Pleasant little mini Sim where you grow (hopefullly!) a large tree.
The control are pretty simple as long as you get off the ground (pun!) by rememebering SPACE BAR grows the branch segment. It's easy to try to click the mouse or random keys.
Very simple ecology, though with a couple of fancy formulas. It's pretty balanced, but it gets a rating of Phoenix Easy-Plus because of a couple of traps.
You start off with a fixed supply of energy, and growing branches costs 50 energy. You can make leaves for free per se, though it seems it does take extra water. So at the base level, grow a bunch of branches, make leaves, so that it replenishes energy, and you need a threshold of 200 to make it rain.
There are only 2 pathways per branch and making leaves finishes off a branch, so some kind of wide base is recommended. Depending on how wide you start off, optimal seems to be about 7-9 nodes or so.
Tips -
- The Water counter is not steady paced! So especially later on, when you think you're cruising, it can race down and you have to hurry to make rain! This has destroyed two big trees so far! Then it slows down. Not sure if this is a feature! Also, a few times it really looked like my water was above zero but then it became game over.
- It's pretty easy to hit steady state, a little care in the beginning should do it. But I am beginning to think the final goal is to really make a fleshed out nice tree! I aesthetically went for a trunk in the beginning, thugh it's not required, but a V-shaped tree just looked ugly.
- The second thing earning the Plus is the branch design. Some variant of a binary splitting pattern is going on, with some unclear formula of when it widens branches (after making leaves!) so although the camera can move, I am trying for a single screen pic.
- It's a sim game, so it DOES take a couple hours if you are really going for a large tree. Turns out it can multi task the branches, so at first you can't see through the delay box, but then once you hit cruise zone you can build multiple branches at once, but I recommend surveying for a minute every few branches because of the quick water counter, and also to see your design after the boxes go away.
- There is no pause, I think, not counting things like shifting OS focus out.
- As is, the graphics are pretty nice once you start to get going. There is no gravity, so I have experimented with growing my branches partly upside down to work on fleshing out the tree.
I'll try to post a screen shot if I can get a really nice one!
LD Page:
https://ldjam.com/ev...dum-dare/45/vaahteraGame Page:
https://wiekafe1.itch.io/vaahteraFor a screenshot, disclaimer - it's not completely right out of the game. I built half the tree, then mirrored and cropped it. The program doesn't really reward trunks, and I was getting fatigued from all the restarts!
But since I can't draw at all, it's still rather neat! I am a loose player - so I just considered my editing like an artist trimming the canvas or paper.
