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Treelogy

Grow, Balance, Adapt. A strategy game where you're a tree. · By Tortue

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A topic by Tortue created Jul 11, 2017 Views: 3,102 Replies: 47
Viewing posts 1 to 21
Developer (1 edit)

I switch from a single comment thread to a discussion board and, due to how Itch manage this, previous comments are no more visible :(

The first discussion takes place here on Reddit

You have now a dedicated thread to all you comments, criticism, ideas and encouragement. Thanks!

Why does the arrow on the right of the profit/reduction go up and down? I don't get how to play this because it's very non-descriptive.

Developer (1 edit)

Bars at the bottom left

From left to right:

  • Consumption (brown) divided in several segments representing consumption of roots, leaves, flowers and fruits.
  • Balance (red/green) red when consume more than produce, you lose sap. green for the inverse.
  • Production (combination of yellow and blue bars), aka photosynthesis.
    • energy (yellow) from leaves
    • water (blue) from roots

Energy and water depend on weather conditions and so can go up and down, impacting the production accordingly.

Gauge at the bottom right

Your sap reserve. Impacted by the balance, i.e. it can fill up or empty more or less quickly depending on consumption and production.

You need sap to grow branches and roots. The circular indicator appearing when you extend something show you how much it will take from the sap reserve.

Why is it so unclear?

I know I have some work to make the game and interface more self-descriptive, it must be integrated to the game (because nobody reads documentation) as tutorial or tooltips. It's a bit of work.

I'm actively working on the game and i'm currently  focused on gameplay and features, which are the most important. And I don't want to spend time on explaining things that might change in a near future. But I'll do it for sure.

I hope that I have helped and that you can enjoy the game! Thanks for feedback.

I suppose that answers most things, but why is it that even when I have more water and energy, the arrow from that side, and hence profit, doesn't go higher? It stays below.

Developer

ok I see. The white graduations (bottom left) indicates sap units, you must have energy and water bars above one graduation to produce a new unit of sap.

More precisely, you need several units of water (say 3) and energy (say 5) to produce one unit of sap. So if you collect 12 water and 9 energy you still produce only one sap and blue bar is 9 units above white line and yellow bar 4 units above.

You really should state that somewhere. It took a month for me to find that out, before it looked very random.

Developer

Indeed it's not really clear. I added one line about this in the Respiration section, maybe it's not enough and could be better explained but I don't want to overload the documentation (i'll do a complete guide later). Thanks for pointing this out.

It'd probably be considerably better if there was an indicator for the amounts of sun/water needed to up the production, or if there were floating point numbers here, rather than only integral amounts of sap being produced.

Developer

I chose to use natural numbers to represent the photosynthesis (it seemed to me more logical) but indeed it's disturbing and finally with floating point numbers it will be much clearer. I'll try it (currently I am a little overloaded :/ ). Thanks!

Yeah, it turned out pretty confusing :P

No worries, good luck with whatever it is that's overloading you!

Ah! Thanks! That makes so much sense now! If there's anything that's hard to grasp, it's that. I love it though! I tried your Minesweeper game too, and I loved it!

Developer

Great! Thanks! Do not hesitate to rate the games it will help for visibility :)

Deleted 6 years ago
Developer

no download, it's a web game. Doesn't work on mobile.

Really love this, hope to see more features soon. 

Developer

Glad to hear that! A minor update is scheduled in a few day and many exciting features will come soon!

I love this game, but just experienced a really stupid game function. I had a BEASTLY tree grown, 62 seeds in a single drop and used a little over half my sap.

I accidentally clicked twice and produced two batches of seeds.

From there, there is NOTHING you can do. Your tree dies. The seeds stay in their half-matured state, eating up ALL of the sap you're producing, until all your leaves die.

This, to me, is super dumb. There should be a "drop seeds" option.  Or click to manually drop a premature seed, something. My tree could have done, like, thousands of seeds in batches of 62. But because I clicked twice, it died. All that work wasted. :(

Developer

oh no :( I'm sorry for your tree. You spotted a real problem, it's a pity that the tree dies just for a mistake.

I like your solutions, I think the "drop seeds" button is better but I like the idea of manually drop selected flower or fruit. I'll work on it soon.

Thanks a lot for your feedback!

Hi, I'm looking forward to seeing the evolution system.  Can I suggest you should explain that a long root still has only 1 uptake, so to get more water you need to split the roots.

Also, I don't understand on the world map when you mouse over a spot on the earth a chart appears in the top right with think blue and yellow lines. What are those lines?

Developer

Hi, evolution system is a big piece with several aspects, i'm working on it and i'll try to release a first iteration soon even if it's partial and not the final system yet.

Indeed, i forgot to explain that only root extremity collects water. I know it's not so obvious despite the visual hint (blue pulsing circles). I'll add it in the doc.

The top right chart is the climat of the region. It shows the evolution of humidity and luminosity range over one cycle (a year). You can see seasonality and periods of rain and drought. The actual value for a particular day will be in the range defined by the line thickness. In game, you can see a little white dot around the humidity and luminosity charts (top right) which indicates where you are in the cycle. (yeah I have to document this too somewhere).

Thanks!

great. thanks for the explanation, and appreciating my feedback.

can I also suggest that if a tree runs out of sap when fruiting that the fruit dies - this would stop it from freezing up or the tree dieing :)

Developer

yep, dying fruit is in the todo list! 

