I switch from a single comment thread to a discussion board and, due to how Itch manage this, previous comments are no more visible :(
The first discussion takes place here on Reddit.
You have now a dedicated thread to all you comments, criticism, ideas and encouragement. Thanks!
From left to right:
Energy and water depend on weather conditions and so can go up and down, impacting the production accordingly.
Your sap reserve. Impacted by the balance, i.e. it can fill up or empty more or less quickly depending on consumption and production.
You need sap to grow branches and roots. The circular indicator appearing when you extend something show you how much it will take from the sap reserve.
I know I have some work to make the game and interface more self-descriptive, it must be integrated to the game (because nobody reads documentation) as tutorial or tooltips. It's a bit of work.
I'm actively working on the game and i'm currently focused on gameplay and features, which are the most important. And I don't want to spend time on explaining things that might change in a near future. But I'll do it for sure.
I hope that I have helped and that you can enjoy the game! Thanks for feedback.
ok I see. The white graduations (bottom left) indicates sap units, you must have energy and water bars above one graduation to produce a new unit of sap.
More precisely, you need several units of water (say 3) and energy (say 5) to produce one unit of sap. So if you collect 12 water and 9 energy you still produce only one sap and blue bar is 9 units above white line and yellow bar 4 units above.
I love this game, but just experienced a really stupid game function. I had a BEASTLY tree grown, 62 seeds in a single drop and used a little over half my sap.
I accidentally clicked twice and produced two batches of seeds.
From there, there is NOTHING you can do. Your tree dies. The seeds stay in their half-matured state, eating up ALL of the sap you're producing, until all your leaves die.
This, to me, is super dumb. There should be a "drop seeds" option. Or click to manually drop a premature seed, something. My tree could have done, like, thousands of seeds in batches of 62. But because I clicked twice, it died. All that work wasted. :(
Hi, I'm looking forward to seeing the evolution system. Can I suggest you should explain that a long root still has only 1 uptake, so to get more water you need to split the roots.
Also, I don't understand on the world map when you mouse over a spot on the earth a chart appears in the top right with think blue and yellow lines. What are those lines?
Hi, evolution system is a big piece with several aspects, i'm working on it and i'll try to release a first iteration soon even if it's partial and not the final system yet.
Indeed, i forgot to explain that only root extremity collects water. I know it's not so obvious despite the visual hint (blue pulsing circles). I'll add it in the doc.
The top right chart is the climat of the region. It shows the evolution of humidity and luminosity range over one cycle (a year). You can see seasonality and periods of rain and drought. The actual value for a particular day will be in the range defined by the line thickness. In game, you can see a little white dot around the humidity and luminosity charts (top right) which indicates where you are in the cycle. (yeah I have to document this too somewhere).
Thanks!
yeah! Phototropism would be great. I plan to do it (even if i didn't know the word, thanks to you), something like the higher it is, the more luminosity there is, and some shadow area to simulate the other trees around, as if we were in a forest. It'll be really interesting and add some constraints in the growth of branches. Thanks!
I really like the game and commented on the old section.
But there is a real problem: Once your tree began to die, there is no turnaround manageable. If you growed to much, SAP is empty and first leaves were gone, production goes down while consumption stays high. There has to be a way to fix the problem - either by letting branches die to reduce the consumption manually, or automatically by reducing the consumption when the leaves die.
Now I have some sceleton trees on the map, and there is no way to restart the level.
I have to check for leaves but I know there is a problem with flowers and fruits than can really kill the tree instead of just rotting and falling. I will work on this but meanwhile you already can manually cut outer branches by clicking on them (it's in the doc in Tips section but you know i struggle a bit to have a simple and clear doc..), this is not the most convenient but it can really save your tree!
I'll also add a way to reset a level, maybe it could give some resource (like wood) depending on the current tree in the level to make something with it :)
Thanks again!
Thanks for your kind words :) The game gets big and so I spent time on design and organization. The next big feature (tree evolution!) requires a lot of work on different aspects and, for different reasons, I do not develop much lately. I hope I could work more on it soon and deliver a great update! But no clearly defined time frame, sorry.
This is a fun game actually. I've always seen like plant/tree sims go really flat but this was unique. It could really use the whole seeds/upgrades system to get it from 3-5 hours of fun to a lot more. Finally streamlining the instructions could help too, I found myself restarting and failing 6 times before I finally understood how all the systems work (and unfortunately one thing wrong and you start dying). Overall though this is a really fun game to show people and see what they can do.
Amazing game, even now!
Couple of things:
I'm not sure if you still work on this but if not I would urge you to publish the source so it does not go in vain.
Thanks again!
This is honestly a pretty fun game! I've seen a few plant sims but none are quite as well-made as this one, in terms of both functions and visuals (the art style in this is actually really pretty). It can be a little tough now and then but such is the life of a plant I guess :P
Also just out of curiosity, I saw this hasn't been updated in a while. Has this been abandoned? I mean fair enough if it has been, I'm not tryna pressure you or anything, I was just wondering if this is effectively gonna be the final version or not?
Again, this is genuinely such a nice game and I enjoyed playing it, in fact this is me making a return to it! So good job!
Thanks a lot for your post!
I haven't updated it for a long time but it hasn't been abandoned. I have big plans for this game, mainly the evolution of the tree characteristics (leaf size, root efficiency, symbiosis and much more) using produced seeds, enabling the new tree generation to better adapt to harsher environments. And also the management of external conditions like wind and parasites.
Unfortunately for this game, in the meantime, I found a real job and had some children :p
Also, I have bad tendency to spread over several projects and I have at least two game prototypes in progress...
But messages like yours are always a boost, giving me the motivation to continue :)
Thanks again and see you soon!
sadly you can't use seeds in this version, I have to work on it and release the next version. The idea is to use the seeds to create a new generation of trees to be more efficient and adapt to other climatic conditions. But well done to have managed to produce seeds, try to have as many as possible ;) And also you can post a screenshot of you beautiful tree :)
