In "Game of Roots" you play a plant, or rather its roots on a quest for minerals and water. The roots can be send down, left and right and, additionally, they can split up. Handling all of the roots simultaneously with the same four keys, collecting water and avoiding poisonous waste is the main difficulty of the game.
Basically the roots always do what you want - except if they can't. Then they do something else, so watch out! With four or more roots at the same time, this can happen quite often.
=====HOW TO RUN:===== - Windows: unzip and double-click start.bat
- Linux: Needs libsdl, libsdl-mixer, libsdl-ttf, libsdl-image and liblapack3 as dependecies. Then untar and run start.sh. If it does not start, try to run start.sh in a terminal to get an error message. The package should work under *Ubuntu 12.04+/Debian 7. Others might not work.
- OS/X: I got it working under OS/X but you have to use the source version, install python3, numpy and pygame yourself. Bundling a standalone application doesn't work :-(. Let me know if you have problems.
----- IMPORTANT: If the screen is too big, You can SET THE RESOLUTION and other gameplay parameters in settings.txt
Created during three days with Python3 + pygame, Inkscape, Anvil Music and sfxr by Code: Marcus Hoffmann, Eric Zimmermann Graphics: Stephan Waeldchen, Marcus Hoffmann Music: Stephan Waeldchen, Eric Zimmermann
Changes: - Fixed music not stopping in win32 build. - Added a hopefully much more compatible Linux build. Also added dependency checking in the startup script.
Wow ! That was brilliant and innovative. Very fun to play.
Energy would deserve a bigger counter imho and also the darkening of the screen would be better if you encounter really darker dirt tiles instead of just darken the background. Maybe, you should stop the bg music when your gameover sequence play.
Depthscore: 399. And this game certainly has a lot more depth than I first expected - in several senses of the word.
It took me a little while to get used to judging what grid square my root end was in. A root that's just moved down one square looks a bit like it's only gone halfway down - which caught me out at first, I would occasionally overshoot and then find I was too low down and couldn't move back up again. But once I got used to that, I really enjoyed this game. Well done!
Ah, I had similar idea but I wasn't sure if it would work so I ditched it after few minutes of thinking about it - nice to see that someone made it and it works...
Good work (you're the first game in about 20 I've tried that makes me want to try another run)
Pretty innovative game. It's an interesting dilemma weighing up whether to go sideways to get the energy or continue travelling down in the hopes you'll find some more below.
That was interesting to play. There's definitely a good tradeoff between the benefits and risks of splitting a bunch. If you're better at the game you can get away with splitting more and thus collecting more stuff with less cost. There wasn't an option to make the screen smaller, though, so I had to hide my taskbar to see the whole thing.
@Knowledge and VDOgamez: You can set the resolution in the settings.txt :-). We set the default resolution relatively high, because the game is more fun if you have more space.
K
Knowledge2 May 2014, 16:58
Please play and rate my game again! How did you play it firs time(it didn't work)?
This was really good! Nice concept, and really engaging. I loved infinitely splitting my roots until the whole screen was filled with them. Also, I really enjoyed the music. And a game about roots gets a bonus by default :D (I made one, too)
I managed to reach a depth level of 1755 by using only one root and collecting as many stone crushers and energy on the way as possible ;) Not sure if that's how it's intended, but you can really abuse the fact that the game always generates at least one passable path on deeper levels if you have enough energy left!
Pretty fun game. I liked the root splitting although for me there was no reason to split to more than two roots, as having too many roots made it nearly impossible to avoid all the radiactive trash (Who disposes all this trash anyway?). At the end, when you get so deep that nearly everything is rocks, there aren't enough rock breaker pickups so that you could avoid getting stuck.
Really cool mechanics, though it would be nice if there was more motivation to split roots, such as some mechanic or obstacle that forced the user to split the root.
Energy would deserve a bigger counter imho and also the darkening of the screen would be better if you encounter really darker dirt tiles instead of just darken the background.
Maybe, you should stop the bg music when your gameover sequence play.