maelstrom.exe
Welcome to maelstrom.exe.
This game will only require a keyboard to play.
The 9 tiles in the middle are your garden, with coordinates a1 through c3.
Your goal is to advance the flood that will submerge the world of Man. Do this by planting crops, feeding them, harvesting them, and then sacrificing them to the rain sprites.
The available commands are as follows:
| plant <coords> | ex. plant a1 a2 a3 b1 b2 b3 c1 c2 c3 This will sow a random seed at the position. Use ls to check available seeds. |
| feed <coords> | ex. feed a1 a2 a3 b1 b2 b3 c1 c2 c3 |
| harvest <coords> | ex. harvest a1 a2 a3 b1 b2 b3 c1 c2 c3 |
| sacrifice | No parameters are necessary. All your harvest will be consumed, advancing the deluge. |
| inv | Check what you've harvested. This will be consumed with the sacrifice command. |
| ls | Check what plants you may sow. As you sacrifice, more become available. |
| time | Prints the time. |
| wait | Passes one day. |
| cat <coord> | Describes the plant at the coordinate. |
| mute | Toggles audio from 0% → 50% → 100% |
| help | Prints these commands. |
| outofcontrol | Secret! |
You may specify multiple space-separated coordinates to operate on.
Tiles will deplete and must be fed every day.
Hit the up arrow to go to the previous command.
Attribution:
Sound:
Thunder - Recorded by Mike Koenig - http://soundbible.com/1905-Thunder-02.html
Distant Thunder - Recorded by Mike Koenig - http://soundbible.com/907-Distant-Thunder.html
Rain Drips - Recorded by BohemianCelticGal - https://freesound.org/people/BohemianCelticGal/sounds/476202/
Rain - Recorded by idomusics - https://freesound.org/people/idomusics/sounds/518863/
BGM: Wistful Downpour - Recorded by me & my guitar :)
Download
Install instructions
The browser build should run via Unity Web Player.
The windows build should be resizeable, it is opened by running maelstrom_exe.exe. (sorry for the weird name :P)
Development log
Comments
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I always comeback here for some rain and gardening. btw, copy paste is too op for the normal part, maybe unable it... somehow.
Cute, but cumbersome game. All the planting, feeding, and harvesting could be done with a button each, with a special button for sacrificing. Might even work with just two really.
that would kinda defeat the purpose of the "out of control"
just buttons wouldn't rly be out of control, a text field on the other hand is
Complete nonsense. I'm aware that that's what the dev intended, but console commands don't somehow magically make the game "out of control", like oh no I have to hit up one more time if I get a text message. It's just boring
out of control more means unusual controls, a text box to control the whole game is indeed unusual
Think whatever you want, out of control it is not, and for good gameplay it does not make either.
Clever idea. I love it! it can be developed to full game! So many people may learn about linux too!
this was a great find! i'll be returning to this little charming game =D
Greatly enjoyed this little escape.
As a lover of mini-games, this hit the spot.
Thank you for this beautiful experience.
how long does it take plants to grow? mine wont grow its been 33 days :((
plants only grow if the tile is fed
It might be interesting if it involved the need for some sort of automation, even if just writing scripts/functions - as it is, your role as a player is just to smash the keyboard while the thing happens, no real agency. I'm sorry, but it's boring, as good as the audiovisuals and concept are.
great game, three things though
-I'm aware from reading the comments that there is an ending, it just took a little too long to get to for what this game is
-Make it a little more obvious that you're supposed to sacrifice your crops! I saw that in the help listings and had no idea why I was supposed to essentially delete my inventory
-Maybe turn the grid into just numbers? (So b1 becomes 4, b2 becomes 5, c1 becomes 7, etc) The two-part coordinates were really hard to parse and I often found myself harvesting column 1 instead of 3
Otherwise a really special game, would make a great idle game even on mobile
Unrelated, what does outofcontrol do? Couldn't figure it out whether it was with empty tiles, fed and unfed seedlings, or fed and unfed crops
you can go with the arrow to past commands and change only the first word
increased my wpm
epic
Playing in browser in Safari I quit getting world updates with "another day passes" after the lightning one (nimbus melons). Also the sound got very bad static artifacts and I had to mute it as they kept getting worse with each progression, which is too bad as I enjoyed the sound before that. Pretty fun though, would love to see the bugs ironed out and it polished up a little bit. :)
when you find a game made by your favourite youtuber and you dont have to download it:
"attempts to speedrun a game not meant to be speedran"
GREAT STORY.
