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Showing 37 reviews

Planting Flowers
by Johnathan Roatch
all reviews of Planting Flowers

Review by rlam12 all reviews by rlam12

Planting Flowers starts with a nice retro chiptune music, the main character, and a green world canvas where you can put flowers on an invisible hexagonal grid. The game world is bigger than the main screen, and you could technically do some fancy artwork by planting flowers around. The artwork used is all located in a single sprite sheet and looks nice.

The readme mentions the plucking mechanic, but it was never implemented. There are mentions on the source code of a text scroller, and there is even a file loaded as the text to be scrolled, but the feature was not implemented.

On the technical side, this is a good tech-demo of some nice features. The screen is resizable, you can toggle during runtime windowed and Fullscreen modes. There is integer scaling of the main game screen, with a nice floral background to fill up the remaining spaces. The code is easy to follow and shows nice structure. It might be that a good base from previous competitions was used though.

The genre requirement was met with the flower theme, the artistic requirement was not really met and the technical requirement of having some sort of scroller was not implemented.

This is a nice tech demo, and it would be fun to study the code to learn a thing or two, but not that fun at being a game.

Scores: Overall 2 Artistical 1 Technical 2 Genre 3

Review by push32 all reviews by push32

Planting Flowers welcomes you visually with a girl character on a green meadow and musically with a snappy old-school chiptune. You steer the character on the yet void meadow and plant as many various colorful flowers as you want to fill the meadow. In full screen mode there is also a floral wallpaper background. The art style with neat pixel graphics and euphoric chiptune matches very well and encourage you to explore the game. But unfortunately, regarding gameplay you cannot do more from there on. I'm curious to see how the planting and plucking of flowers described in the readme will turn into gameplay. Technically, the game uses a large hexagonal grid for planting, which also scrolls as you move too far from the center. A text scroller is absent however. The source code makes use of allegro and compiles without any problem.

Overall: 2 (interactive tech demo, but no game)
Artistical: 2 (no fun of old fashioned or inverse, but nice chiptune music and pixel graphics)
Technical: 2 (no text scroller, no procedural content, but hexagonal grid, below 400kb size limit, compiles flawlessly)
Genre: 3 (many colourful flowers and floral wallpaper)

Scores: Overall 2 Artistical 2 Technical 2 Genre 3

FlowerShower
by rlam12
all reviews of FlowerShower

Review by push32 all reviews by push32

The title FlowerShower suggests a gardening simulation game. It starts promising with beautiful comic style pixel art in the title screen showing clouds and meadows with a picturesque narcissus flower. The title screen also features a a basic text scroller asking to press enter. If you do, the game unfortunately shows nothing more than a blue background. Sadly there is no game after all and no indication how it should have been. I'm curious to see how this game was intended to be. From a technical point of view FlowerShower's source code is very clean and readable, uses allegro, and compiling it was straight forward.

Overall: 1 (no game after all)
Artistical: 2 (pixel art could be considered old fashioned)
Technical: 2 (scroller is there, but no procedural content, code is clean, below 400kb)
Genre: 2 (only one beautiful flower on title screen)

Scores: Overall 1 Artistical 2 Technical 2 Genre 2

Review by amarillion all reviews by amarillion

I can see a flower - so the genre requirement is met. I see scrolling text. The old-fashioned art requirement is not really present, and neither is the procedural content.

Unfortunately, the game is unfinished. Thanks for trying, and better luck next time!

Scores: Overall 1 Artistical 1 Technical 1 Genre 1

Review by elias all reviews by elias

This entry starts really promising with a hand-drawn yellow flower on a meadow with a blue sky and some clouds.

To my big disappointment I realized that that's rally all that was finished during the competition. I want my game to play!

Scores: Overall 2 Artistical 2 Technical 1 Genre 2

florami
by wasd & push32
all reviews of florami

Review by amarillion all reviews by amarillion

This game is remeniscent of the "mastermind" code-breaking board game. But instead of coloured pegs, you have to place the four possible nucleotide letters 'A' 'C' 'T' or 'G' in one of 3 slots. Each slot is a 'gene' that determines certain properties of a flower. Unlike "mastermind" that tells you how many letters you've chosen correctly, for each choice you're presented with a geometric flower that varies in the shape, number and color of the petals and carpels that you have to match with the solution provided at the start.

