Madness in Square Garden
Arrow keys ← → ↑ ↓ to arrange blocks, Space/Enter/X to place them
Madness in Square Garden
A compact block puzzle with a twissst 🐍
Arrange a random set of blocks to get the most out of your garden in 30 days and rack up a high score. Till, plant, water, harvest…but keep an eye out for snakes!
Typical play time per run: a few minutes, with high replayability.
📈 Post your high scores in the comments!
📉 For an additional challenge: what's the lowest score you can get? :)
Made for the LOWREZJAM 2022 game jam, where the goal was to make a game in 14 days with the resolution of 64x64 pixels.
Gameplay & controls
The game plays in turns, and one turn equals one day. You have 30 days to collect as many fruit and mushrooms as you can to maximize your score. The starting board, as well as actions you receive each turn are randomly selected.
- Rotate action blocks — ←→ Left and right arrow keys
- Swap top/bottom action blocks — ↑↓ Up and down arrow keys
- Place action blocks — Space, enter, or X key
To get the most fun out of the game, I recommend playing it a few times to learn the rules from experience. These are the most important board interactions:
To get fruit
- Grass + Till = Tilled ground
- Tilled ground + Seed = Sapling
- Sapling + Water = Watered sapling
- Watered sapling + Time = Fruiting plant
- Fruiting plant + Harvest = Collect fruit
To get mushrooms
- Grass + Water = Wet grass
- Wet grass + Time = Mushroom
- Mushroom + Harvest = Collect mushroom
What about those pesky snakes?
- Grass + Time = Snake
- Snake + Water = Wet grass
- Snake + Till = Grass
- Snake + Hand = Lose health
(Don't worry: the snakes are fine!)
Contact
Follow me on Twitter @hellobalint
Credits
- Game design, programming, art, sound, and music by Bálint Magyar
- Frameworks, libraries, tools used: LÖVE, love.js, Aseprite, 30log, bfxr, Ableton Live
- Special thanks: Adri, Bebe, Ati, Ariel, Ildi, Pete
Known issues
- On certain Macs and browser versions there's dithered (checkerboard) artifacting (likely due to compatibility issues regarding particular GPUs)
Download
Click download now to get access to the following files:
Comments
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
I really need 32bit versions pls
Thanks so much for playing! It was really interesting to see the contrast between your first and last run :)
Hey ! Your game is in my top 5 lowrez games to draw inspiration from. Congratulations for making this game. It's quite fun and I'm waiting for the mobile release !
Thanks again, Darenn! Hoping to get to that release sometime :)
so minimalistic, yet so incredibly well done.
Thanks so much :) ❤️
Congratulations on making this game !
I've played your game during a live that you can watch here :
The live is timestamped so you can go directly to your game.
I hope the feedback and live reactions will be useful. Keep it up !
Really great little game.
Thank you!!
just farm those mushrooooooooooooooooooooooooom!!!!
let’s gooo
I love it!
Yay!! 🐍🧡
Got to grips with this really quickly, fantastic little puzzle game, can really see myself revisting this!
I'm glad you enjoyed it, thank you for playing :)
Fun game! Really clever little ecosystem play, love how its easier to get to mushrooms and they stay good until you pick them, whereas the fruit is harder and longer to raise and can go wrong in multiple ways, and that the scoring reflects that.
Also scaring snakes away with water is the best!
1 bug: I got to 1480, but the highscore got stuck on an earlier score of 1190.
Thank you for the kind words :) And also for the bug report — others have ran into it as well, I'm currently trying to hunt it down
It's a clever little game, wouldn't mind an expanded version with more plants, maybe scaling up the plot size or other such things. I can see a bigger version that might warrant a release on more platforms!
I'm hoping to explore this design a bit. :) Let me tell you I had to exercise a lot of restraint during the jam when I was thinking about expanding the grid to 3x3…
And maybe 1 little UX thing I'd recommend is having in the score screen the enter push forward to the final score, rather than straight back to the start screen.
(and maybe a restart button :b)
Great points! :) These are the kinds of things that got pushed down the Trello as the deadline got near 😅 I'm definitely planning a post-jam version though
very good gameplay, i was constantly smiling while playing this. Especially love the graphics and sounds. Nice job! I hope i’ll see more from you in the future!
Thank you!!