Phantom Garden

Yeah we had a bit of a desync between the art and the code there unfortunately, turns out the hue-saturation-value system kindof goes from red to red instead of red to violet, so especially in the yellow/green area we had some not great inconsistencies. The different symbols on the icon werte there to help with that (and with color blindness) but it's definitely a detail that bothered me too once the game was uploaded hahah. Thanks for the feedback!

As per usual, Tea for Dragonflies with the jumpscare-ish ending :P (we really should start with the ending cutscene next time ,instead of leaving it for last)

Thanks for the feedback!

Wow! This is probably the most in-depth feedback we've ever received, thank you so much!

Regarding the text feedback:

Very glad you liked the atmosphere, it's probably what we spent most time on. The gameplay turned out quite different than our original idea unfortunately, and got very simplified, to the point where it was as you say, just bring 3 of each type to each thing with somewhat random food preferences for each one.

The lore answer for why each spirit wants three of their own kind of spirit doesn't really make sense with how the game turned out unfortunately, but if you're interested, basically the idea was to have the game be a bit more open ended and with a day/night system. The game would end on the 31st of october, which is the soul festival and you, the soul gardener, would release the souls you gathered to the world. This would in turn please different phantoms, who are a level above souls and kind of like "guardians" of each type of soul.

Yeah, we would have loved to have a larger and more interesting world. The original idea was to have two gameplay loops: Farming sim and Metroidvania platformer. But over scoping and our first project in gamemaker kind of prevented that sadly.

Regarding the video feedback:

• First, no worries on comparing it to planet weaver! We do too :P. As yadokari was to planet weaver, hopefully phantom garden will be to our next project. Working with new tools and techniques to hopefully be ready for a more ambitious project on the next jam.

• On plots: I was super crunched on the programming in the last couple of hours, to the point where I basically nerfed the growing times to almost instant in the last 15 or so minutes. This is because of our experience previously, where it's better for jam game to be too easy rather than too hard. I suppose it had the useful side effect of allowing for a safeguard against hard-locking the game.

• On characters/dialogues/hints: This was probably our most lacking area, and is really my fault for not getting the dialogue system working sooner. Trial and error for the soul types was not the idea at all, but it's just kinda what stuck as other features took higher priority.

• The hat does grow as you progress! I'm glad you noticed that.

• Why seven spirits? We wanted to work with a different perspective on souls/ghosts/phantoms, where usually in games they are evil or out to get you, we wanted the ghosts to be virtuous creatures, loosely basing them on the seven virtues (opposite to the seven capital sins)

• On sound and music I'm super happy you liked the rain sound. Since using pre-made recordings isn't allowed, and it's very hot and dry here right now, we spent a long time (perhaps too long) figuring out how to synthesize a convincing rain sound. Also I'm glad you found the music not looping to be nice, that was sort of a happy accident, because I didn't notice that FL studio was counting bars instead of seconds, so instead of making a 3 ish minutes song, it turned out being 13 minutes hahah.

• What happens if the ghost gets you? Your character just resets, but no progress is lost.

Once again, thank you for the in depth feedback. Hopefully we can use this to make a better game next time :D

Thank you very much!

"Tea for Dragonflies masterpiece" Wow hahah, that's high praise.

Glad you liked the atmosphere, perhaps we spent more time than we should have on it though :P

Thank you very much for the feedback, I appreciate the kind words :)

I'm very happy toto hear you enjoyed it, thanks!

Thank you very much :)

I'm glad you liked the atmosphere of the game!

Hmm I'm not really sure about the bug D: Do you remember what order you did the things in? The way it's programmed, it should always trigger once you've completed 7 "quests", so i'm really not sure what happened. Sorry about that.

And yeah, the instructions for the draw tail extension snuck it's way in there, and we didn't even get to use it hahah. It was meant for the ending cutscene.

Thank you for the feedback!