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Flowering Plants Of The Outer Worlds's itch.io pageNames and Email Addresses of ALL Team Members
Mandy J Watson (for privacy purposes you have my address on file).
Categories Your Team is Eligible For
Overall, hobbyist, diversity, best art, technical excellence, best narrative, best humour, The Rohun Ranjith Prize. (72 hours.)
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Comments
Top notch writing (as always) with a unique setting and lots of room for expansion. I can appreciate something cozy coming from this year's theme, so thank you for the lovely entry.
That's really kind of you to say - thank you!
All fair points. I just didn't have time to add the rest of it, including more complicated and interesting endings (and story indications of what you could be aiming for). The tradeoff was to have at least something - in this case a good ending and a bad ending - so that there is a complete story loop for the player rather than a broken jam game with no ending. I had also planned a basic game of nine plants/planets (three easy, three medium, three hard) but only had enough time to add two easy and one hard. In a not-jam game I would add even more, of course.
I have a couple of random events in the game that can negatively or positively affect your resources but I had intended to add a lot more plus some probability things you would know about and could anticipate/try to plan for.
In reading about Midnight Staircase I came across Aaron A Reed's description of it for Fallen London, a game I play, and, honestly, the Midnight Staircase aspect of that game is the most boring, grindy part of it (it's also a significant part of the game) so I had that in my head as I was designing my game, unfortunately. I also, as I mentioned in another comment, lost a lot of time in the beginning because I had planned to make a game in Bitsy and then had to pivot when I realised I couldn't make this theme work in it.
I do feel that I've got the basics of a good game here but it needs time and work outside of the constraints and pressure of a jam so I've put it in the circle-back pile (although that pile is getting bigger every year). If/when I get back to it I'll definitely take everything you've said into account as it's very helpful. Thank you.
It’s cool to see I’m not the only one who made a text-based adventure! The visuals are really clean, and the dialogue reads nicely. I honestly don’t have much feedback to give, but maybe adding some sound effects could enhance the overall feel of the game. Additionally, incorporating a few more dynamic elements could help add some visual variety to the experience.
Overall, cool game!
All those things are always on the list but I didn't even finish adding all the plants/planets and story/stat randomisation elements that I wanted to include, nevermind people and plant art, which were something I'd also intended to do.
I had actually planned to make a Bitsy game because I've done so many Twine games in the past, especially for the SA Game Jams, but the theme, unfortunately, didn't suit Bitsy, which has a far more simplified, and somewhat cumbersome, way of handling variables and state transitions. I lost a lot of time trying to figure out if I could do something in Bitsy and eventually gave up on that hope and moved over to Twine to do the best that I could do in the time that I had left.
If you're interested, I'd recommend looking at my Twine games The Mischievous Thievery Of Jessica The Cat and You Will Not Live. Jessica is a long term project where I am able to work at my own pace and I'm using it to experiment and test stuff (it was quite an accomplishment getting the audio working), as well as work on narrative writing. YWNL was a 2021 SA Game Jam entry, which I still don't know how I managed to do in three days but I was just in the zone that weekend (excuse the bugs).
Thanks for playing and for your comments.
Now I know what its like to work for space NetFlorist :) Well done and good luck with the jam :)
NetFlorist is an absolute hack. The Extrasolar Botany Association is the real deal - and it doesn't make offensive radio ads or spam you with marketing messages either.
(Although, actually, I've made a note of that for my list of possible extra things to add if I do a game revision in the future.)