Veggienizer

Overall great idea and execution. The animations and visuals were great, but I did struggle to understand how it connected to the theme.

Amazing game. It made me legit uncomfortable to put a turnip down and then having it be hurt about it.

So, this potatoe might be worth 4 to you, but than I don't agree with your values!

Beautiful game!

I enjoyed it a lot, angry veggies are quiet funny!
By the way, is there a way to reach the first veggie you encounter? I tried moving the boxes around, but got stuck eventually.
The highscore board with countries is a cool touch to see where the other participants are from!
I am actually from Belgium, but guess my VPN hid me in Great Britain :D

Good job overall!

@BPM I think you missed the whole point of the game then. Sure it's kinda abstract take on the theme but it's still there. Thanks for playing though!

@elZach Thanks! Good, that's exactly what I was going for. Kinda making a not so subtle statement.

@Yaro Thanks! There isn't a good way to reach it at least. It isn't blocked in any way so it theoretically can be reached if you manage to manouver the boxes there but it's not worth it. It's really just the same as all other vegetables but the only one that has a 100% spawn chance. And since vegetables get their value assigned when they spawn (based on your current score) it will be the lowest possible. It's kinda just there to guide the player on what to look for.

Yeah I love seeing the internationality of the jam communities in the leaderboards. I've done the same thing for couple of Ludum Dares and it's always fun seeing a huge array of different flags some I don't even recognize. It's kinda weird how small of a thing it really is but it adds a ton of flavour and personality instead of just being a name and a score on screen.

@anttihaavikko
I see, I guess I was thinking about the possibility of a poetic "the best veggie was under your nose this entire time", haha :D

I couldn't agree more about the countries!
It's amazing to see how international those jams can be!
For instance, seeing how you are from Finland, I regret deciding to not include the conspiracy theory about how Finland doesn't exist in my game xD

Turned down by a turnip :(
Unique game with cool visuals. Took me a while to get what's happening but I enjoyed the journey. I don't know if I'm getting old or if the picking up thing is too fast. Great work!

Nice entry!

Graphics and audio are really solid. I particularly liked the little garbly talking sound the character makes when he narrates. The music was really nice, but some of the samples you used (e.g. airplane taking off) seemed maybe slightly out of place.

I like the mechanic of only being able to hold one vegetable at a time, and trying to incrementally increase your points by courting more and more valuable vegetables. It felt really bad when you tossed your current vegetable in favor of a new one, then ended up losing both --- probably some sort of parallel to real life. It did feel bad that the spawning dropped back down to the base level after you end up losing your valuable vegetable; it might be a little less punishing if it records the most valuable you have encountered to date and uses that for spawning?

Interestingly enough, I actually found the smallest vegetables the hardest to pick. Though you have to press fewer keys in a row, there's a smaller time window, and my reflexes weren't fast enough to orient myself that quickly sometimes.

Although I don't think it would make sense for the game to be paced too fast, I think that it is currently just a little too slow. Between the slow character movement speed and the fairly scarce vegetable spawning at the beginning, you would sometimes go one or two minutes without encountering anything.

Overall really interesting take on the theme and great game for a solo entry in 72 hours!

@plasmastarfish Thanks for the feedback!

Yeah, it was already quite late on sunday when I was doing the music and I was honestly getting quite fed up with the whole project so was just throwing random dumb stuff there. I still kinda like the idea of the game but it was not at all fun to make and test mainly due to it being so slow. I think I kinda overscoped and underestimaed how much time testing such a slow game would take and didn't quite get to polish everything to the point I would have wanted.

The slowness too was indeed intentionally designed that way as a reflection of real life. Just like the gamble for a "better" vegetable and then ending up being left empty handed. The punishment is probably way too hard though yeah.

It's flat half a second per direction for the picking up. So yeah of course the shortest one is the trickiest since the initial reaction time is the biggest percentage of the whole alotted time for them. Probably should have been some initial duration of x seconds and then y seconds times the directions on top of that to make it more smooth. And obviously adding some variation to those times too would have been nice.

edit: Oh and nice score btw! Even ended up standing in front of one that is at least 112 too. Didn't want to risk it or completely ran out of time?

I loved the press-your-luck element of the gameplay, and how it ties into theme of romantic connections. The art style is really cute too- especially how all the characters are animated.

My main problem was the lack of instruction as to how the game actually worked. There were two things that I think the game should explicitly tell the player:

• Dropping a vegetable signifies that you have "rejected" them, and you can't pick them back up. This also loses you the points you would have earned by keeping them.
• You don't have to do anything to "settle down" with a vegetable; your chosen vegetable is simply the one you are holding when the timer runs out. This is the only vegetable you earn points for.
  I was able to figure out the first one by playing, but I was very confused about the second one. I first tried taking the vegetable to my house, figuring that's how you "settle down" with it. When that didn't do anything, I actually quit my first playthrough with 6 minutes left to read the above comments so I could figure out what I was supposed to do with a vegetable I wanted to keep. It would be nice for the official description to clarify these points.

Still, now that I understand how it works, I can say that this is a really cool concept with a neat mechanic. I enjoyed it. Good work!

@anttihaavikko Ran out of time! I did previously get one that was around 120, but accidentally tossed it and it got angry…

Completely see the balancing act of making a game with the slow exploratory feeling without making it too monotonous, and getting the time to playtest such a game. I had a good time though!