itch.io

This was a fun, well-polished game! I loved how the balloon would change in appearance everytime you bought a new upgrade, and I thought that overall, both the presentation and music was very charming. I think the lever mechanic was quite unique even if it was obsoleted by the end-game too!

Hey thank you very much! The agency is definitely abstracted out a layer due to the way the plants follow their own rules, and even when upgrading their characteristics, you really have to know what to look out for when watching the simulation if you want to see the effect that you've had. I agree it could have been clearer for sure, AND, I also wanted to implement a direct form of agency where you were able to specifically click to build walls and place/kill plants, but that was out of scope for the demo.

I was going for a more abstract evolutionary pressure, where the growing number of plants were competing for the limited simulation space, and also the pressure of meeting/beating the increasing simulation reset costs, but the concepts were definitely not as apparent as most other entries in the jam!

In any case, thanks so much for playing it!!

Just to let everyone know, I now have a web version of this game up now! It's probably entirely too late since the initial voting rush has happened now, but it's there now for anyone who wants to try it :)

Just FYI, I've updated the game based on your suggestion - check out the v1.2 patchnotes at the bottom of the description section!

Just FYI, I've updated the game based on your suggestion - check out the v1.2 patchnotes at the bottom of the description section!

Wow, thank you so much! That's incredibly high praise! I did have quite a few ideas on where I was going to take this that have been left unimplemented like a third type of point that rewards plants living across ticks, running multiple simulations simultaneously, sidegrade/replacements to certain plants that would essentially give you different loadouts, and as you have suggested, some kind of metaprogression where your starting runs become stronger etc...

Thanks again for playing the game and for your kind words!

Thank you! I think you hit on a very important point - I'm making an incremental but I completely failed to think about players who wanted to keep playing past the goal I've set out for them and just go ham on the simulation. I'll add another option that simply disables the victory condition check so you can upgrade to your heart's content!

Thank you so much! I think allowing resizing is just a checkbox on the export - I'll get back to you and reply again to this comment when I've figured it out!

Hey thank you for checking it out! The simulation can get very complex, I definitely agree - the main thing is to eyeball it and just see if your plants are looking happy and your numbers on the side are going up! Some of my more experienced playtesters can then form strategies based on that information but honestly it's more eye candy than anything else :)

Thanks! Plant indeed goes brrr (sometimes...)

"You may now go back and view your tank" 

Aw yeah, you know that's what we are all here for!

This was really cool! I'm big on minimalist, functional UI, especially for incrementals, and yours was spot-on. The game felt very balanced and having to maintain your pressure in the early game kept me feeling engaged as I looked through the upgrades and tried to make the various products. I feel like you wanted people to experiment with different temp/pressure/fill values in order to generate the products you need to progress, but I would have liked just a touch of guidance for the non-petrochemical engineers like myself!

I mentioned this in my reply to you already but I thought both the cat and enemy art (+ names and types) were absolutely hilarious. The gacha aspect really hooked me too and after getting lucky with the rarest pressurized coin cats, I was able to grind out the rest of the money needed to get the rest of the normal ones and was rewarded with some very cute cat pictures. Great job!

Thank you! I was overall quite happy with how things turned out. I think the music was great (even if the loops were a bit short like you said), but having them come in one by one depending on which plants you take always brought a smile to my face while testing and watching others playtest!

Hey thank you very much! Yes, balancing was an absolute nightmare and you can absolutely win starting with any plant, although some definitely take a bit more luck than others (that's why Conway is always there as an initial choice if the other two plants are subpar)! As you noticed, I found that if I made costs scale in the crazy way that the points do by mid-end game (which is very dependent on your mutations), early-mid game was almost impossible to survive through, and like you said, it would have felt bad losing a run where you were starting to snowball. I don't have much experience with incrementals but I do have some ideas for future balancing passes though! Thanks again for playing!

VERY good video game

Congrats to everyone who submitted a game, and of course to the winners as well! Woo! 

Thanks! This is nice for people like me who are shy about commenting but still want to show people that I had fun with their games!

I like writing a ton (and not just for the game, mind you) so rather than spamming the thread with a wall of text, here's a postmortem about our entry into the jam (The Best Birthday)!

Wow, thank you so much! Really happy to hear you liked our game and I'm glad you thought we did the theme justice!

 Honestly, doing pixel art in this silly style was quite fun, so I'm sure we'll do more like this in future. Thanks again!

Yep, that's correct - my apologies for the confusion, I have updated the game page with the clarification!

That's great news, thanks for the response! In that case I'll make the game public and then email the source code to you guys.

I'd also like to know how exactly to provide the source code to yoyo while still keeping the project public! Would be great if I didn't have to stress about this during the final hours before submission!

Thanks a ton!! It was a lot of fun to take part in your gamejam, and your theme was great! The team and I pretty much agree on all of your feedback, I definitely wrote way too much text but as we were throwing the tutorial together last minute, we didn't have time to do up some infographics. Regarding the different powers and their lack of use, originally we were planning to have certain obstacles types require certain powers to get through effectively, but in the end we were only able to implement a few different ones!