Grovetender

(Made from scratch in 72 hours for Ludum Dare #50)

Intro

Darkness looms. After enduring for millenia, the time of The Sacred Grove is coming to an end.

All must fade. But…there was supposed to be more warning. The Mother Tree is still releasing her energy.

Surely The Grove will fall. If only you could buy enough time for her to finish, the cycle may continue.

How to play

Help The Mother Tree release all her energy before the gates fall.

• Fill up the “Energy Released” bar before any of the “Gate Health” bars hits 0.
• Chop down trees and cut up logs to collect WOOD.
• Stand near a GATE and aim at it to spend WOOD to REPAIR it.
• Stand near the MOTHER TREE and aim at it to spend WOOD to help RELEASE ENERGY.

Tips

• Falling logs can knock over other trees and smash other logs, speeding up wood gain.
• Water slows you down. Try making a bridge of logs to run across it more quickly.
• More intense gate assaults happen occasionally with increasing frequency over time.

Retrospective:

Inspired by Valheim, we wanted to make a game that was just "tree dominos", and while we got the basics right, we learned some tough lessons about asset planning. With the size we made our world and the speed it felt reasonable for the player to go, it became a very tight balance between too easy and too difficult that we never managed to perfect and didn't have time to fix.

It also became too difficult to navigate that world once we actually filled it in with trees, and our trees were too short to domino well, but the more we added, the harder it became to navigate. Finally, we wanted knocking trees down to make bridges over water to be a useful tactic, but they were too short and the jumping too awkward for that to feel worth it.