Word Salad

This was really original!
I didn't know what to expect after harvesting for the first day or two. I didn't know if I wanted nouns, adjectives, etc. But when I got to story making everything clicked and I thought "oooh, I wish I had planted more adjectives! and verbs!"

Love the intersection of farming with words and the wholesome ability to make my own madlib. Well done!

Wow, really original! And a huge game with many screens given the scope of a game jam. I loved the theme and the idea of growing words to fill in a mad-lib style! The only thing I didn't really like was the dragging minigame, it was a little frantic for a word game, i think maybe a more idle or puzzly kind of minigame would be a better fit. Also, there were a lot of steps, which could good but it also could be a chance to streamline it. Overall great idea and a ton of potential.

@joel-davis Thanks! I definitely bit off more than I could chew with this one - I got used to doing jams with a bit more time, so I was really sweating this morning trying to finish. And yeah... I didn't love the dragging game either, tbh. I had several ideas for a puzzle-y approach but I decided to take the idea that I could implement the fastest (which turned out to be a good idea). Thanks for playing!

@candlesan Thanks for playing my game! I definitely think that shortening the first phase and then adding replayability in the form of additional stories or whatever could add to it, since based on my testing, people tend to enjoy the madlib part more than the first part.

I didn't really understand what I was doing until the 3rd day, but once I got there it all clicked for me and I thought it was really good. I especially enjoyed the mad-libs at the end. I think it would benefit from a tutorial (but also it's ludum dare and those take time to make.) Good game! :thumbsup:

Cool game! I thought the words are comments on my plants and was kind of angry when getting goofy alien area 51 at the first day XD

And I got a "sharp" eggplant. I hope it won't turn into something R-18 (Luckily the final story does nothing with eggplants.)

But it may be more interesting if the species of crops can be meaningful, instead of being an indicator of nouns or verbs.

I have never seen anything like this! It was really fun to try and manage all the crops at once but also not too difficult, here's how my funny story came out:

Thought no one will notice? 😊

Interesting and fun game. I like the concept of growing the words. It would be nice to have some way to more actively guide or choose the words.

What a nice refreshing entry! Sweet art and a really entertaining, well-implemented, concept. Wished to see my inventory when deciding how many X/Y/Z to plant! Also I tried to give the dog snacks but it denied both the fertilizer and my wordfruits.. ;(

The amount of scenes you implemented, and dialogue guiding me along the way, is really impressive for a compo. Did you even sleep? I often scope too big and fall short, but you're like "nah I'll just do it all". Impressive!

All art, code, and music are great! I like it very much! Thank you for making it!

Wow, impressive amount of content for compo. Fun core gameplay with drag and drop of water and fertilizer :thumbsup:

Very good aesthetic, especially for the compo! I completely forgot about making a coherent story until the final part of organizing words, but I had fun anyway :P

Wow this is such a great concept, it would make a great educational game. There was a tonne of work that had gone into this, I don't know how you managed to pull it off as a compo game! The growing minigame was a little bit stressful and maybe some more feedback or making it a bit slower would have helped. The art looked great and there were a tonne of easter-eggs to find with the scarecrow and dog ect. The final story construction was brilliant. Great job!

Wow, what a unique entry!! I agree with commenters that this would be a fabulous game for learning language. The Mad-Libs style game was so fun! I'm so impressed that you did all the coding, art, and music in just one weekend. SO good!

I did have a little trouble harvesting my vegetables, but I really enjoyed the art style and I always ended the day with all 6 words/phrases, so no complaints there! :slight_smile:

One thing I would say for your audio: the music speeds up regardless of the timer, because the sped-up music is built into the loop. That made me feel a little stressed during the final stage, even though I knew it wasn't timed because the instructions said so. So my recommendation would be to:

1. Make two music loops, one for the harvest game and one for the madlibs mini-game, and
2. Swap out faster music for just one SFX to indicate that your time is running low, OR implement a system that shifts to faster music only for the last 10s of each harvest day. (But given that you were in charge of all things in this game, I think just an SFX would be the easier/more efficient route to give consistent information.)

That's just nitpicky stuff. Overall, thought your game was super thoughtful and really engaging. Wonderful entry! :four_leaf_clover:

Very cool! I loved the mad-libs story created at the end, it was a great reward for the frantic crop tending that the other days consisted of. The music picking up tempo during the farming was a great touch, it made it feel much more frantic. I did wish that I had a better idea of which types of words were going to be important in the end, while my random guesses worked out I felt like it was just a guess rather then an informed decision.
Overall a great take on the theme and a fun and original game. Well done!

The idea behind this game is absolutely great and it was such a bliss to drag words on the right places! The harvesting part was little difficult to me, I had no idea what to do with finished products. But it payed of to grow your own words. Sadly, judges didn't really like my fancy space dog story :')