#play wildmender tbh

[unironicallycringe]

Wildmender art dump because Wildmender is Wildmending my soul

Anyways this is my character I'm pretending that in her past life they were an acolyte of Stryge. I'm designing fan acolyte/priest outfits for the gods. She hugging frogge.

Also the birds in the Salt Flats. I gifted them the beautiful headempty eyes of a grackle.

[eccentric-nucleus]

so wildmender came out the other day (yesterday) and i've been playing it a bunch!

preliminary thoughts: it's decent. the mechanics don't come together in the way that i would think are ideal, but, i'm picky so it's probably fine. there aren't an enormous number of plants in the game, just like a dozen-and-change, which i'm a little disappointed by. the 'plants' tab in the game's journal has blacked-out silhouette squares for all plants, with the ones you've actually seen filled in, and let me tell you they are putting a bunch of things that are not plants in the plants tab. things like: a hedge wall that exists as a static object that doesn't grow or die. but it has leaves on it so we're putting it in the plants tab. etc.

anyway i am playing on 200% day/night length and 25% plant growth rate, which (since plant growth rate is in units of in-game hours) means i am effectively playing at 12.5% plant growth rate. i think it could go lower tbh. the part of the game where you plop down an acorn and a week later you have a full-grown tree struck me as a little too game-y.

anyway uhhhh it is a cutesy gardening survival game. you will in fact be doing a bunch of gardening. i am still enjoying the water flow systems, even if now in the actual game it's showing its limits a little. (clearly water isn't fully simulated across the entire game world at all times; when i leave the main oasis for a long period of time and come back later, it's locally "topped up" but then it clearly realizes i have the channels hooked up to flow into a big lower pond and it starts draining. this is kind of a degenerate case, b/c i noticed that all the springs are coded to stop producing water before they fully immerse themselves and responded by putting all my wellstones at the top of hills. but also the game itself gives you a bunch of springs on elevated pillars, so, idk. the real challenge will be seeing if it's actually possible to flood the dry canals in the salt flats.)

personally i would prefer something more deliberate, where the desert is actually a desert and it requires planning and forethought to strike out in an expedition across it. but my 'deliberate' is probably everybody else's "pointlessly punishing", so i definitely understand why they didn't. they currently do this more with drain effects (the other biomes drain your: heath, water, food bars as you spend time in them and require specific things to counter that; i'd prefer if they were draining just by sheer bigness.) still, i'd like map generation settings with "size" and "amount of dead vegetation" options, please

it's definitely doing a bit of the 'green-imperialism of approved environments over unapproved environments' (which i just happened to read like an hour before making this post) thing where you are tasked with getting rid of the Bad Biomes (deserts, mud flats) and replacing them with Good Biomes (full of nonthreatening and instrumentally-useful plants). tumbleweeds are plants too! deserts are vital ecosystems too; they're not just a blank-slate 'barren wasteland'! let me grow a horrible thorn bramble that sucks to navigate b/c that's the only good habitat for birds! more poison berries that are food for wildlife! accept that nature isn't actually super cutesy!!

anyway good game i am enjoying it and i will probably play a bunch more of it even if it only has a dozen-and-change actual plants in it and very simplistic biome mechanics.

[eccentric-nucleus]

https://mkremins.github.io/blog/gardening-games/

I read this and thought of you (talking about wildmender and your minecraft worlds)

(actual link)

oh yeah i've read this before! i do think it does hit a few things, like... games are frequently defined in terms of their verbs b/c those are the things that have clear & direct gameplay impacts. 'shoot the lock to open the door', b/c, what you can do in the game is: shoot. and so for a lot of games, objects are mostly designed as things you can get. you can acquire them and then you can use them! and a lot of the times the specific use is less important than the fact that the whole game is strung together by always having more stuff you can Get leading you forward.

a 'gardening game' as they talk about it is a game that's more about... an interesting interplay between things. sometimes that's more systemic (town-builder games are pretty heavily 'garden' in this metaphor) and sometimes it's more about the variety of a thousand options. and that's neat!

i personally tend to be kind of fixated on... the act of dwelling in a game space? game spaces are frequently extremely static, never really changing, and so games that actually let the play impact and change a space over time tend to be games that have put a lot of thought into that as a primary mechanic

tho tbh the most compelling games i've played have basically been half-and-half. your 'dungeon crawl to build up the town' games. azure dreams, dark cloud... it seems like that should be a way more popular genre than it is

[eccentric-nucleus]

e-a-r-w-i-g

love ur games posts bc its always something ive never heard of that sounds right up my alley followed by thoughtful critique also right up my alley lol.. i want a really miserable survival game but nothing quite scratches that itch 4 me.. one day i will make that game tho! hopefully

tbh i just saw this post linked somewhere and wildmender was literally the second game listed

tbh it's a weird feeling since it's so close to some of the game concepts i've worked on, only done way more professionally/high production-value than i could ever do. but i mean. it's still a game i can play, so, w/e, i will try to let it inform my game concepts without being bitter about it

something something the increase in afforestation/gardening games due to anxieties about climate change plus nobody under 40 ever able to own land