Glowing Meadow

2

PITCH ELEVATOR

You’ve just been awaken to free the three other forest guardians in order to revive the Ancient Oak, thus bringing peace and balance back into the Glowing meadow.

To do so, you’ll have to gather four golden seeds. These ones will bud if you have enough plants grown. For that purpose, you need to take care of your garden by watering the glowing plants and cutting off the dark weeds.

Each freed guardian will help you in your quest by granting you a magic power !

By the way, do not forget to water your faded plants, or they might catch fire..!

Controls :

• Water plants: SPACE BAR
• Cut: E

Powers :

• Speed Boost: B
• Summon plants: V
• Summon Rain: C

GAME’S CONTEXT

Glowing Meadow is a Jam entry for the 40th Ludum Dare. The theme was « The More you have, the Worse it is ».

The goal was to create a game with mechanics that would force the player to grow, while making the situation worse and worse sytemically. We thought about the fire, which can spread easily and get worse if you don’t do anything to handle it. It was interesting, but not enough. Inspired by the tragic events that stroke a lot of our planet’s forests this summer, we decided to go for plants. You would have to take care of them, instead of what they would start a fire, and spread until nothing’s left. Our concept was born.

We actually were a team of six people (see credits), so a lot more than for previous entries. For this jam, we went remote, and decided to work for the full three days, except for me. I went to work at Ubisoft the Monday morning, and took my afternoon off to finish the project with the rest of the team. The jam went well, except for the last few hours (AGAIN!) where we faced some balancing issues on the spread system due to the variable framerate of the game. The cooperation work was awesome, and there was a good synergy between us (fourth jam as a team!). But if you want to learn more about this Jam, I invite you to read the Post-Mortem to come on my DevBlog 😉

What was my Job ?

We were a team of six. Louis still used Clickteam Fusion 2.5 as programing tool, while I was in charge of the Game Design of the game. Arthur was responsible for all the Sound Design/Music composing, and Thibaut, Alexandre and Melissandre were on the Graphic part. Once the major axis of the game were written, the most challenging part was to get the « Spread system » working well and balanced. Again, you can learn more about the design process as soon as the Post Mortem will be done.

Credits :

Mathieu Clavel – Game Design

Louis Denizet – Programing

Arthur Dos Santos – Music / Sound Design

Alexandre Magnat – Graphic Design

Thibaut Risler – Concept Art

Melissandre Samson – Support Graphic Design

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