You get only 6 tries to pick the correct one out of 64 possibilities. The puzzle of the game comes from understanding the relation between genes and the resulting "phenotype". The first gene determines colour, and this one is easy to match. The second gene is called figure, and determines the shape of the petals (square or oval) and the shape of the heart of the flower. The last gene is called size, and detemines the number and size (width) of the petals.

As a former bioinformatician, I love the reference to genetics in this game (Even though genes are really thousands of nucleotides long, and flower genetics works very differently, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABC_model_of_flower_development)

My main criticism is that the details of the flower, especially the heart of the flower are hard to see. The game runs in a window of a fixed size that only occupies a fraction of my screen, and I often wish I could enlarge the window to zoom in. If you also happen to have non-contrasting colours in your flower solution, then it becomes impossible to see what is going on.

We recognize pleasant background music from the water levels of Mario 64. Overall, a very inventive game mechanic that makes this an interesting puzzle game.

Scores: Overall 5 Artistical 4 Technical 4 Genre 4

Review by SiegeLord all reviews by SiegeLord

A nice, enjoyable entry carried by the fun-looking flowers you get to see. It's essentially the usual password guessing game, but instead of the usual feedback of what you got correct, you get to stare at the nice geometric patterns. I liked it.

Graphically, the game looked polished and neat. I always appreciate using the default A4/A5 font.

The sounds were somewhat generic, but I liked the music choice. I set an appropriate mood.

On a technical level, I appreciated the polish for the player input. You could press the bases and the cursor would auto-advance. Also, you could select which aspect of the flower to input, it just felt very nice. The text scroller wasn't super special, but it was more fun than the usual horizontal/vertical scroller. I thought the procedural aspect was well done, there was always something new to experience as far as the flower appearance.

I thought the genre was represented well. The game took advantage of the flowers by varying their colors/shapes etc, and the connection to genetics felt compelling.

The only thing to complain about was that it was a little hard to see the flowers sometimes. It felt impossible to win sometimes, but I didn't feel bad since I got to see some fun flower combinations along the way.

Scores: Overall 4 Artistical 4 Technical 4 Genre 4

Review by MarkOates all reviews by MarkOates

My highest caption score goes to the genre requirement, for the elaborate and creative procedural generation of flowers. I like the game's idea of discovering/generating flowers through code, and this game tied that requirement directly into the gameplay. Of all the games, this one had the most complex set of rules for flower generation, too, so bonus points for that.

I did have difficulty with 2 things:

- The window size on my display was very small, and as such the buttons and fonts in particular were microscopic and hard to read.
- I had difficulty finding documentation on how to play the game. I searched a.cc, the progress logs, and the readme, but had to figure out the UI by randomly clicking things. Since the fonts were so small, it made it especially difficult to read the difference between G - C.

Apart from that, there was one flower that I could have sworn was matched to the example, but nothing happened, leaving me to believe it was up to me to appreciate the match, or match at the top row, until I matched a flower later and was met with the victory sound.

The sound effects were fun, and added a bit of polish to the game, too.

I give the game a lower score in the "Overall" category for the small text, lack of instructions, and making the game somewhat unplayable without a lot of guessing.

Scores: Overall 3 Artistical 3 Technical 3 Genre 5

Fole & Raul go Flower Power
by Max, Amarillion & Superdaze
all reviews of Fole & Raul go Flower Power

Review by SiegeLord all reviews by SiegeLord

An interesting, Zelda-inspired game where you go on a musical rampage against plant life. The optimal strategy appears to require avoiding all of the game mechanics, and rush to collect all the bananas not bothering to dodge of kill any of the enemies.

I really liked the graphics of the game, the gradients on the walls and the flowers are very pleasing to the eye. The sound and the music fit the theme as well, it resembled a 90's platformer sound to me.

I understand that a lot of the technical aspects are recycled, but it's still pleasing to play a well-polished game. The split screen option is neat, and I always give bonus points for including key configuration.

