Flowers

TINS entry by Mark Oates

Screenshots

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About the Game

The game revolves around choosing flowers. Offspring of flowers are procedurally generated, each mutated in some way from their parent. As you, one-by-one, choose the flower you like the most, you explore the domain and gain achievements for discovering (creating?) new flowers.

Downloads

- Source Code
- Windows Binary
- MacOS Binary (not available)

Instructions

- Press ENTER to start
- Use LETTER_KEYS to choose your flower
- Press ESCAPE to quit

Collect the 6 achievements to win the game. Four of the 6 achievements are shown in the screenshot.

There is no audio, or music. So I recommend listening any meditation or focus music. Something like this is fine .

TINS: Implementation of the Rules

The Genre Rule (flowers) and Technical Rule #1 (procedural content) are both fulfilled by the procedural generation of flowers, which is the
primary component of the gameplay.

For the remaining requirements, I'm envoking the bonus rule, Act of Monkey, to reverse the Artistical Rule from "Make fun of old-fashioned things." to "Celebrate and cherish old-fashioned things." During gameplay, you will be rewarded for developing and growing your flowers with positive and inspiring quotes on the topic of aging. These quotes will appear and disappear with a scrolling motion, fulfilling the Technical Rule #2 (scrolling text).

Player's Guide

<spolier>

The 6 achievements are listed below, along with the tasks needed to unlock it:

1) Four Leaf - You pick a flower that has 4 petals.
2) Little Stem - You pick a flower that has budded a little stem.
3) Saturated Color - You pick a flower that is very saturated in color. In Windows, the background terminal (wasn't intended to be displayed, oh well), will output sat and val. You can use these outputs to cheat if you wish. sat is the saturation of the petals and a sat > 0.6 will earn you this achievement.
4) Dark Petals - If you continuously pick darker colors, you will eventually unlock this achievement. val becomes less than 0.45.
5) Fast Flower - Each flower spawns at a slightly different speed. If you hone in on flowers that spawn faster, eventually your flower will be producing at blazing speeds. Pick a flower that is fast enough, and you will unlock this achievement.
6) Black Flower - If you hold a "Dark Petal" flower, then there's a 1:5 chance it will produce a Black Flower. Choosing this offspring will unlock this achievement.

</spolier>

I did it!

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Initially it didn't seem that exciting, but then I really got into making freak flowers. Most of the achievements were easy, but the speed one was really hard as it was hard to tell which flowers were faster than others. After I figured that out, I set out to make the tallest flowers in the land, it worked pretty well until they got so tall that I couldn't tell how high they were anymore:

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Then I set out to make the slowest flowers in the land, it after awhile it became too hard to tell whether I was making progress.

Anyway, pretty sweet game overall! I liked the little messages below, and the graphics were nice.

Did you guys have any trouble with resolution at all? I'm getting some mixed reports about window size, all my devices display a nearly quarter size window. I have one report that the window is larger than the whole screen, and a possible device I could try on to debug.

I don't want to give much away. But, I have had visions of expanding this to much more showful flowers. Stems with branches and curves, petals that shape in all different sizes and grow patches of grass and sparkle, sway, emit fireworks, made of gold, affecting music. Some sacred flowers would be the real achievement, but the showmanship from start to finish would be the adventure.

I wonder if I'll ever finish a game.

Nice to see science is represented this year This could be a nice little educational game to teach the concept of human selection.