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The artstyle is really adorable! I would love to see some stylized sky matching that style tho! I feel like that could pull the artstyle together even more. It's really cool how you managed to create labyrinth style environments that don't fell too confusing or overwhelming! And I'm not sure if I'm imagining the effect but does the landscape of the crystal world have a slight curvature to it? If yes, that's really awesome (I always love those globe effects especially with space themed games)

This is a very sweet game! Being in the shoes of a plant trying to grow towards the sun really puts me in that happy spring mood and makes me appreciate the wonders nature creates each spring :D Just a very nice experience! Also I love the mixed media look of handdrawn game elements and the sunny photo background!!

Is this what it feels like to win at capitalism? LOL This was a lot of fun and very humorful and charming! Watching the numbers grow with the great VFX and SFX feedback felt very satisfying! And I really appreciated the visual novel style poses of the characters :D

The art is very cozy and I really like the theme of this game! I also wasn't able to beat it, the best result I got was two dry tiles left. Like other people suggested a few easier level to get into it would be an awesome idea! Or maybe more than one selection pattern (e.g. instead of the 5 tile cross a 2x2 tile selection to change the environment. Maybe this could be seen as a resource to bring an extra layer of strategy to the game: The player has 3x 5 tile cross selection, 2x 2x2 tile selection, 1x a 1 tile selection available or something like that)

This is such a specific aspect of spring new beginnings and I love it!

This is such a cozy experience! The art is beautiful and reminds me a lot of styles that can be found in picture books! Everything just feels very cohesive with this game!

Great work! This game was very engaging! Personally the start felt a bit slow, but maybe that was just my play style. I usally moved quite a bit away from the hives to collect nectar so it took me a bit to return and collect the honey. Maybe some kind of notification if the player moves further away (and isn't able to see the bees) could be helpful (maybe just some kind of auditory clue or something along those lines), or having the honey production phase a bit shorter at first and increasing the more honey is produced by the hive (oh no, are the bees getting even lazier?!?) that would also incentives the player to invest in all 5 bee hives. By the time I had bought all the hives the time between filling up nectar, collecting new nectar and collecting/selling the honey felt very well balanced (nectar replenishing as well!) all though I rarely needed all the hives at the same time (again might also be due to my play style). I also really liked the bee guy telling me bee facts :D

That experience was absolutely lovely! Everything matched so well, the music, dynamic of interactions, dialogue etc. You did awesome with this first game jam, I hope it was a fun experience (overscoping is a game jam/game dev staple experience ;))

That was a beautiful tale! And the art looks very lovely (loved the contrast of the sky with the more dithering pixel art look vs the rest in the conventional pixel art look). I would have loved if there was a more meaningful interaction with the koi pond though! That's such an impressive piece of art and I feel like it would have been great if it was more integrated in the story/interactions!

Such a cute game! The expeditions remind me of the feeling of walking around with a pokéwalker when I was younger :D Also incredible how many items are in this game that can be collected! Also loved the UI especially the moving cherry blossoms in the main menu!

That was an adorable experience! I loved the puns and the cute character designs!!

Thank you so much!! The visuals were all done for the jam by my awesome partner Emma (except for a bit of VFX and shader work done by myself) ✨

Thank you so much! It was definitely a tight deadline to realize our idea but we are very happy with the result :D Thanks to the amazing feedback we have received so far, we identified some points where clearer communication is very needed e.g. like you mentioned what tasks can be done/what objects can be interacted with. Having the achievement available during the game would definitely help with that communication issue as well! Thank you for organizing these lovely game jams! It’s our second time participating now and both times have been a ton of fun!

Thank you so much for playing! And also for the feedback about increasing and decreasing the water flow I'll look into improving the UX on that feature!!

Wow you really managed to break the game quite a bit (tbf we didn't stress test the collision so I'm not at all surprised that you were able to sneak out lol) Thank you so much for the list of bugs you ran into! We do want to continue to work on this project so this will definitely come in handy :D And of course thank you for playing too!!

Hey!! Thank you so much for playing :D I'm glad you enjoyed the game!! Saving achievements across playthroughs is an awesome idea (and a good excuse to finally look into save systems). And you did not miss anything with the achievments that are only triggered at the end! I wanted to implement a system that rates the players progress with the garden after the time is up. There wasn't enough time to properly implement that system so I scraped it for now but I still wanted the achievements that were awarded during this part to remain in the game. So for now they are awarded silently but that's definitely a part that is hopefully better communicated once we update the game!