The procedural content was implemented as random mazes constructed from pre-made rooms (as far far as I could tell). This worked okay, but the reused rooms combined with the time limit meant that it was very easy to get lost as you forgot which level you were on. There were a few too many dead ends as well. That said, it didn't feel unfair or frustrating.

The genre was implemented okay, the enemies were flowers of sorts, but aside from their superficial appearance their flower aspects were very limited.

Scores: Overall 4 Artistical 5 Technical 4 Genre 3

Review by entheh all reviews by entheh

Congratulations on this top-down banana-hunting Plants vs Rob Zombie game, or am I trying too hard with that one?

The flower theme is satisfyingly all-pervasive, with the game set in a flower garden and bringing in elements of the old-fashioned Flower Power movement. I haven't awarded 5 because I can't honestly say it defines the gameplay mechanics, but the 4 is well deserved.

Artistically speaking, my first feeling on opening it was that it was somehow unfinished. I think a few elements that may contribute to this feeling - though I'm listing them with a great deal of uncertainty - are the somewhat arbitrary screen area set aside for the game map, the faux perspective effect that doesn't have a consistent vanishing point, the presence of large, untextured areas (including black outside the map), and the use of Allegro's built-in font. That said, the artistic rule (to make fun of old-fashioned things) is covered, and there is some nice pixel art once you get into the details, so I've awarded 4 here too. I was certainly surprised when I discovered that my weapon was musical. (On that note - yes, note - a missed opportunity would be to use the current harmony in the music to inform the choice of chord.)

Successful procedural level generation as exhibited here is no walk in the park, and this easily earns you yet another 4. The text scroller is special, with coloured letters and wavy offsets, so that's covered too. I did reserve a point because the collision detection didn't convince me when I was trying to collect keys.

It's a generally solid entry and I seem to have awarded fours all round. Well done. This game will have me on all fours picking flowers. Oh dear, I'm trying too hard again.

Scores: Overall 4 Artistical 4 Technical 4 Genre 4

Review by elias all reviews by elias

Very impressive entry. It's definitely the highest production value of any games I've played so far.

Music, sound effects, lots and lots of content. There's many (procedurally generated) levels and different monsters and power-ups. I really like the graphics style and all the small details like the different notes depending on which direction you shoot or the colorful rainbow messages :)

Scores: Overall 5 Artistical 5 Technical 5 Genre 5

Review by MarkOates all reviews by MarkOates

Wow what an entry.

I had very slow framerates with the game starting in fullscreen, but I was able to toggle in and out of fullscreen to get good speeds. I appreciate the fullscreen option, which worked particularly on my display scaling the graphics up to usable levels.

This game was remarkably complete for a TINS game. I appreciated the graphics, sound effects, and gameplay in general. Mostly, I found picking up the strength and weapon enhancing items to be the most rewarding part of the game, because they were the most rare.

I also appreciated the pre-designed rooms, and variety of enemies. I feel this game has a solid foundation of an engine and with more level design expansion, weapons, enemies, boss fights and a few tweaks like power bars, could be a solid game all around.

Scores: Overall 4 Artistical 4 Technical 5 Genre 5

Rewrite It In
by SiegeLord
all reviews of Rewrite It In

Review by amarillion all reviews by amarillion

"Rewrite it in" is essentially a king-of-the-hill arcade game, using a backstory that shines an uncomfortable psychological light for an old C++/allegro programmer like me.

In this game you have to plant projects on planets, which grow (like flowers) to generate ideas. You can catch these ideas to plant them, while trying to fend off "naysayers" that try to ruin your projects. The naysayers continuously spout grumpy comments, that seem especially directed at competitors of the C++ programming language. We note that the game itself is written in Rust, so that fits.

All these concepts are presented as brightly coloured geometric shapes, with a nice glow effect on top, all the while the source code of the game itself is scrolling in the background. This game definitely has a cool look. The music is great but it wasn't made during the compo, so no extra points for that.

The game gets pretty hard pretty quickly. I managed to get to year 3. There is probably also a deeper lesson about focus, and the problem of trying to keep too many projects running at the same time.

As others have commented, the jump is hard to control, and sometimes a jump takes you so far away from your planet that it's completely overrun by the time you get back again. The slow movement of the player, as well as the enemies, makes for long waits in between action. The slow pace feels a bit awkward for this type of arcade game, and could do with some tuning.

