Emoji

Major props for the style. Its super cute.

Really cute and polished presentation! I like the idea of having emojis represent the actions and it's pretty intuitive what things does. I wonder how far you could expand on this by additional emojis............... :poop:.

This is an awesome, polished little sandbox (dirtbox?). Very cute!
I had fun discovering what all there is to do, though I had the game freeze/crash at one point (playing on macOS safari, this happened when I surrounded a hole with a moat of water all around, and was just about to add soil to make a flower. No idea if that's consequential or not though).

I love the visual and audio presentation. One tiny pet peeve is the raining animation starts feeling too long after watching it several times.

Thanks, everyone! 😊

@hajden: Gosh darn it! 😢 That's because you're not supposed to be able dig where there is no neighbouring tile for the dirt pile to go to and I had written all the code to deal with that, but forgotten a tiny if statement to make sure it got applied correctly—fixed now! Thanks for bringing it to my attention!

Very cute!!!! I included it in my Ludum Dare 45 compilation video series, if you’d like to take a look :) https://youtu.be/aEgrmplySyU

Ahhh, I finally got featured in a Jupi video, what an honour! 😊 Thank you so much!

Disclosure

So if you update the game now you will see that there is save/load functionality. I had already coded this up yesterday but the JSON serialisation didn't work because the entity positions were using p5.js vectors, which don't serialise readily because of a circular handle to the p5 instance. I didn't have time to go through the codebase before the deadline to replace all the p5 vectors with simple JS xy objects so I disabled the buttons.

I fixed that today. I consider it a bugfix, and it doesn't alter/extend gameplay, but if you feel like you don't want to consider it when rating the game, that's fine, but I added it to the main build anyway since it really was made during the jam but had a bug in it, and since people might want to save their game while playing anyway (even if they don't consider it part of the submission). Hope that's fine!

So adorable, and really polished. Very relaxing, although the crying animation could feel frustratingly long at times.

Very cute. A little odd changing the function of the number keys, but I was eventually able to plant a cute garden. (Couldn't figure out bricks though) :)

I love the style and soundtrack choice for this game. It gives it an extremely relaxing/zen vibe. I would have liked the ability to zoom out once I had made a massive garden since the map was a static 20x20, but other then that I had no complaints.

I liked to control the weather with my emotional expression. I didn't make it very far, but at least I had a few bricks. :laughing:

awesome sound effects and atmosphere, the main character is very very cute

Cute game. I would've liked there to be more options, but for what there is it was fun to figure out all the combinations and what not. Extra points for how consistent the system is. Whether you apply rain to something that is either inside a dirt pit or not, the effect is the same. I like the art style as well, very cute. You say in the description that the sounds are not your own. If that counts for music as well you should probably opt out of the audio category. In any case, a job well done!

Thank you all so much! 😊

Music is mine, @sheepolution, just the raw sound effects from zapsplat. c: I’ve still edited, combined and cut most of those around in Audacity too to transform them into something specific to this game, and I’m thinking the audio category is also for sound design/use? I’ve always considered that on the same level as using a code library or preexisting samples for a digital instrument in the music at least. 😅

EDIT: Changed it so that it says '*foley* from zapsplat' instead for clarity.

@rainetheglutton: Ohh, zooming would’ve been great!

@unept: Yeah, I remained unsure about the UI until the very end, maybe it would’ve been better to always have all options visible but the unavailable ones faded out, so that the same key would always correspond to the same action?

This is super cool, feels really polished and the part of discovering how to play it's really cool. You did a great job, reall y liked it! very moody and relaxing, which is a plus in this times of stress haha.

OK, this game is adoreable as hell, also I like how coregameplay polished and well made. Well done!

A cute game packed with emotion. A great idea for this theme and very well executed. The controls were a bit tricky to get used to, but ultimately they work fine. The graphics are cute and nice to look at, so well done!

So cute and satisfying. Thank you for the game!

This game has the potential of bringing world peace to this planet. Cute graphics, ASMR music and things that grow. Good job!

Adoreable vector art and lovely concept! Very soothing. Overall, a decent game!

