Reviews

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