One of my favorite entries overall, one that keeps interest

Scores: Overall 5 Artistical 5 Technical 4 Genre 3

Review by entheh all reviews by entheh

Rewrite It In pits you as the creator of a new language, keen to see your projects succeed despite the efforts of people so old that they are incapable of learning any language that isn't a literal antique, and so insecure about their continued relevance that they have to sabotage your projects to enable themselves to continue living under the lie that they are even remotely employable any more.

In addition to how true to life the choice of stuff to make fun of is, the game makes a statement with its minimalist but consistent artistic style. Now, in fairness, as a fellow appreciator of Rust, I have to admit that I'm biased, and the fun-poking would probably only deserve full marks if it could be made inherent to the design of the game. All things considered, I decided to award 4 here.

As for the genre rule, flowers are present in the game, but the analogy of using flowers to represent projects felt a little forced, so I felt I could only justify awarding 3 there.

Rewrite It In is a technical tour de force. I particularly like what appears to be the use of orbital dynamics for jumping from circle to circle. A text scroller of sorts is present. I can nevertheless only offer 4 points here because the proceduralilty appears to be limited to the placement of the circles and a few other things for which random numbers would have been the natural choice anyway.

So, is it fun to play? Well, I found myself mostly just waiting, if I jumped wrong or my flowers were still growing, so I didn't play it for very long. Certainly worth a 4 though, for all the good things otherwise present in this game. Well done.

Scores: Overall 4 Artistical 4 Technical 4 Genre 3

Review by elias all reviews by elias

Those messages made me laugh :) The game play was well balanced, it was easy enough in the first levels but then I had to develop a strategy. I decided it's best to find a good spot on a planet and keep all flowers close together to defend them. Once too many were required for that I discovered that you can get actually speed up a lot if you just keep circling and used that to my advantage.

Scores: Overall 5 Artistical 5 Technical 5 Genre 5

Review by MarkOates all reviews by MarkOates

OK that was fun. I made it all the way to Year 5, having barely scraped by at year 4.

My first impression was I love the music and the style. It reminds me of my actual coding environment so I felt right at home knocking baddies away from my brilliant projects that can only get worse when the invaders come in.

It hit very close to home, if I may say so ;)

I loved the comments each of the naysayers. I found a lot of them very funny and wouldn't mind having 20x more of them so I could just read them and enjoy during gameplay.

I did have some trouble with the controls, and would get stuck between circles. I'm not sure if this was part of the gameplay, but several green circles would go into those notches and I would not be able to reach them. I wasn't sure what was causing me to go faster or slower during the game, maybe there is an indicator that I missed out on?

I'm sure I'll play it some more.

I played on Windows (had no problems running), however, the screen was higher resolution I believe causing the layout to show differently than intended. Here's a photo of my laptop screen running the program.

I think this would be really fun with joystick support.

Technical, I give it a 3, mostly because of glitches in the gameplay, difficulty with navigation controls.

Scores: Overall 4 Artistical 5 Technical 3 Genre 4

FlowerFlyerTron
by Bruce Perry
all reviews of FlowerFlyerTron

Review by amarillion all reviews by amarillion

Flower Flyer Tron looks like an old arcade game. Gameplay wise, it's best described as a mix between snake and pac-man (although thinking that way is little misleading, see below). You have to move through a maze (randomly generated!) with a long snake-like text following behind you. Instead of eating pills, you water flowers, and the more flowers you water, the more points you score. After you traverse a maze, you move on to the next level, and you get a longer text trailing behind you. I imagine a maverick pilot that is making an extra buck on the side by flying an advertising banner while spraying crops - although why the plane would fly through a maze is beyond me.

Given this entry was made in only a fraction of the 72h time, it packs a lot of interesting ideas. This is the only entry that made the text scroller an integral part of the game. The procedural maze generation is top-notch. The process is animated, and the algorithm automatically culls dead ends (by necessity, because the snake-like text scroller makes back-tracking impossible) Therefore a deserved 5 points for technical.

