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Symbiosis's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Topic | #4 | 3.889 | 3.889 |
| Visuals | #5 | 4.444 | 4.444 |
| Sound | #5 | 3.778 | 3.778 |
| Creativity | #6 | 3.889 | 3.889 |
| WOWIE! | #17 | 3.111 | 3.111 |
| Fun | #18 | 3.000 | 3.000 |
| Simplicity | #37 | 3.000 | 3.000 |
Ranked from 9 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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Comments
Its fun, but just by trying ramdom combinations you can win, so maybe more difficult levels could make the game better. And more than 3 plants makes it a little bit complicated... Nice game!
The instructions weren't clear enough, so here's a summary:
- Flowers determine which tiles are affected by the pollen, affected tiles get highlighted when dragging a seed.
- If two plants have different stems, their pollen is toxic to each other.
- If two adjacent plants share the same leaves, extra points are awarded.
- To win you must plant every single seed and have no dead plants.
This game was a lot of fun, however the many different types of plant make it more complicated than it needs to be. It would also be nice if you can see the plots that are currently used by the plants already placed. The highscore system also didn't seem to work, but that didn't really matter.
I kind of think that the lack of clear instructions makes the game look harder than it is. The rules can be boiled down to this:
- Flowers determine which tiles are affected by their pollen, affected tiles get highlighted when dragging a seed.
- If two plants have different stems, their pollen is toxic to each other.
- If two adjacent plants share the same leaves, extra points are awarded.
- To win you must plant every single seed and have no dead plants.
Are these instructions making the game look simpler? I was also planning to highlight the influenced tiles when the player puts the mouse over a plant, due to lack of time I didn't add that and yes, the highscore system is bugged. Thanks for the feedback btw!
Yes thank you, that makes it a lot more clear. I thought that none of the blue tiles could overlap with the ones from the plants you have already placed. And it is quite difficult to remember which tiles are already occupied (blue) by the plants that are placed, so I thought it would be helpfull if the player can see which tiles are already occupied. But how do you know which plants are toxic to each other and which one aren't?
They are toxic to each other when they have different stems. Think of it as chess, pieces of the same color (stems in the case of symbiosis) cannot kill each other. I didn't have time to implement a feature that shows affected tiles by a plant when you mouse over it, the best way to check that would be by replanting the seed or memorizing the patterns, which are pretty simple. There's only 3 different flowers in the game so the player would only need to learn 3 patterns (the eye flower affects all tiles in the same row and column, the diamond flower affects tiles diagonally and the carnivore flower forms a ring).
Cool idea and very fitting for the topic. Also looks and sounds pretty great. I think having every plant consist out of 3 parts makes it a little more complicated than it needs to be. Would probably be even more fun with just some simple predefined plants and that would still allow for some fantastic puzzles. The text at the beginning was hard to read. :D
I think that the lack of good instructions makes it look more complicated than it really is. The game itself can be compared to chess (which is easy to learn but hard to master). In chess pieces have two "parts": piece type (bishop, rook, etc) and color (black or white). In Symbiosis flowers can be compared to the type of piece in chess, they determine the way they "attack" but instead of attacking they affect the tiles with their pollen. The color of the pieces can be compared to stems, two pieces won't be able to kill each other if they share the same color; same rule for Symbiosis. Finally, leaves just give extra points to the player if two adjacent plants share the same leaves; this adds an optimization aspect to the game. Leaves can totally be ignored if the player just wants to win the level. The main reason I decided to do modular plants was the possible amount of combinations, with 3 flowers, 3 stems and 3 leaves I get 27 different plants. Thanks for the valuable feedback btw!