This is beautiful. :)

I'll give it a more serious shot later, but the Tree Gallery tree looks awesome, great work!

I like the water depth mechanic! Creating the different root shapes depending on where the water is.

Maybe you could add some form of phototropism? To do something similar with the branches.

Developer

yeah! Phototropism would be great.  I plan to do it (even if i didn't know the word, thanks to you), something like the higher it is, the more luminosity there is, and some shadow area to simulate the other trees around, as if we were in a forest. It'll be really interesting and add some constraints in the growth of branches. Thanks!

Haha, I didn't remember the name as well, only mechanism.

But yeah, that is exactly as I meant it. Looking forward to it!

Developer

Thanks! I'm also amazed by the gallery :) You can add your tree too!

I really like the game and commented on the old section.

But there is a real problem: Once your tree began to die, there is no turnaround manageable. If you growed to much, SAP is empty and first leaves were gone, production goes down while consumption stays high. There has to be a way to fix the problem - either by letting branches die to reduce the consumption manually, or automatically by reducing the consumption when the leaves die.

Now I have some sceleton trees on the map, and there is no way to restart the level.

Developer

I have to check for leaves but I know there is a problem with flowers and fruits than can really kill the tree instead of just rotting and falling. I will work on this but meanwhile you already can manually cut outer branches by clicking on them (it's in the doc in Tips section but you know i struggle a bit to have a simple and clear doc..), this is not the most convenient but it can really save your tree!

I'll also add a way to reset a level, maybe it could give some resource (like wood) depending on the current tree in the level to make something with it :)

Thanks again!

any chance of this still being developed? its so fun to play

Developer

Yes :) I'll be sad if i don't implement some ideas for this game. But i don't take time currently,  I'll try to do soon. Thanks for your interest!

Love the game! Just wondering if there's any time frame for an update? Love the ideas for developing the game further and looking forward to it!

Developer

Thanks for your kind words :) The game gets big and so I spent time on design and organization. The next big feature (tree evolution!) requires a lot of work on different aspects and, for different reasons, I do not develop much lately.  I hope I could work more on it soon and deliver a great update! But no clearly defined time frame, sorry. 

i love this game so much, it works well as a background to music.  

Developer

haha :) thanks !

This is a fun game actually. I've always seen like plant/tree sims go really flat but this was unique. It could really use the whole seeds/upgrades system to get it from 3-5 hours of fun to a lot more. Finally streamlining the instructions could help too, I found myself restarting and failing 6 times before I finally understood how all the systems work (and unfortunately one thing wrong and you start dying). Overall though this is a really fun game to show people and see what they can do. 

Developer

Thanks a lot! I'm a little busy these days but I hope to take the time soon to bring it to the next level!

Love this game, keep up the good work!

Amazing game, even now!

Couple of things:

  • My first "a-ha" moment was when I realized that roots indicate where the water is and don't die by themselves
  • My next "a-ha" moment was when I checked tree gallery and realized that roots can intersect. Felt like cheating. I love it! It's mother nature, everything goes!
  • Removing of roots/braches doesn't work for me
  • There's no update system as far as I understand.

I'm not sure if you still work on this but if not I would urge you to publish the source so it does not go in vain.

Thanks again!

This is honestly a pretty fun game! I've seen a few plant sims but none are quite as well-made as this one, in terms of both functions and visuals (the art style in this is actually really pretty). It can be a little tough now and then but such is the life of a plant I guess :P 

Also just out of curiosity, I saw this hasn't been updated in a while. Has this been abandoned? I mean fair enough if it has been, I'm not tryna pressure you or anything, I was just wondering if this is effectively gonna be the final version or not? 

Again, this is genuinely such a nice game and I enjoyed playing it, in fact this is me making a return to it! So good job!

Yes, seems to be abandoned - I also enjoyed this a lot and it is sad!

Developer (1 edit) (+1)

Thanks a lot for your post!

I haven't updated it for a long time but it hasn't been abandoned. I have big plans for this game, mainly the evolution of the tree characteristics (leaf size, root efficiency, symbiosis and much more) using produced seeds, enabling the new tree generation to better adapt to harsher environments. And also the management of external conditions like wind and parasites.


Unfortunately for this game, in the meantime, I found a real job and had some children :p
Also, I have bad tendency to spread over several projects and I have at least two game prototypes in progress...

But messages like yours are always a boost, giving me the motivation to continue :)
Thanks again and see you soon!

how do i use seeds its not clear about this. i have seeds but what are they doing for m,e

Developer

sadly you can't use seeds in this version, I have to work on it and release the next version. The idea is to use the seeds to create a new generation of trees to be more efficient and adapt to other climatic conditions. But well done to have managed to produce seeds, try to have as many as possible ;) And also you can post a screenshot of you beautiful tree :)

they keep dieing im finding it difficult to keep sap production up idk whyi cant seem to keep production up

(+1)

hay i have one idea that i think the creator would like make a pine tree so when you click and aria where you want to make a tree there should be an option to be like a Maple tree or a pine tree basically an option to have different types of trees

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really like the game! also i was wondering how close the update is

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WAKE UP TORTUE. WE NEED U NOW!!!!!!11

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This game is ridiculous. I make a giant tree, I have huge energy surplus, I decide to make seeds, and suddenly my huge surplus turns into and even greater shortage. Stupid!!!!!!!