The graphics are entirely in 8 bit style, hard-coded as binary strings in the source code. This effectively makes fun of the old fashioned BBC Micro graphics (personally, I have more experience with the ZX Spectrum, a similar but less expensive computer) One level you get the text "ONE OF OUR CUTTING EDGE GAMES IN COLOUR", which could be a marketing slogan right from 1982.

There are some twists in the mechanics, that are not immediately obvious. My instinctive comparison with snake is misleading, because it's only the flyer that can collide - collisions of the text with itself do not count. This means that you can move through gaps in the text. Also, wherever a flower is watered, a gap appears as well. This means that you can make clever use of flowers on crossings for new navigation possibilities. Another thing that wasn't clear immediately that you don't have to water ALL flowers - the game becomes a lot easier once you realise that. All of that wouldn't be such a problem if the game wasn't so punishing: each mistake is an immediate game over, resetting the player back to the very first level. This doesn't give the player an incentive to experiment, for example with gaps in the text (a long gap only appears in later levels). By the way, it would be nice to get a reward if you do manage to water all flowers.

There are a few more missing features that I would have expected if you had put in the full weekend: music, sound effects, and hi-scores saved to disk (although probably the BBC Micro wouldn't have been able to do that either)

Overall, innovative entry that could do with a few quality of life improvements.

Scores: Overall 3 Artistical 4 Technical 5 Genre 3

Review by elias all reviews by elias

[I'm lazy and just copy&pasting my allegro.cc post here.]

Very impressive, especially considering you could only spend some of the time on it and also wrote it in a new programming language. I loved all the old-style effects like the tile update delays and the flood-fill(?) map reveal.

The game was surprisingly hard - I always crashed myself into a wall at first so couldn't beat level 1. Finally learned to avoid keyboard auto-repeat and limit myself to small one-step movements and made it to level 4 before running into impossible small closed chambers. Was about to give up when I realized that I could sometimes run twice before the snake moves. So I had to revert my initial trick and go back to auto-repeat, having to master the fast movement after all. That got me to level 9 or 10 doing some impossible between-the-update jumps :)

Scores: Overall 5 Artistical 5 Technical 5 Genre 5

Review by MarkOates all reviews by MarkOates

This gameplay typically isn't the type of game I gravitate to very much, but I did find myself getting more enjoyment out of this entry than most of the others.

My favorite aspect was the attention to detail and technology behind the retro graphics. The retro artistic style was spot on, and took no shortcuts to produce what felt like a tweaked ascii table of special characters displayed on a hot Z80 processor. The transition FX were a fantastic touch, and the integration of the special scroller into the gameplay was a clever use of the technical rule #2. The game felt to me like one of the obscure cabinets I might find at a retro arcade bar.

If I were to make any improvements to the game it would be to add a title/splash screen with instructions, some audio fx, and a special shader or two to give the game a CRT look. That, in addition to having an auto-moving player sprite would really make this entry pop.

Scores: Overall 4 Artistical 5 Technical 5 Genre 4

Review by NunoMartinez all reviews by NunoMartinez

I'm jealous of this game: it is beautiful, elegant, simple, fun and well made. Why didn't I had that idea?

I like the aesthetics, so old school that I feel like I was playing in an old Sinclair ZX-Spectrum or an MSX. A little bit of sound will make the game perfect.

Good job.

Scores: Overall 4 Artistical 5 Technical 4 Genre 5

Flowers by Allefant
by elias
all reviews of Flowers by Allefant

Review by MarkOates all reviews by MarkOates

Right off the bat this game gets a 5 in technical for using 3D graphics. That's a very rare thing to see in hack games so I'm super stoked not only to see polygons, triangles, models at varying level of detail, but a level of touch with animations and flower bouncing motion to match.

I made it past level 10 and appreciated all the self aware humor in the special text scrollers. "final time, I promise" and "collect *ALL* the pollen, just kidding" both legitimately caught me off guard and had me laughing out loud.

Overall the game could use a bit more polish, (titles, options, direction hint arrows, hud, etc) so a tad off from full marks. I ended up preferring the keyboard controls over the mouse. Mouse movement point-to-point was too aliased and became a distraction.

