Map progession

[Losereye]

Going more than two columns in the map seems... more than counter intuitive. If you start in the back corner, which it feels like you're meant to given how you start there, you lose the bonus that the column hitches off of after you move too far away from it. For example, if your leftmost column is fern, and you get a second in front of it, and then begin a third, you lose the bonus 100 at the start from being close to the fern, and thus you lose the exponential increase you get from completing the column, forcing you to get the fern all species upgrade. This is shared by succulent too, and all other bonuses given, and it makes progression after a certain point really dull, since it feels like you start from scratch without any map tiles. I suggest giving you more movement, and thus bonuses? Like having all the bonuses you currently get like the movement of a rook in chess, so you can get one of every bonus, allowing your column bonuses to actually give you meaningful upgrades instead of forcing you to complete a plant slowly if you get all the fastest column upgrades first, like fern.

Hope you see this! And I hope you consider it! Have a good day

[footofthehare]

Yeah the game isn't the best balanced. I was trying to avoid some of the madness that came up with succulent, like if you had all 4 doubling effects on sugar from the column and then the squaring effect from the column itself it was a lot.

That said I've been both quite ill and working a Massive new project and so I've kind of put IPG updates on hold but there's a lot of stuff I wouldn't mind revisiting and changing, the vague list being:

Finally adding a tutorial
Fixing balancing
Adding the original second planned map (Trees)
Getting more unique art from FlyThruTheChaos and adding those in for the remaining plants
Adding the Row bonuses

There are a lot of things but IPG was really a bit of a learning project for me so I could learn about making a game in this framework before I started work on Squalls of Northspire but pretty much everything has been put on hold for health reasons at the moment.

[Manite]

Originally posted by footofthehare:

Finally adding a tutorial
Fixing balancing
Adding the original second planned map (Trees)
Getting more unique art from FlyThruTheChaos and adding those in for the remaining plants
Adding the Row bonuses

Once I got done with making a column of moss on the map, I was really disappointed when I moved over a column and completely lost the full column effect. I assumed that end game would look like just completely filling in the map with each row of plants, so you can get every column effect at the same time (speeding of gameplay significantly but probably not ruining the fun factor). I quickly stopped playing after realizing it wasn't going to play out like that; the feeling of having my speed of progression suddenly drop from ^2 to x20 (if I remember correctly) was very, very noticeable and demotivating. If you did follow the route of allowing full column bonuses to be active regardless of where the player is, I think it would open up more possibilities for future progression (like maybe full forests or something).

Anyhow, I guess my main point is that playing through the game over and over again with the meager bonuses from nearby map tiles gets boring very quickly.

[Zaelle]

The cell stuff doesn't make much sense to me considering you lose bonuses as you go. Seems counter intuitive, like you said, to lose bonuses. I know this thread is a few months old, but I do hope the planned changes are still on the to-do list.

[jawstrock]

you only lose adjacent bonus if you move away, you get column boost anywhere. focus on doing columns of single herbs :)