I still had them saved in my tabs so here you go: this playlist was extremely helpful when it comes to learning about Render Textures in Unreal (specifically the Unreal Live Training, I worked with similar systems to the one used in this game jam before so I wasn't entirely new to the set-up but skipping through the playlist helped a lot), this video shows how the system is used for a dynamic landscape, and  finally, similar to the last one, this video except with a method that is a bit easier to set-up (which works incredibly well in UE4 but has some issues in 5 when it comes to height displaced Landscape and since I wanted to keep my options open I opted for the other method).

Hey! Yeah it seems like some kind of introduction/tutorial is desperately needed for the game (playtesting only for ourselves really doesn’t help with recognizing UX and communication issues) :’D The goal is to improve the garden’s liveliness by watering plants and cleaning up stuff and just have fun with different water interactions which also leads to collecting different achievements for small tasks you can do. Sometimes it helps just aiming the water at different things, like dead plants, for a bit to see what happens :D And thank you!! My partner really did some stunning work on the art!

Thank you so much for playing! I'm sorry to hear that the combination of lag and timer stressed you out! We have some graphics settings that might help with the lag (you can open the menu with escape but forgot to acknowledge that and the timer doesn't stop in the menu... probably not really a great help with the timer stress :')) Although, I don't know how much that will help with framerate issues since we weren't able to stress test performance. Just thought I would mention it (and should note the settings on our download page if someone else has similar issues). But I'm glad to hear you had fun despite the stress!!

Thank you so much! The music wasn't made by us, it's from this lovely lofi pack! Also great note on the stuff that might get buried. We are already thinking about a small cut scene at the start that's teasing what the different types of interactions are.

Thank you so much :D Yeah, a timer can definitely take away from the cozy feelings! We were trying to aim a bit more for replayability with this jam but I'm usually more the "explore on your own time" person as well!

Thank you so much for playing and for your feedback when it comes to play time! There is still a lot of balancing work left to do so it's great to hear some new perspectives. The time crunch forced us to cut some corners and a tutorial was unfortunately part of the cut content. But it's something we will keep in mind to add in the future!!

Thank you so much!! It was a lot of fun to think up the achievments and the different interactions for the water 🥰 I'm glad to hear it's appreciated!

I immediately recognized this cool style from the last winter jam! The style is really eyecatching and funky. And I really loved the mechanic, this really channeled some nostalgia of those excavation kits I always played with as a kid. Also I'm always in awe of 2D Unreal games, great job all around!

Thank you so much!! I'm glad the puddles were appreciated :D The puddles are masked out in the Material with the help of a Render Texture that is drawn on during runtime when the water collides with the Landscape. It's a bit of math to accuretly map the Render Texture to the Landscape and paint at the correct position and a few tricks in the Material to get smoother transitions (Noise mapped to the gradient of the Render Texture and some smooth stepping to blend between mud and water). If you are interested in specific ways of implementation in Unreal in can gather some resources I used to figure it out (although I couldn't follow any of them 100% because of some technical limitations).

This was super fun and adorable! It's awesome to see that you guys made a continuation for the winter jam (I just went back and also replayed the updated version of the winter jam, great work on the update it turned out amazing btw). I also love the photography mechanic, it's really perfect for a cozy game experience! If it's possible to have the pictures saved it would be awesome to take another look at them too especially since the camera gives a completely different perspective of the game.

That was a lovely experience! Absoluetly loved the UI on the harvestman's chest! That worked incredibly well with the game loop (I assume players tend to stay more on the left side to collect logs but having this important detail on the right really incentives players to not neglect that side). Also the color palette is awesome!

Hey! Thank you so much for playing! And thank you for the great feedback! We are definitely looking into making orientation easier. The interactable direction sign idea sounds like a great idea!! And fellow Unreal dev!! yay that's very nice to see!

I love the vibe! Really reminds me of getting a game for christmas and playing it as soon as I woke up the next day. I feel like it could be fun to get a bit creative with the sizes of the individual snowballs so people can create a lot of different looking snowmen (I guess that would probably create issues with the customization... thought I would mention it tho). I'm excited to see how you develop the game further!!

Very cute game! The background art gave the perfect cozy vibes! And the character art, especially the expressions are adorable :)

Thank you so much, my partner really did great work on the visuals! Yeah, that's a bug we didn't catch in time :') but we are working on fixing it! At least it will be playable once the upload isn't locked after the rating phase!

Hey!! Thank you!!! Unfortunately, that bug snuck in last minute and we only found it after the submission phase was over :( So it's not only on your laptop! We are going to update the game once the rating phase is over to fix the bug though!

Thank you so much!!