I would also like to see a richer use of color theory and hues. A lot of the colors felt like out-of-the-box yellows, reds greens, and blues. I would love it if these palettes had a more styled approach that would give the game a more unique look and feel, along with better color contrasts to make the elements easier to distinguish (making the queen being more visually distinct from the environmental elements and other bees, light text on darker background, etc).

At first I didn't like the small hit box on the pollen, but as I progressed in the levels I actually preferred it when I needed to pick pollen from only certain color flowers.

Other little touches I really enjoyed were the little crown on the queen, and the flapping animations on the bee wings.

Overall, this was definitely one of the more technically comprehensive entries, and you can really tell it takes a lot of experience to pull something like this off that is so technically extensive in such a short amount of time. Control, camera constraints, world, graphics performance, all really impressive and admirable for any TINS entry.

Scores: Overall 4 Artistical 4 Technical 5 Genre 5

Review by dthompson all reviews by dthompson

This is pretty damn good for a 72h hack. Nice block colour visuals, intuitive controls, and of course an entirely procedurally generated 3D environment. There's even a themed text scroller! Very nice.

At first I'd worried that the Queen's AI would be difficult to follow, but actually her behaviour isn't jarring at all - and given her speed matches yours, following her actually makes for a fair challenge.

Overall, it's very easy to see what you're doing - though the bee's butt did occasionally get in the way. Would be easily fixable with a tiny amount of zoom out, but this really wasn't a huge problem.

Given the brilliant graphics on this thing, it's with some solid regret that I felt I had to mark this down in terms of the artistic requirements; I get elias's thinking on it making fun of 'old-fashioned things', but I'm not feeling that making fun of fetch quests et al quite hits the mark. They aren't *too* old, IMHO! So yeah, apologies if this seems harsh, but that's why.

Scores: Overall 5 Artistical 3 Technical 5 Genre 5

Review by NunoMartinez all reviews by NunoMartinez

Who never wanted to be a bee? Now you can!

Beautiful and fun game.

Scores: Overall 4 Artistical 3 Technical 4 Genre 5

Flowers
by Mark Oates
all reviews of Flowers

Review by dthompson all reviews by dthompson

In short: this is the most oddly relaxing game, it makes for a really good coffee break, and that's a good thing. ;)

I feel like this'd make for a really good mobile game, perhaps with more achievements and infinite play. But hey, this is a 72-hour coding exercise!

In terms of rules: it's obviously 100% flowers and procedurally generated. Mark's 'Act of Monkey' (celebrate and cherish old-fashioned things) makes things interesting here, and though I wouldn't have figured that out without seeing the readme, I guess it makes sense. The scrolling text was unexpected, but not unwelcome - and (obviously) required.

Scores: Overall 4 Artistical 4 Technical 5 Genre 5

Review by KillerWasp all reviews by KillerWasp

Too relaxing I guess. It has no challenge and cannot be lost. It only consists of taking variations and taking the flowers that you like the most. I have taken the rarest variations without taking into account the list of achievements, except for the one with 4 petals, I have obtained one with 9 and another with 0 petals, one black, one dark, one with a strong blue color and strong violet, almost all with 7 or 8 petals.
It is more to hang out with a mobile on some trip, although it is not attractive or tacky to spend more than 1 hour.
Also the screen is too big, so much so that I could only see 1/4 of its screen and couldn't see the bottom, so I don't know the messages or the state of the game.
In the C++ code everything is too overloaded. For a game that should be simple it has too many classes and functions, even templates. I have never seen the text in Scroll. Note the capital/small letters in the file names.
I couldn't see a scroll in operation and the old fashion in phrases.

Scores: Overall 2 Artistical 2 Technical 1 Genre 4

Review by NunoMartinez all reviews by NunoMartinez

Not sure what's the goal. Seems sto be some kind of "evolution". It says there's 6 achievements but I have no clue (or can't see it) about how to reach them. Anyway it is nice to see how flowers grow, evolve and fill the field.

Scores: Overall 3 Artistical 1 Technical 4 Genre 5

Flower Follies
by dthompson
all reviews of Flower Follies

Review by KillerWasp all reviews by KillerWasp

It is simple and entertaining. But what has earned points are the animations, which gives seems to be watching a TV. It has enough visual appeal to maintain interest in the game.
Although those tile repetitions would have to be fixed and made different, otherwise it seems broken. :P

Scores: Overall 4 Artistical 4 Technical 2 Genre 2

Review by NunoMartinez all reviews by NunoMartinez

In short, it is a game, a complete game and a fun game (something I can't say from my entry).

