Hexarden is a gardening puzzle game, played on a hexagon grid.

Here’s My Entry

Try to maximize your points and evolve your fledgeling garden into something great!
Ok, so its adherence to the theme is perhaps a bit loose

So, in keeping with my self-imposed constraint to make a hex-grid based game, I’m making a gardening game of sorts. How does it fit the theme, you may ask? Well, I guess you evolve your garden into something better

Here’s what it looks like right now:

The basic rules are:
1. You start with some plants and some water pieces.
2. You can “expand” out from these starting points, the game ends when you fill the grid with plants and water.
3. Each plant is worth one point for each water that’s touching it – so a maximum of 6 points for a plant if you completely surrounded one of your starting plants (but this prevents any future growth, so be careful.)

The world is currently randomly generated, which means there are for practical purposes an infinite number of levels… I had a thought on this: What if there were thousands and thousands of leaderboards? Maybe the game could let you choose your level (which is just a random seed number) up to say 5,000. I wonder if people would get into that, just finding the best possible score for as many levels as possible?This is all dependent on the game playing out deterministically, of course. That could be fun, but I think it could also be fun to have some randomized griefers in there, and maybe some gardener bunnies that you could send around the board?

I’m having a blast! Follow me on Twitter for more updates

Hey all, this’ll be my 2ND LD – the first one was a “Flippfly” effort between myself and my brother Forest, which came at a perfect time after I quit my comfy game industry day job to go indie. We had a blast and made a game (Ant Command.)

This time I’ll be doing the 48 hour compo, using Unity3D, Blender, probably a bit of Gimp, and bfxr.net for sounds.

I’m pretty determined to make some kind of game involving a Hexagon grid, simply because they’re fascinating to me, because I haven’t tried working with them yet, and because I tend to find more inspiration with some artificial constraints. We’ll see how that works out!

I may toss my game in the Kongregate contest afterwards too. Actually, I wonder if they’re accepting Unity entries? Hmm…
Best of luck to everyone!

Just wanted to say, we had a total blast making “Ant Command” for the Jam. Really cool to see all these entries. I’m blown away by what people can create in a couple days.

We’re convinced this is probably the best way to prototype games for iOS or whatever – just such a cool way to stay focused. We spent maybe 2 hours picking the game, and jumped right into development after a reeallly short design phase on Friday night.

We’re calling this a big success story, although in the end, we only had an hour or so left to mess with the gameplay after it all came together. We’re pretty thrilled with the result, and I’m sure we’ll be taking this game to the next level.

A little more Postmortem’y thought:

What went wrong:
- Stressed out our wives a bit Next time we’ll probably make some plans to have some activities for the kids or something.

What went right:
- Unity – holy crap, they make it easy. We were able to figure out stuff we’d never done before in the engine in a matter of minutes (music, some basic UI, rigid body physics…)
- Taking Sunday off! Ok, we did a little bit on Sunday (Forest wrote some music and I was fixing a source control problem.) but for the most part, we relaxed and just did game design in our heads. When Monday morning rolled around we were ready to rock.

(Play Ant Command)

Our progress so far on our Jam entry, “Ant Command”

Environment lighting needs some work – iteration with Unity Basic’s lighting is pretty slow isn’t it?
Having a blast!

Aaron & Forest San Filippo
(www.flippfly.com)