I've been playing this for an 2 hours- -I really like the style(as a unity programmer, text channels are hell)Quite boring, but it was very calm.
I have to question..... Is there even an END to this game?! It's peaceful and all, but it takes a LONG time, with no end in sight. Did the rain also wash away the ending?
yes, it will say in the log that the game has finished, you can also tell when it talks about a underwater world
hmm
i like this, but is there an end?
yes, it will say in the log that the game has finished, you can also tell when it talks about a underwater world
mm
This was a fun game it was also fun watching the YouTube video you made on it
Quite fun and relaxing! One thing that I noticed while playing that got quite annoying was that the up arrow key cycled through all things showing up in the console, not just my commands, though.
Yep I noticed this too. Also quite annoying.
agree, I only noticed after copying 7 times "A light drizzle paints the ground"
Amazing game!
Good little game. Not sure if have a end (it seems not to), very repetitive, I mean is ok but you only need 3 commands, there is nothing more, like something eating your crops.
yes it has an end, it will say in the log that the game has finished, you can also tell when it talks about a underwater world
ive played this for the past hour...
same lol
Really quite lovely and engaging; using console commands for a gardening game was an unexpected combination that I quite enjoyed. The storytelling is soft and interesting and I was disappointed to run into some bugs, or just an end of updates rather than an ending (I was looking forward to flooding the world!). All the same, I kept playing quite a while after that. The music is good, wholly unintrusive. It's just a sweet little gem of a thing.
Incident report: when I advanced enough to be able to plant Nimbusmelons, the rain suddenly stopped falling vertically and instead started sliding horizontally across the top of the window, above the crop area. After advancing past this stage, the rain started behaving normally again, however the "next day" event stopped being formatted with the blue backdrop and started presenting as regular text and using the first level's "Another day passes" message. This seemed to have closed the game's update loop. I focused on counting melons for a bit and sacrificing them after each harvest but no.
As this is a jam game, I totally get it if this is where time ran out, but it's difficult to tell if that's what it is, or if something broke!
good music and art pixel :)
I plant 9 cells.. and I dont know what should I do next..
Good easy game..
is there a way to beat it?
yes, you plant, you feed, you wait, you harvest you sacrifice, until in the log it will say that the game has finished, you can also tell when it talks about a underwater world
Is there an ending to this game?
Use ctrl c to copy <a1 a2 a3 b1 b2 b3 c1 c2 c3> and use <commands> and ctrl v to essentially be overpowered
Tip: copy and pasting <feed a1 a2 a3 b1 b2 b3 c1 c2 c3> over and over again just by holding down crtl+v for a minute or so will make the soil always be cyan and forever be fed and you will never need to feed it again. (You can see if how many times you feed that tile of land by the color but after the 4th level it stays cyan but it still counts as a bigger level after it just doesn't change color)
Yeah, that's pretty much what I was getting at. I didn't know about the levels above cyan, though
ikr?
like it but a bit boring not that it's bad
I really like the graphics
for as long as i can remember, i've had a problem with insomnia. i cannot sleep when i want to. i will lie awake for hours, sometimes even going days without physically being able to sleep. medicine helps sometimes, but certainly not always. until now, the only surefire way to get me to fall asleep relatively easily is during a thunderstorm, which is something i obviously can't control. however, that has since changed. i have discovered that, without fail, every single time i play through this game, by the end i am absolutely exhausted and perfectly capable of falling asleep. this is absolutely insane. i have no idea what it is about this game that suddenly causes my insomnia to be completely obsolete. i know for a fact that it is not the games audio, as i have tried using thunderstorm audio before. it's not that. again, i have no idea what it is about this game that suddenly makes me able to go asleep, but nonetheless i wanted to thank you for pretty much changing my life. have an awesome day!
really nice game, unique concept and interesting gameplay. typing endlessly to plant, feed, and harvest did get repetitive and tiring though.. just a lot of typing!