It looks easy, but it is actually hard. First time I didn't beat stage 2 (I'm embarrased). But it is not impossible, and as you learn and get the pace you can advance... until the map generator generates an impossible level. It did once!

Now I stop writting because I want to play a little more.

Scores: Overall 4 Artistical 3 Technical 4 Genre 5

Orchid Adventure
by RmBeer
all reviews of Orchid Adventure

Review by NunoMartinez all reviews by NunoMartinez

Not sure if it is a complete game. Actually it failed the first time I tried. The second time it worked but I don't know what to do. No instructions, no clues.

The Zeppelin is cool.

Scores: Overall 2 Artistical 2 Technical 2 Genre 3

Review by Tharro all reviews by Tharro

Orchid Adventure is a side scroller that features a purple flower as the main flower. There is some imminent doom quickly after the start of the game but the character will survive and continue its adventure.

Played the game for a while, unfortunately there is not much to it. It has a nice RPG style mini map. While walking around I discovered a new terrain (mountains) but a bit later I walked of the edge of the world (mini map disappeared). Wasn't able to find out how the game completely works (the source had a reference to a narcissus that I couldn't find in the game itself, also navigation over the nodes in the mini map seemed impossible or I couldn't figure it out anyway).

All rules have been implemented in a way. The bonus rule was applied to the artistic requirement and it was featured as one of the technical requirements. If that isn't a very efficient way in implementing the rules! Also the source featured some efficiency I hadn't seen in a while (heavy use of bit logic & optimized the use of screen space).

Scores: Overall 2 Artistical 2 Technical 3 Genre 2

Flower Life
by NunoMartinez
all reviews of Flower Life

Review by rlam12 all reviews by rlam12

Hola amigo! Nice to see some code with Spanish in it. Flower Life is an interesting idea. The game features a nice purple flower on a 2D side scroller, but it also has a top-down overworld like thing in the lower right corner of the screen. It seems that this world is procedurally generated.

The sinking blimp with the scrolling text is nice. I was not expecting that. The text is…interesting… I want to know the origin of these phrases!

Overall, there is not that much to do besides wandering around the map. Once the blimp crashes no other worthy thing happens. This might have potential as a more polished game though.

Code is somewhat hard to read as it uses lots of abbreviations.

All requirements except for making fun of something old where met. Nice entry! Saludos!

Scores: Overall 2 Artistical 1 Technical 3 Genre 2

Review by Tharro all reviews by Tharro

Flower Life ended up being (the most famous) simulation game. While we were teased with screenshots of a nice shoot-em-up sadly an to date unknown bug ruined these plans.

The simulation is a recreation of the Conway's Game of Life but this time with colorful flowers as "cells". Given the limited time there is a few bugs (performance, flowers are not always not rendered) but I've checked the source and it is an implementation of Conway's Game of Life. It's impressive as well to deliver something in only a couple of hours (guess the RAD promise of Lazarus is true).

Hope you can finish something in a next competition (or continue on your shoot-em-up because it looked promising).

Scores: Overall 2 Artistical 1 Technical 1 Genre 4

Botanim
by Tharro
all reviews of Botanim

Review by jroatch all reviews by jroatch

amarillion's review will be more worth to read then this one, especially the part about how dialing system works: "to get 6, you have press 6 six times", otherwise you'll be stuck on how to progress further the then first flower type.

This is exponential growth game, like cookie clicker, but without the base clicks. Which means the game will be especially slow at the beginning.

The ground that the flowers like to be in seems to be the middle of not being in forests, empty space, deserts (which sometimes looks like lava), and snow. I'll be obvious when the ground is unsuitable as the flower immediately dies. There are save (floppy disk) and load (arrow pointing to a letter inbox) buttons on the left side of the screen, so you can use those to guess and check what's good ground without losing much money.

There's no end goal other then the $100000 Ajuga, as the farmer specialist will never be available. So by that point of the game you'll be free to plant whatever flowers everywhere, with plenty of income to spare.

