herbarium

Bring your herbarium back to life..

Water your flowers so that they bloom simultaneously. Don't use too much water, or your flowers will die and soil will disintegrate.

Links

- PLAY: https://itch.io/embed-upload/451557?color=333333 (HTML5)
- SOURCE CODE: https://github.com/t-mw/herbarium/

Controls

- arrow keys: move cursor
- z/c: place earth at cursor
- x/v: remove earth at cursor

Hold z + x or c + v to restart

Development

This is the first game jam I've used PICO-8 on - it was nice to be constrained a bit. I could afford to develop a system for loading / transitioning between levels; I normally stick to one-map games to avoid the hassle.

Writing the fluid simulation was a bit tricky: I quickly ran into performance issues, so had to reduce the speed of the fluid and split processing across frames. Besides that, at the moment water tends to flow towards the right, and tiles don't absorb water well when they're completely submerged; water needs to be flowing across them.

The tendency to flow to the right is particularly annoying for gameplay, but I couldn't work out a way of solving it that didn't affect performance. Maybe the maps should take more advantage of right-flowing fluid, instead of being symmetrical.

Hope you enjoy the game!