I guess I must have missed something!

Thank you so much! I'm just about to watch the stream :-)

Thank you very much for the kind words! I will indeed be continuing to work on the game after the voting ends - I've already created a new project on Itch for the non jam version

I liked the concept and was really looking forward to this one but I did struggle with the controls and I don't think the audio really matched the vibe indicated by the description. If that changed it could really change the whole feeling of the game.

Took me a minute to figure out it was flappy bird with spikes lol! 

I had real problems running the game. On Chrome all I got was a black screen with music. On Firefox I got the starting screen but I couldn't actually start the game in any way. I won't rate it as I can't really judge it if I can't play it.

This was very impressive for a jam game! A simple mechanic turned into something very playable, good job

This is fantastic on all counts, 5*! I'm stuck on the puzzles but that's because I'm obviously just missing something :-)

This is fantastic on all counts, 5*! I'm stuck on the puzzles but that's because I'm obviously just missing something :-)

I'm still playing this and Vlad just cracked me up.... the bat ;-) Hilarious!

Yeah that's a good point, maybe I should just continue with the concept I have started building on and see where it takes me, finish it and THEN play some more card games. I have a feeling this is a genre I might like to explore for future games.

Thank you yes I'm very open to ideas. One of my problems picking this genre is that I have never actually played any of these card games before - I just thought it would look cool! Now that the jam is over and I can take my time with the game I think I want to spend some time playing more card games and seeing how the mechanic works. 

I definitely want there to be some element of strategy, even if it's fairly light. I didn't really want it to be just a click fest through the resident stories and then the game is over which is what it would be if I just kind of finished what I had now. 

haha interesting idea! Would certainly be a twist but perhaps not really fitting for the uplifting vibe lol!

Thank you :-) What I was able to submit in time was only very basic but I think I could build on it 

There's some brief instructions on the game page

Yeah I just completely ran out of time, the game is not finished at all and has no tutorial. Thank you for playing! 

If anyone is interested I've been recording a few short videos showing my progress with the jam. The first few are literally just throwing together prototypes which ended up getting binned but I have finally settled on a game idea now. Hopefully I'll be able to finish it in time to submit! Here's the playlist:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLyl8md3Lj3mrLFl83o1rKOogFt_Rrqm0B

I loved the art style of this game and I found the mechanics simple and easy to grasp but I think the randomisation is overdone in places; there are times when the player can't make use of all the resources in a turn, or all the cards are of a certain resource type etc. I played through many times but could never beat the last ship!

Mechanics are decent but I found the paddle speed a little slow in relation to the speed of the ball!

This caught my eye as I was browsing through breakout games. The particle effects you have in here are gorgeous! There's no "end" though? I destroyed the lungs... and the ball just kept on going...

Nice job, I like all the different powerups! My only criticism was that sometimes the ball gets stuck at a kind of weird angle - very horizontal so it's going back and forth across the screen for a long time without hitting anything.

I used several of the backgrounds in a recent game, Endless Coil, thank you! 

These FX were just what I needed for the explosion sounds in my game Asterworlds, thanks very much! 

I absolutely love Cosmic Journey from this pack! It gave my space game Asterworlds a very chill vibe, thank you!