Scores: Overall 3 Artistical 2 Technical 4 Genre 5

Review by amarillion all reviews by amarillion

Botanim is essentially an investment game. You invest by planting flowers. With a bit of patience, they grow, and you can harvest them to recoup your investments. You harvest by clicking, and the more you click, the more money you make. After a while you will be able to afford more expensive flowers. The cost & earnings of consecutive flowers increase steeply, setting you on a path to exponential wealth accumulation.

It reminds me of another game that combines clicking with an investment mechanic - Insaniquarium. In that game you have to invest in fish instead of flowers, but it's surprisingly similar.

Botanim is a hard game to get into. There is not much happening in the beginning - the game requires patience - and could use a higher speed setting. Also because there is no sound and music, there isn't a whole lot to discover in the beginning. The world is very large, which also doesn't help. I first planted some flowers, then started looking around the map while I was waiting for them to grow - but I couldn't find my flowers back anymore (I always have the same problem in Minecraft)

But after a while the game gets going and it actually starts to get fun to try to make the map as colorful as possible.

Investments are risky. It takes 100 clicks to harvest enough corn flowers to be able to afford one tulip - and most of the time, you will only see it die immediately after planting. So that's a bit disheartening. One tactic that I found useful is to pick a spot, and try plants sequentially from cheap to expensive until one sticks. There is a hidden pattern underlying the map of where each flower will grow, and it requires trial and error to find out.

The game leaves you with the impression that there is a lot going on under the hood, but it doesn't present you with enough information to figure it out. There is a hidden pattern of hot/cold wet/dry spots, but I still haven't figured out how to know which is which. The icy/deserty/foresty patches seem to only loosely correspond to where flowers will grow. There are similarities to my LD46 game Exo Keeper (https://www.allegro.cc/forums/thread/618101). Ironically, it also has the same issues. On that game I also got the feedback that the game was too hard to figure out and therefore seemingly random.

A small bug: when scrolling and releasing ctrl-key or middle mouse button while outside the map area (e.g. on one of the side bars - the game stays in scroll mode and the map sticks to your mouse)

It took me a while to understand how the research dialing system works. I now get that to get 6, you have press 6 six times. But I didn't connect the dots for a while. A bit of tweaking and usability testing would go a long way here.

All in all, a difficult game with a lot of potential. But I feel that a few tweaks are necessary to make the game more fun: make it easier to discover where a flower will grow, so you don't have to risk it all to advance. And make it so you don't need excessive clicks.

Scores: Overall 4 Artistical 3 Technical 5 Genre 5

Victory Garden
by BugSquasher
all reviews of Victory Garden

Review by jroatch all reviews by jroatch

A scene of a rainbow quad, the painting "American Gothic" by Grant Wood, scrolling green text of "Victory Garden", and the X coordinate of that text.

Scores: Overall 1 Artistical 1 Technical 1 Genre 1

Review by rlam12 all reviews by rlam12

Victory Garden looks like a tech demo for Eagle5 usage. It opens with a classic Gothic scene, a scrolling green text with the name of the project, a color gradient, and some debug text un the upper left corner of the screen. After a short while, the picture fades to black and program ends.

Looking around the code I found some clues about the game and what was originally planned. Both characters from the picture where getting divorced and had setup a flower growing contest. This would have been a good 2-player competition game, and whoever wins would have won the farmhouse.

The genre requirement was only met in code, with that description, the artistic requirement was met with the old picture and the technical requirement was met with the scrolling green text.

Again, this is a tech demo for Eagle5. It shows some nice functionality. This could be reworked as an example for various subsystems of the GUI Library.

Scores: Overall 1 Artistical 2 Technical 3 Genre 1

Review by amarillion all reviews by amarillion

This entry presents American Gothic 1930 painting by Grant Wood, with scrolling text on top, in a Gothic font. This seems to cover the "old-fashioned" requirement pretty well, as well as the scrolling text requirement.

Unfortunately, the game is unfinished. Nevertheless, I'm glad you at least submitted something and wish you better luck for next time!

Scores: Overall 1 Artistical 2 Technical 2 Genre 1