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Idu

Grow plants with a mind of their own · By epcc, eggcapsule

I am surprised this game runs at all

A topic by asanetargoss created Jan 29, 2023 Views: 583 Replies: 2
Viewing posts 1 to 2
(+1)

This is pretty impressive. I expected lag, and indeed I did get lag once plants started growing, but it was an acceptable amount until I started pressing the fast-forward button. If I did this too much, the framerate was semi-permanently degraded until restart, pruning would be unresponsive, and saving would fail on exit.

Other noticeable issues: white font is sometimes hard to read, shadows are too intense in small recesses, resource management is frustrating, it is too easy to lose expensive items (in part due to bugs), and ladders do not work after restart.

Not as intuitive: It is hard to tell what moisture level the soil is, and it's not clear what amount of light the plants are receiving.

I am not sure how I feel about this game. On one hand, being able to precisely control the growth of plants like you're doing landscaping or clipping a bonsai tree is a wonderful, underused mechanic. On the other hand, I worry about the lag.

Also, I'm not sure if the gameification of resource management is the right fit, as it seems it could take away from the primary mechanic. I do appreciate more generally the building and "having something to do", and I like the aesthetic contrast of natural and urban. Maybe it just needs refinement? Not sure. I suspect that shouldn't be the highest priority, but also, the inventory management will only get worse as more plants are added.

Developer

Thanks for taking the time to write the feedback! Most of your thoughts about design actually mirror our own. Right now I believe we can actually make this work with some more polish.

You mentioned
> it is too easy to lose expensive items (in part due to bugs)
Can you elaborate what bugs did you encounter?

I'm also interested in how did your save fail?

(+1)

Regarding item loss, I had an issue where I broke a pipe connector and lost the pipe connected to it. I think there was also an issue of some items getting trapped when placing tiles on them, although this was sort of expected. Also, and I'm not sure this is a bug or not, but items that fall into the ocean tend to disappear. ... I think this may be an issue in part because metal is somewhat rare. For the save file failure, I was holding down the fast-forward key for a while, pruned some branches off of a tree (the waterfruit, I think?) and then saved and exited. The game appeared to exit normally, but the log ends differently:

02:26:33 [DEBUG] (3) main::game: Next day ready
02:26:33 [INFO] Settings saved
02:26:34 [ERROR] Terminal must be dropped after all `Escape`s
02:26:34 [ERROR] thread '<unnamed>' panicked at 'called `Result::unwrap()` on an `Err` value: "SendError(..)"': main/src/game/mod.rs:334
02:26:34 [ERROR] thread '<unnamed>' panicked at 'called `Result::unwrap()` on an `Err` value: "SendError(..)"': main/src/update_loop.rs:157

Running it again, I get:

02:10:12 [DEBUG] (3) main::game: Next day ready
02:11:12 [INFO] Settings saved
02:11:12 [ERROR] Terminal must be dropped after all `Escape`s
02:11:12 [ERROR] thread '<unnamed>' panicked at 'called `Result::unwrap()` on an `Err` value: "SendError(..)"': main/src/game/mod.rs:434
02:11:12 [ERROR] thread '<unnamed>' panicked at 'called `Result::unwrap()` on an `Err` value: "SendError(..)"': main/src/update_loop.rs:129