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Re-Prairie's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Audio | #7 | 4.176 | 4.176 |
| Authenticity (or, Creativity in use of resolution) | #43 | 4.118 | 4.118 |
| Overall | #64 | 3.618 | 3.618 |
| Graphics | #107 | 3.235 | 3.235 |
| Gameplay | #112 | 2.941 | 2.941 |
Ranked from 17 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Themes
Two themes stood out to me for this project:
Initially, "You are the environment" really helped me crystalize some ideas I had about designing a game about the prairie ecosystems of the American Midwest. I knew I didn't want to make a settler colonial game (or anything that strayed into that area), but that was sort of all I had on my notebook. Framing the game as coming from the perspective of the environment both gives it a novel, ecological spin AND led to a set of design principles. We don't care about a number going up, we only care about growth, winding around trash and getting a nice balance of flora.
As I worked the "peaceful" theme became more and more important. I really wanted a relaxed vibe that reflected some of the feeling of being in one of these landscapes. I actually had a mechanic that involved wildfires burning away tiles, but I scrapped it in order to stick with this formal queue. It helped give the project some focus.
Tools
This game was made in Unity, particularly using URP. I made all the sprites by drawing them with permanent marker, scanning them then using the drawings as guides for pixel art in Photoshop. I found sound clips from freesound.org and adjusted them with Audacity. I had some difficulty compressing my spritework down to the 16x16ish scale that I ended up settling on, but I think the results are stronger for it. The scintillating, flickering quality of the grass rhymes with real tall grass waving in the wind, but also reflects the material specificity of the tools / processes I employed.
Lessons
While the tools I was working with were all familiar, this jam really productively held me to a degree of economy that I'm not used to. Limited resolution and particularly limited screen space really meant I had to pick and choose what I captured and what information I shared with the players. I learned a lot about how to manipulate Unity's render pipelines, but these "soft" skills of information design and compositional balance feel like the bigger takeaways to me.
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Comments
I feel like I can fall asleep to the peaceful music in the background, the game was confusing to understand what I was doing/trying to do, the goal of the game is what I mostly didn't understand. I feel that if there was a more detailed explanation, I feel that when I understand that this will be a fun relaxing game(not saying it isn't fun) even just to mess around and listen to the ambient sounds. Keep making game, I hope to see more in the future!
Wow the peaceful vibes and ambience were so smooth here. And after reading what you wrote above, I just wanted to say well done on executing on all of that with the themes. I definitely also agree with what others said about the visibility or simpler view, but the gameplay itself and your instructions were easy to grasp. Great work overall and it's always fun to see interesting takes on the puzzle style genre in jams!
Absolutely loving what you cooked up here, the puzzle itself is nice, and the ambient created is just lovely. The ambiance, the sounds, everything is just perfect.
I somewhat want to chime in as well with some simpler view, because looking into empty tiles in the middle of grass is kinda tricky, but otherwise, really cool project! Well done!
Ah, +1'ing my response from on the main page. Thanks for playing!
After understanding what you need to do game feels soooo fun, challenging and keeps you for a quite a time. I didn't count how many retries I tried but there were a 20 at minimum. A few thing which I really needed for my better experience as a player:
- possibility to turn off the grass and leave only squares with colored sides according to plants
- possibility to "store/keep" a one tile for future
- may be some visual hints or tutorial what the game objectives/goals mean, because I didn't get what this objective:
is asking me to do...
Overall perfect idea, good realization, simple yet hard puzzles (in good manner). I really like games which forces your brain to work 😂👍🔥
Thanks for trying it out! Glad to hear parts were clicking for you.
Those are great suggestions. I definitely think a tutorial key for the goals would help a lot. (That one is overgrow 4 garbage tiles, by the by).
Togglable grass makes sense. At one point I had a button to show outlined icons for each edge, but it was pretty jarring and folks just left it on all the time. Reducing the tile to just a square with maybe some translucent whisps to suggest grass might be perfect.
I like how unusual this entry is. It is a bit confusing to interpret what is the goal at first, but I got a hang on it. The sounds are probably the best ones I have heard in all the games of this jam I have tried so far, they are very calming. :)
Great work!
Thanks for playing! :D Definitely proud of the audio on this one, since its not usually my forte.
I really enjoyed the peaceful vibe to this, the sound and visuals are lovely and I like how the environmental theme informed the puzzle design. Great submission!!
Thanks for playing! :D
This game is very beautiful and the super calm atmosphere makes you want to play but I can't get new tiles, I succeeded once without really understanding what I did... but the idea is really cool
Thanks for trying it out! I fretted over whether to add a tutorial, but seems like I should have...
For some reason this game reminded me of Tetris where I would wait for the perfect 4-block line to complete a Tetris, similarly here I would keep placeholders where I was hoping for the perfect 4 edge color combination to score a huge chunk of points at the same time.
Really fun concept, I won't go further into the visual issues already provided by the other comments. I love the vibe that I got from playing this. No time rush, just plain old fields with beautiful guitar chords to celebrate what I'm planting. I loved the details in the sounds (the birds, flies, etc), some of the visual details like the clouds etc that just add on to the game.
I think if you fix the visual, you could take this concept quite a bit further. Ideally you remove the RNG completely so it becomes purely strategy.
Loved to play, great job!
Thanks for playing! Sounds like the parts I was most proud of were working.
I agree that moving away from RNG is probably wise. I experimented with manipulating the stream of tiles so that it would gently guide you towards being able to complete your goals, but ran out of time to implement it in a way that felt better than randomness.
I think having a menu of potential goals to complete (probably with tooltip text) would also help guide the experience along. You could still have the quality where the various goals scale in difficulty as the run continues, but you would have more agency over it rather than just being saddled with something hard straight off the bat.
Cheers!
Fun game, sometimes its hard to see what sides are what, but you get used to it quickly. Very fun! well done! ^_^ <3
Yeah, visibility was definitely the biggest design problem for this project and I think I only half solved it.
Thanks for playing!
It's very hard to see what's on each side of the tiles, good game otherwise
Thanks for trying it out! I definitely struggled with balancing procedurally generating the tall grass AND controlling edge visibility. Something to tinker with further...
i really like the ambiance and style you went for :) i was a little confused on how to get more tiles, but i kept playing just because its so peaceful and relaxing
Thanks for playing. Glad to hear the vibes were coming across :D