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Void Garden's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Originality | #1 | 4.600 | 4.600 |
| Audio | #1 | 4.533 | 4.533 |
| Graphics | #3 | 4.400 | 4.400 |
| Overall | #7 | 3.689 | 3.689 |
| Fun | #14 | 2.933 | 2.933 |
| Theme | #19 | 3.000 | 3.000 |
| Controls | #20 | 2.667 | 2.667 |
Ranked from 15 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Godot Version
3.1 stable
Source
https://github.com/ClementRivaille/Void-Garden
Game Description
A musical game with no goal or challenge. Just relax while your space garden grows and creates music.
Controls
Use the mouse for everything, ESC to open menu.
Discord Username
Itooh
Participation Level
First time
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Comments
My let's play...
Thank you so much for your video! I'm really happy you enjoyed the game that much.
Not sure I will continue working on the game. However I will certainly reuse some of its code. I like making musical games, and letting the player arrange its own melodies.
Wow, well I'm looking forward to playing other games you make. :D
This game has my heart and my ears. My brain feels like there needs to be some tweaks to help it catch up with the others. I'm not sure what could help, I think the previous comments touch on possible improvements. One thing I was thinking was the have a sort of macro-recording ability where the player selects a ship, hits "record" and then they control the ship for a short period of time using the arrow keys and then the recording ends and that's the ship's loop until they record another direction setting.
I loved this entry. The visual and musical style reminds me of Katamari Damacy, which is a series I hold close to my heart, and I am also a music nerd who is into "chance music" and stuff like that. I also see echoes of Conway's Game of Life here. I understand the complaints that it's "not really a game", but IMO a game is really whatever you want it to be. I would love to see this expanded, perhaps allowing for something like "trees" or other varieties of plants to be generated if a chord is formed, things like that. I think ways to "progress" could be added without putting the controls directly back into the players hands, and still preserving the zen, "let it do it's own thing" mentality that helps make this game what it is. Thank you for making this!
I really feel a lot of potential in this game. Sadly it's taken down by the weird control system, which could work if the game were turn-based, ie. you could pause to plan out next few movements.
I deeply enjoyed the atmosphere and simplicity there, and the fact that you made the black hole the "good guy" here. ^^
Yes, the UX should encourage the player to plan its moves, but currently it gives the illusion that they should try to directly control the ship by clicking on its next move. One idea I had recently was to let the player only edit the next cycle of five moves. However I would need to re-think the interface to make that visually intuitive. I want the game to remain very simple.
Thank you for your feedback!
The art style is nice and the sounds are very soothing. Great work! I do find the ships' movement patterns to be a little bit erratic. Wasn't able to control them very well.
The ships are completely erratic I agree! The best way to play might be to let them do their thing, or trying to plan several moves ahead, by looking at their cycles. But the game doesn't convey well enough that idea.
Happy that you liked the art and sounds though. Thanks!
Very unique. It took some time for me to figure out what was going on but it has very relaxing sounds and graphics. There could be more game but it's a interesting concept.
Actually there was supposed to be a score, and maybe an end, but I ditched it out because it wasn't really satisfying. The flowers came later, and turned out to feel way more rewarding! I still used an old “trick” to create a bit of challenge at the beginning: not including any tutorial, letting the player figure out how it works. :P Not compatible with every games, but this one was apparently simple enough to try that.
Thank you for playing!
I like this a lot. I had a few audio tearing/clipping issues. Sounded like lots of clicks. Otherwise, I really liked the audio.
The aesthetic is great! Remined me of mini-metro.
Yes, on some machine there happens to be a lot of audio stuttering. :/ Might be a performance issue. I hope it didn't impacted too much your experience!
I'm happy you mention mini-metro! At some point I used it as a reference, since there is a lot of interesting things in this game (the aesthetic, the sound-design, the feeling of starting with something very basic that becomes more and more complex…). I envisaged to reproduce its zoom out effect (starting close to the black hole, then enlarging the view), but it would have been a bit tricky to warp the ships around.
Thank you for your comment!
This was, um, neat. You have a good sense for design. Just next time, could you uh...make and actual game maybe? 😁
Haha, that's always a challenge!^^' Sometimes I just find a system interesting enough to not need score or victory. In this case it was even incompatible, as the controls are too random to provide a real sense of accomplishment. So flowers it was!
But yeah, next time, I should see if I could fit in some challenge or goals. In fact, I initially wanted to do a puzzle game. Obvisously it didn't worked out well!
Thank you for playing!
Kept it on while checking out some other entries, this is the result: :)
Graphics are very nice! I think its a nice idea but I'd like to program my seed workers a bit more efficient. Its very frustrating now to play actively. And running it while doing something else kind of defeats the purpose of the game. Original entry though!
Yeah, there's way more randomness than I anticipated. At some point, the purpose of the controls is only to alter the melody a bit, while watching the ship doing their thing.
Thank you again for your feedback!
Hi!
Game is pretty,
Music is relaxing,
Idea is interesting.
But ! trying to control ship is stressful, confusing and frustrating inthe end.
There should be also right mouse button option to rotate arrows counterclockwise.
Great start!
I actually thought to implement right mouse clicking. But I discarded it, thinking it would encourage players to try to play “fast”. So movement is intentionally slow, to makes player think two or three movements ahead. But… that wasn't enough, as a lot of players still try to directly control the ship.^^
Thank you for playing! :)
“Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game.” Soren Johnson
So damn true.
Actually, there's even a winning strategy I couldn't remove from the game. If the ship goes in one single direction, it is almost certain to catch every seeds. But the result is incredibly boring! I crossed fingers hoping players wouldn't find that out. :P
The presentation is nice; clean graphics, good music, good use of sound effects; but trying to actively control the ships is quite frustrating. It makes you think that if you're _just_ fast enough, you can control where the ship will go each time; but that sort of fast, stressy control goes against the zen atmosphere of the rest of the game, so I find it's better just to let things play out.
Thank you! I agree the game feels way better once you “let off” everything. My intention was to make the player think around the cycles the ship makes, rather than the immediate direction it takes. But the game poorly encourage this way of playing.