Replace this font with pixelated like a heartbit or m5x7 please
It would be cool if we could somehow make bash scripts for automated farming
This game was very calming and interesting! It would be very exciting to see what else you can make. Maybe you could make some quicker shortcuts as it can be quite tedious in this game to keep typing out every tile like a "plant all" could be good but all in all 6/10
copy and paste <a1 a2 a3 b1 b2 b3 c1 c2 c3> after a command
Was a really enjoyable game to play. Love the music and the sound of rain. I liked the idea of a command window system for playing the game.
But after a while it became tedious to constantly write in each tile to plant, feed and then harvest over and over again. It would have been nice if you could have a command that was like plant a1 - a3 and then you would plant in all 3 tiles and then the same style of command for feed and harvest.
That would speed up the commands and make playing a bit more enjoyable. It would also be nice if there was a end system in place. I kept playing for awhile trying to see what would happen after you sacrifice for long time and other than the rain increase nothing else happened.
Maybe have it were if you sacrifice to many times a flood happens and wipes out your crop. Then if you wipe out your field maybe you have a way to calm the rain down so that you have to balance the amount of rain that falls due to your sacrifice. Anyways this is an awesome game!!
You could chain the tiles to feed plan and harvest.
Feed a1 a2 a3 ... etc then just press up to recall the command
The only pain was the up arrow also brought back the text than the command.
ya i know you could press the up button it like you said it would bring everything else in the command window up. Plus depending on the situation maybe using the up button was not helpful.
was really cute :3
a command to see the last info about the world would be nice. sometimes the "story" gets lost in all the frantic harvesting.
also you can feed your plants forever all at once. there's no downside to over fertilization.
Nice atmosphere. But the game is very tiny. Its starts to be boring very fast. Maybe u need to add some features like achievement system, possibility to buy new ground, etc. Anyway it needs to do game more complex
love the game! keep making more! :D
the atmosphere is wonderful, and as someone new to coding, I really appreciated the controls-- being able to command the game from a console just felt really nice (although, isn't this the opposite of what the jam was about? haha). the soft, beautiful guitar kind of reminded me of the soundtrack for "miner dig deep," that 2009 xbox 360 indie game that it's hard not to be nostalgic for.
however, I felt that the gameplay itself was strange, and perhaps even tedious. as others have pointed out, there's really not any reason not to just switch between planting, feeding, and harvesting the tiles all at once. I think it would be neat if you made it so that planting more than one plant in one tile perhaps means you yield more plants, but makes them much slower to grow, over-feeding plants also makes them grow more slowly, and harvesting immature plants kills them. this would incentivize executing commands on particular tiles, rather than just executing a command on all the tiles at once without worrying about the consequences.
I think it also would have made things flow more easily if pressing "up" on the keyboard gave you the most recent command you executed, and never gave you whatever the console's response was. it also would have been nice if pressing "down" brought you forward in your previous-commands list.
furthermore, I feel like the story could have been executed a lot better. before watching your video or reading the documentation, I decided to just jump right into the game so that I could form a clear judgement for myself before playing it through. so, because the flavor-text that you get in the console talks about how how awful the torrential rain is, the whole time I was playing this I thought it was my goal to appease the rain sprites and make them stop flooding the village, and therefore that I was somehow losing-- maybe I wasn't making sacrifices often enough, or I was using the wait command too frequently. it would have been a lot better if, at the beginning of the game, you were told that "Your goal is to advance the flood that will submerge the world of Man. Do this by planting crops, feeding them, harvesting them, and then sacrificing them to the rain sprites," rather than assuming that the player will have read that on this itch.io page.
in the same vein, even after reading what my goal was on here after my first attempt at playing this, as a player it was really difficult to assess my progress. I kept playing, hoping I would get to some kind of "end-screen," which never came. if something was stated in the console, I totally missed it, because I was focused on the plant-feed-harvest loop. my only hint that I had maybe completed the game was the fact that the flavor-text stopped coming. if there is some kind of ending, you need a pop up of some kind, or something really flashy in the console. maybe you pause their ability to type or execute commands-- anything, as long as it's impossible to overlook
also, I seemed to experience a bug where the feed state of the middle tile never deteriorated. this didn't affect gameplay at all, it was just sort of strange.
all in all, I really enjoyed whatever you've made here, but feel like in its current state, I can't recommend it to anyone as a "game" so much as a cute, atmospheric, interactive art piece.