A game about growing plants (beta 6 released!)

[MooseHead]

Would be awesome if you made some situational music in Survival.

So when the forest is plentiful and the sky is blue, there's this chilling ambient delicious heaven music.
But when the disease kills almost all of your plants, it delves into a more chaotic, glitchy mess, sort of like Lawn Wake IX, by Flashbulb


Just an idea.

Also, having making the diseases target area more 'fuzzy', coupled with a slowed down time would be awesome.

[Robin]

Another thing: if you up the maximum of plants allowed, that would be great for survival mode, otherwise there's not much you can do to prevent every plant from dying.

To clarify: right now, especially in the beginning, the game play changes back and forth between "frenzy" and "can't do anything, bored". More plants to plant gives the player something to do between the "oh god I'm dying, have to act fast" parts.

[Taehl]

Already thought of that, MooseHead! The "disease is winning" music will be the song 'Parade', from Amon26's album Fulcrum.

I could up the plant limit, Robin, however, it'd be at risk of FPS loss... Is it worth it? Do you have framerate to spare?

Thanks for the Survival suggestions - I'll try them out. Keep the feedback coming, please.

[Robin]

I could up the plant limit, Robin, however, it'd be at risk of FPS loss... Is it worth it? Do you have framerate to spare?

This is something that is different for everyone, unfortunately. How many can you add before noticeable slowdown?

[Taehl]

Unless there's some way to speed up love.draw? Not many. The current limit is 12, and my system runs at 50 FPS when I have 19... Not to mention, there's other stuff that needs to be drawn too: Wind, bugs, grass...

[Robin]

Does everything need to be animated? Those that don't could be drawn on a framebuffer once. You could also check whether there are some expensive non-drawing functions that could be improved.

[Taehl]

I was thinking about having that as an extreme performance option, but... Really, if they're just static images, it kind of defeats the point of them being so dynamic.

[MooseHead]

Currently I have no issues with framerate at all.
Then again I have a Quadcore 3.0ghz and 8GB DDR3 RAM.

[Taehl]

Time for a new beta. It has lots of tweaks, some fixes, and a new way of doing Survival mode. Comment and critique, please.

[nevon]

Managed to get to 1130 (though I still don't think survival is any fun). I'm really looking forward to the "make a plant like *this*"-mode. I would really like a game mode that's a lot slower and more strategic, where you get access to more information about the trees (like, right-click → see some representation of the selected tree's genes) and more ways to influence their growth, making it almost more of a puzzle game than anything else.

I liked the new ground. The menu is still kinda ugly and just barely legible, so I hope that's still a work in progress.