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A jam submission

The Quest to Restore the SUNflower!View game page

An incremental game where you direct a hive of bees to pollinate the SUNflower and restore light to the world.
Submitted by Axelx — 2 minutes, 50 seconds before the deadline
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The Quest to Restore the SUNflower!'s itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Theme#383.8753.875
Music#663.2923.292
Overall#823.2583.258
Art#873.5003.500
Fun#942.8752.875
Gameplay#1082.7502.750

Ranked from 24 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

KAPLAY

No

Was not made with KAPLAY

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Comments

Submitted

First of all, for jam games, you should keep your intro short and make it skippable. It would attract more players to try out and rate your games. 

Also game play wise, the game screen might have too many flowers to pick. It looks very noisy. Also I keep on clicking on the hive and the bees. So I should click on the flower and then the bees to direct them to pollinate the flower. That part is a bit confusing. 

Having more animation to make the screen lively would be even better.

(+1)

I liked the style. I didn't like that I had to wait for the intro to finish, without being able to skip it. Not great for returning players. A little slow-paced for my taste, but it does look like an intersting concept to build on.

Submitted (3 edits)

The initial presentation and itch page did a good job making me want to check the game out. I liked the art overall, but the bees, flowers and landscapes often blended together. I liked the music initially with the intro, but it was quickly too repetitive.

I don’t like incremental games, and I only got to 55 pollen or so. So whether the gameplay loop is good or bad, I’ll leave to other people. To me it’s very tedious.

I want to focus on UI elements, because there’s a lot of room for improvement there.

  • The hive - there’s no indication of how many bees are in a hive, if it’s clickable, or anything really. The game starts, and even though I skimmed the rules, I had to stare and think - how do I start playing?
  • The flowers - Again I only skimmed the rules, but I had no idea these were even interactive. Around 25 pollen I realized I was sending all of my bees to a flower that required 100k pollen - soul crushing. I clicked nearly 50 times to get to that point.
  • The bees - These are the best of the interactive elements, but they get lost in the landscape, and could use a hover effect.

Consider adding ready and hover effects to every single interactive component, and/or sound effects when timers are done. I know this is a lot of work, but incremental games are almost entirely about the UI/UX. They are dopamine machines; you want to drive satisfaction through very simple repetitive actions. Crisp UI, sound effects, big numbers - these are the core of a good incremental game.

All said and done, this is a good base to build further on. 1 week is not a lot of time and there’s a lot to be proud of here. And I really like the giant bee sprite :)

Developer

Thank you so much for the detailed feedback, I'll definitely keep this in mind moving forward!

Submitted

The game felt a little lackluster to me; it got very repetitive very quickly, and not in a good way. Additionally — and I think this is just me, given the other ratings — I found the music annoying. I think with more focus on game balance this could be a very good game, but I don’t think it’s quite there yet.

Developer

Thanks for your feedback, I think that having more upgrades would've helped it to be less repetitive, but I ran out of time to implement them :( I'm not really sure what else I could have done to make it less repetitive though...

Submitted

Surely the most clicked game of the jam. It was nice, but in the right part of the flower field sometimes it was hard to see if a bee was done harvesting, and it would be good if at some point you could click more beeas at once, but overall it was a nice game

Developer

Thanks for your feedback!

Submitted(+1)

It took a lot of clicks to finish the game, and the pollen scaling started off slow but then ramped up really fast. At the beginning I was a bit confused, I thought I was doing something wrong and that the bees were rejecting the flower because of the sound they made, but once I understood the numbers in the corner it was fine. What really stood out to me was the art and the simple and fitting music.

Submitted(+1)

Cool idea fusing an incremental game with the theme. Took me a bit to understand that I was opening flowers that gave me more bees/better pollination targets, but it's a good mechanic. The upgrades options were few and I couldn't automate away the bee-clicking. I had fun with what was there, though. 

Submitted

Good job! I’m not going to lie, it took me quite a bit to actually understand what was going on, with the flowers blooming, bringing more bees and more pollen. Some criticism is that visual readability is a bit low, particularly on the bees on the right side.

But I think overall it’s a pretty fun game! Certainly a unique way to do incremental, which I think could be expanded if you’re willing to. I wish I did a grandiose ending like you did!

image.png

Developer(+1)

I'm really glad you enjoyed the ending! And yeah the readability definitely isn't great, but this was my first time making my own art for a game, so I wasn't entirely sure what I was doing, lol. Honestly, I'm still not, but I'm working on it, so that's all that matters...

Submitted(+1)

The use of the theme, art style, and overall idea are really nice, and the music fits very well. However, the art itself didn’t feel very satisfying, and the feedback for player actions felt lacking. I often wasn’t sure if what I did had much impact. Some parts of the menu also looked a bit too plain. With stronger visual/audio feedback and a bit more polish, this could become a much more engaging experience.

Submitted(+1)

I like the color palette, the meditative gameplay of incremental game which matches the theme of the jam. And that's first incremental game i have seen on this jam, so it covers the niche genre. The problem i had is that it takes some time to make your first upgrade and therefore the development of gameplay arrives after some time (but that's only question of balance, so it's not hard to fix).

Submitted

Fun little game, number go up is pretty addictive ngl. I was about to complain how its missing some key incremental game elements like automatising your production but at the very end when i alerady went through the game manually i realised you can enter the hive. This one's completely on me, im just stupid lmao. Anyways one other piece of feedback i can give is that it would've been cool if there was still some kind of use for the lower tier flowers once you unlock a new level of flower, becasue right now its just not worth the effort to send out your bees to those ones. I always kept a number in my head for how many of my flowers are the highest tier and only sent out that many bees. Anyways cool submission :>

Developer

I definitely agree that it'd be cool for the low tier flowers to not become obsolete, I'm just not entirely sure how to achieve it so I'd love any ideas. Anyway, thanks for the feedback and I'm glad you enjoyed! :)

Submitted(+1)

Simple yet addicting! The issues that i had is how the level visual hierarchy quite overlapping so i can't see where the bees is ready. Great work still, don't mind to try our game too!!!

Submitted(+1)

this was extremely tedious, but addicting. great work!

Submitted(+1)

The theme, visuals, and gameplay together make me feel... wistful. The pacing is very... very slow and repetitive though. It's certainly relaxing, I'd like to see further iteration where things "get going" a bit faster! Good stuff!

Developer(+1)

Thanks for the feedback, I'll certainly keep it in mind moving forward!

Submitted

nice game… took me a while to understand the game logic… but I managed to get the sunflower bloom! well done.

Developer

Thanks! I really enjoyed your game as well; absolutely loved how you interpreted the theme.

Submitted(+1)

Pretty fun! Wish the bees were a little clearer to see, they get kinda lost in the scene

Developer(+1)

Thanks for the feedback! That's a really good point, and I've tried to fix it now by making the bees a little bigger and giving them a stronger outline, although I'm not sure how much it's helped.

Submitted(+1)

The theme fits really well. The gameplay is interesting at first, but after a while the loop starts to feel repetitive. I enjoyed the artwork, and overall it’s a solid game.

Developer(+1)

I'm glad you enjoyed it! I've added an upgrade system now, which should hopefully keep the gameplay fresh for longer.

Submitted (1 edit)

The upgrade system fixed the repetitive feeling of the game. I ended up playing until I finished it, and had a lot of fun. I updated my rating—it’s way more enjoyable now!

Developer

Yay!! :)

Submitted(+1)

👍🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