This looks so cute! I had fun playing around in it for a bit. Took me a while to figure out all the combinations. For some reason I made algae, and I think I took them out of the water, and then I didn't find anything to do with them. So I just made a moat and surrounded it with bricks, to live in a barren castle... in hindsight I guess I should have my moat outside the castle walls :thinking:

Thankfully I took another shot at going through combinations and finally found soil. Interesting that someone else didn't find bricks instead. :smiley:

I found it hard to tell when :angry: would destroy something. I was always anxious about using it because I was never sure if it'd maybe just destroy my hard work. Maybe entirely removing something should be a different button of its own? Or at least it should be hard to undo something that took 3 steps in one accident.

Same goes for accidentally aiming at the wrong tile, or using the wrong action. Maybe have a little wind-up where a little loading bar / pie chart fills up on the emoji and then it does the action? It could already start the animation during that, but if I realize I'm doing the wrong thing I can still let go and cancel the action.

On the algae thing, maybe let me mix algae clumps with dirt clumps or mud clumps to make soil clumps too? Or to maybe make dry soil that way and then I need another step to water it or something. :thinking: It just takes a bit of luck to find that specific path to soil.

Last thing I thought about was having a reminder on what does what. Maybe a cute little recipe book that I can pull up which shows the order of steps to get a specific thing that I already learned to make/discovered. o:

But I realize this is an LD game and time was quite limited. Kudos to the cute game you made in it! :clap: :clap: :clap:

PS:

Here's my fort with all my flowery glory, until I figured that flowers don't get any fancier than that :)
Oh yeah, as you can see the bricks overlap the flowers, but that's a minor detail.

It is very relaxing game. I like to play a god who looks like a sweet pokemon ;)

harmony of simplicity

Thank you all so much! Really lovely to see the pictures of your creations too.

Disclosure 2

Turned out cookies were a bad idea for this sort of save data (too big), so I changed it to the moderner local HTML5 web storage instead, or servers might get angry and break the game and prevent you from going back to it, which would be very bad indeed. It does mean old saves will be lost. Sorry about that. Again, doesn't affect gameplay or add features or anything, just a very crucial bugfix.

(altho if you're a little techy you can manually restore your old saves by going into your browser's cookie viewer for the site hosting the game, copying all the cookies containing savedata into one long string, and then pasting that into the web storage savedata (just save the game once and it will be created for you) also possible to view and edit in your browser's viewer for that)

A cute little zen garden app, with beautiful graphics and animations, funny sound effects. Thanks for the journey, it was very relaxing despite my poor gardening skills.

On the UX side I would suggest always associating 😊😢 and 😠 with the same number, because I have destroyed countless items going from one tile to another and hitting 😠 by mistake because it was bound to 2 instead of 3 on the previous tile…

@samh: Thank you! Yeah, that's been a very consistent criticism, haha. Would (will?) definitely fix that post-jam!

Seems like a very solid little game. I couldn't figure out how to get past mud or algae, but I'm sure it'd get more fun if I did. :) 3-4 on all scores!

Super cute game, sorta wish there was like a little cheatsheet of actions if you get stuck, or to get the hang of what does what or maybe just a tutorial would be helpful, that's the word I'm looking for. Other than that, great game

Thanks a bunch!

@lars-erik: My hint is to put some dirt in the algae! 👀

@emiliabea: Yeah, or maybe just clearer UI, haha. Has been established it wasn't the best. 😰 A little "cookbook" would've been cool!

@ava-skoog Got it. Got some pretty flowers. 😁👍
Noticed the emojis above too, now. I could see this going somewhere with some sort of goal and some more features. Also, what @emiliabea said.

Yay!! 🌺🌼🌸

Really cute game. I enjoyed exploring the little mud box I was gambling in. But at some point I needed to watch the Lets Play to find out how to do flowers. Would love to see this game being extended further :thumbsup_tone2: :heart:

Nice artstyle and relaxing sound :)
I think for this type of exploration game it's not really necessary to have an action that reverts every combination back or destroys elements. This and more combinations in general would be a nice!

Thank you two as well! 😍

Congrats on #32 in graphics!

Thanks for submitting your game for me to play on my livestream!

If you’d like to rewatch the playthrough, you can find it here: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/494941349?t=0h33m21s

Hope you got some valuable feedback on your game and looking forward to seeing you next LD jam if I dont catch you before then! :D

💜 Elysia Griffin AKA Button Feedback Lady

https://www.twitch.tv/elysiagriffin

@elysiagriffin: Thank you so much!!