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Fungal Bloom's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| INNOVATION | #19 | 3.308 | 3.308 |
| THEME | #40 | 3.308 | 3.308 |
| AUDIO | #56 | 2.846 | 2.846 |
| HUMOR | #72 | 2.000 | 2.000 |
| GRAPHICS | #75 | 3.000 | 3.000 |
| OVERALL | #79 | 2.692 | 2.692 |
| MOOD | #80 | 2.615 | 2.615 |
| ENJOYMENT | #116 | 2.231 | 2.231 |
Ranked from 13 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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Comments
Great Game! There was a lot to read and took me a while to get the hang of it, but enjoyed it! Good job.
I realized that there was a simple mistake preventing the win condition from triggering when the player achieved more than the goal of 10 total decayed tiles. This, undoubtably, affected many players' experience
Really cool game! I feel this had a clear scope that allowed for many creative cards, and I like the use of events and enemies.
I don't think a full on tutorial is necessary, but I do think indicators might be when starting out; what the numbers mean on cards and tiles, hover pop-ups with names for the resources counters, and how the 'decay health' for different tiles would've been helpful. Kind of explaining the obvious, but once you know that, the UI/UX is very navigable
I enjoyed playing after learning the rules! I started by just using matching cards to tile decay rates. Then rolled many forest tiles, so i could win in 6 turns with mushroom spores hehe ^^' I'd want to play longer to experiment and strategize with other cards. Also figure out nutrient optimization, adapting around events, and when to focus on defense
I don't know whether it was intended to have resources go negative, but that happened depending on what I picked early, which meant for several turns I couldn't move, but might've been a skill issue with resource allocation.
Long post, but overall I'm really impressed with the work, in a short span too. Mostly trying to engage with it as someone who's new to strategy games but wants to learn more. I'm curious how you approached balancing or playstyles when creating this?
Also I don't know if you also did the soundtrack, but it is really relaxing and fits, kinda reminds me of ESO
In such a short timeframe, balancing was mostly done via intuition. Considering that, I'm relevantly happy with how the final result ended up turning out in terms of my goals for how strategically deep I wanted the final result to be.
I was aware that the resources could go negative. This was deliberately left in (it would have been a trivial change, naturally). Whether that was correct from a balance perspective is a bold question. Adds a relevant bit more challenge, which I intuitively liked, so I kept it in. Thematically, you could consider some events in some situations (partially from lack of preparation) so detrimental that recovering from them may in fact be impossible and a restart may be required
The music is from a copyright free source (I do personally do some piano compositions, but in such a short timeframe, making something specifically for this jam game was non-viable). The Sound effects were created by me with a sound effect generator application.
Interesting, thanks for sharing. Yea I'd be very happy myself with this!
That makes sense on negative resources, I do like the idea of detrimental events, and 'restart threats'. Maybe something like casting cards could be an interesting way for the player to salvage/prepare for them, in addition to beneficial events. Or event rarity by tiles (I found myself planning around tiles). It is an interesting balancing problem, and I admire the game's achievement on that given the complexity.
I'd love to play more of your games in the future (hope to hear some piano too)!
Out of my other games published on itch, "[Kanin]" and "Prayers and Precipitations" both feature a bit of my music (not specifically written for those games, necessarily, but fitting selections from what I've done). Both ~4 week jam games. "[Kanin]" is the odd game out, in terms of genre, compared to the other 4 games I presently have on Itch, mainly because for that Jam I wanted to see what I could do more so in terms of art/animation assets than actual mechanics.
Pretty cool concept. I just think a tutorial should be added to better understand it because it took me a while to get it. It's very detailed for a 48h jam so props to you for that. Also the game randomly froze up on me when I was towards the end so that was a bummer.
Yup, a tutorial definitely would have been among the next highest priorities, given more time.
I think this game was just not meant for me. It was hard for me to fully understand how to engage with the game in a meaningful way and strategize to grow the colony. I do appreciate the underlying game system and think you killed it with descriptions!
-R
Lacking a tutorial (which would have been among next high priorities, given more time), yes, the game was a bit too heavy in complexity. All the information is there, but it requires a few attempts to learn it well to perform well.
Honest thoughts would be you’ve got a really cool idea here, good systems, good use of theme, mechanics seem to work well, a leaderboard, but the UI to me was almost unusable. Might just be my browser but I couldn’t actually read any of the in game text. The art on the cards is nice, bonus points if you made them?
Looks like you have a very good game systems wise and idea wise, but the actual presentation right now makes it hard to play and enjoy which I would like to as I do think it is very cool.
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I'm quite amazed by how much variety of card types, enemies and events there were. That said, this seems to come back to bite you as per the lack of a tutorial. That said I spent a decent bit of time sitting down and trying to learn it and found a fairly well-made strategic card game! Some instructions and a few visual flourishes to provide more direct feedback for when/why a fungus dies and you're set. Good work!
Glad you took the diligent time to learn and enjoy it. Thus is a bit of the nature of attempting a strategy game design in such a short time frame. Spend too little time on the depth, a tutorial is unnecessary and there's no real game there. Spend too much time on the depth, a tutorial is fundamentally necessary but there is no time. No regrets though. I'm happy with how it turned out, even though it could of used a bit more polish
I thought I had cleared all the crashes, but I may have missed something in my testing since it seems a couple of people have hit it (I haven't personally yet been able to replicate). Thus is the nature of a relatively ambitious design with limited time to test.
Pretty cool game, I love mushrooms, they are one of my favorite things in biology. The game was very confusing without a tutorial, and with a large amount of flavor text, I would reccomend maybe color coding what each fungus does in the text, like, increasing nutrients is green text etc. The art was phenomenal, if you drew it then congrats, and if you just put a filter over real photos then, fair enough. The music was nice and calm and the sound effects were good. In the end my game crashed, presumably because I had too many resources or active tiles at once (the whole board was infected by my mushrooms), and I didn't know if i was winning or losing. But other than that, cool game, keep making more!
The lack of a tutorial made it very difficult to understand what exactly I was doing, even after spreading decay all over the place I still had no clue if I was even winning or not. Also the game started to lag quite a lot once more and more tiles were active on the field at the same time, so it became difficult to continue to progress in the game. Other than that, I think the concept is sound, it just needs a bit more mechanical polish to really make it shine :)
Your thumbnail is really cool. The images in the game are a little blurry and fuzzy, probably because it's interpolating them from a lower resolution. You should see if you can get it to render with nearest-neighbor or true pixel upscaling or something. Aside from that, the art is really high-quality. I don't play a lot of card or strategy games, so I don't think I really understood all of the nuance of what was going on. It would be nice to have a tutorial level or something to ease into. I like how events in one tile can affect the environment of another.
Also, Godot FTW!
Yup, a tutorial would have been among the next top priorities given more time