I shared a work-in-progress version of this cart a few days ago that I had created over the course of a 4-day hackathon at work. I fixed a few bugs and added some finishing touches on my own time and now I think I'm going to call it done. I'm already looking forward to the next one!
Congratulations @amfrantz on your first Pico cart! Here's to many more!
A fun little game with lots of nice touches. A very nicely presented title and high-score page. The mover and bees looks great and I like the way that the bees wander off at the end of a level. It also seemed fair in that if I mowed over a flower the spawned bee was on the other side of the screen.
My main criticism is that the first few levels are simple and don't entice the player to replay them. I'd like a start-level select so that I can start from levels 1, 5 or 10 (for example). The gameplay also tends to be (at least early on), avoid the flowers as much as possible and then cut them right at the end. What if there was an aggresive time limit - maxed at 15 seconds and every flower cut gave you 5 seconds? So you had to occasionaly cut flowers but not necessarily all of them?
Regardless this is a nice cart and you should be proud to now be a "published author". Well done and gold star.
@phil Thanks for the feedback!
Regarding a level select option, I had this exact thought last night. I agree the first few levels are pretty boring once you've played them a couple times. I will definitely be adding this!
I also love your suggestion regarding incentivizing releasing bees early. In a previous version of the game, in an attempt to incentivize this behavior, I had a system that would grant bonus points the more bees you had on-screen as you mow (basically a small multiplier effect applied to the normal points earned for mowing grass). Friends and family who play-tested were confused by how this bonus worked and I couldn't figure out a good way to make it intuitive, so I ended up dropping it. Making the time limit more aggressive and granting extra time for mowed flowers is an excellent idea and hopefully much more intuitive for the player! Thank you!
Just released an update to support level select! Every 5 levels reached is a new "checkpoint", so you'll be able to start from level 1, 5, 10, and so on up to level 50. I'm limiting it to 50 because there is a point where the game becomes so fast that things start to break, like the mower beginning to leave chunks of un-mowed grass behind.
Since level select will likely enable players to reach much higher levels than before, I also made a small tweak to speed up the "3, 2, 1, Mow!" animation so that it scales with the game speed. On higher levels (like 25 and up), the animation was too slow and was blocking the screen for too long at the start of the level.
Anyway, enjoy!
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