Play It⌗

LDJam 45 Background⌗

I created this game as an entry for the 72-hour Ludum Dare 45. The theme was “Start from Nothing”.

This is the second LDJam that I’ve participated in, and I feel like my entry this time around was much better than the last one.

Idea behind Nature Garden⌗

My idea with Nature Garden was to create a game where you started with absolutely nothing (literally a barren island) and you’d have to control natural forces to get certain things to grow. Plants will grow and you have to harvest them when they are ripe, but before they die! You play as a demigod and can control some natural events, such as bee swarms, cow swarms and rain. These can help your little island grow if done at the right time.

Art decisions⌗

Due to the short timeframe, I went with lowres pixel art, mixed in with some solid UI elements. I was able to get the tileset from opengameart.org and used Tiled to make the island map.

I was originally going to use some pixel-art flowers from opengameart.org, but opted to do that myself. I drew the flowers in GIMP. I wound up drawing a couple stages of flowers, mushrooms and a cow.

Gameplay⌗

The gameplay implementation was straightforward. The basic mechanic is gathering a plant by clicking on it, and then getting X number of resources based on the type of plant and the stage of growth it’s in.

This will take a long time to get to 500. So, to make the game more interesting, I added some environmental effects. Using these at the right time will create resource-rich plants that you can then use the basic game mechanic (picking) to harvest.

What I Did Wrong⌗

I got a lot of feedback on this game, mostly it seemed like the game needed more balance. The rain effect was the cheapest, and easiest way to get to 500 as fast as possible. I should have better balanced the effects.

I spent a lot of time fighting with Super Tiled 2 Unity in order to get the grass area to import correctly. They use some components in Unity for scripted importers that I was not familiar with. The KITTY Tiled importer would have been better. KITTY converts tiles into Unity GameObjects if a tile’s ‘type’ is the same as an existing prefab. This would have saved me a few hours of work and a lot of sleep.

I also admit that the game idea isn’t the best. It’s not very engaging and takes little to no skill to play (it’s about as simple of a clicker as it gets). I could have spiced it up requiring the resources be gathered in 60 seconds or have a constant ‘resource leak’ so you’d have to come up with a strategy and stick with it to get to 500.