A Social Card Game of Floral Generosity for https://itch.io/jam/tgcxcoreblazer

Game Overview

Step into Mother Nature's sanctuary where kindness blooms as beautifully as the flowers! In Blooming Together, players work along Mother Nature to grow a magnificent field of flowers.

Theme and Gameplay

Pollinators feast on nectar and in return, they gift plants with the pollen they need to reproduce. And mycorrhiza is an underground web of generosity where tiny fungi connect plant roots and help them share nutrients.

In this cozy puzzle game your job is to connect everything together into one big, happy ecosystem.

This game celebrates the spirit of generosity where Mother Nature provides players  with all the resources they need and invites players to share them with one another.

Controls

You only need your mouse or touch device.

• Left click to select and place cards.
• When a card is selected, mouse wheel to rotate (or use the card controls)
  
• Right click to pan the view (or use the view controls)
• When a card is not selected, mouse wheel to zoom in and out (or use the view controls)

• At the bottom left corner you can click the magnifying glass icon to toggle the "Field view". You can close panels using the cross button at the top right.
• The lock icon disables the automatic camera so you can pan and zoom it however you want. You can also use the X keyboard shortcut.
• The arrows allow you to move the camera manually. You can also use the arrow keys or WASD to move the camera and C and Z to zoom in and out.
• The diagonal arrows icon will take a screenshot of your field and include Gaia with its current hair. It will be used for the leaderboard (instead of a random screenshot).
• Once you select a card a white reticule will show you the positions where you can play it. The tile follows the mouse, click somewhere to play it.  A red outline means that the card cannot be played. Sometimes you need to rotate a card before you can play it. Press the blue arrows to rotate it clockwise or counterclockwise or use the mouse wheel or Q and E keyboard shortcuts.
• Once you finish the tutorial you will get access to your neighborhood where you can donate the selected card to other players. This is the best way to spread biodiversity and the gifted card will get a boost!
• Finally, at the top right there is an hourglass icon that opens the pause menu where you can adjust the volume, set the display name your neighbors see or restart the game.

Social Features

Players are encouraged to share their cards. Each player gets some unique flowers (procedurally generated) which they can share with others. The best way to increase biodeversity in your ecosystem is to plant cards from other players. Plus when cards are gifted, Mother Nature will be happy to provide a nice boost!

Note, the gifting system works but due to time constraints it has some limitations.

Strategy

• This game is a solitarie style puzzle game. Can you cover the full landscape?
• Place cards adjacent to multiple existing tiles to maximize your score. Pay attention to multipliers on the top left corner and set surrounding cards before placing a flower to take advantage of the point multipliers. And watch out for cards with missing connections; placing a card with missing connections in a tight spot may prevent you from reaching important seed caches.
• You can only play cards in soil. Avoid obstacles like water, sand and trees by placing edges without connections against them.
  
• You get one point for each side that connects, that is, that matches the color of a previously played card. Then the points get multiplied by the card boost at the top left of the card. 
• Additionally, every time you find a seed cache for a new flower you get a specific number of points depending on how many different flowers you currently have as indicated by biodiversity. 
• Pollinators spawn on purple segments and their kind depends on biodiversity but currently are only aesthetic and do not affect the scoring.

Credits

• Programming and game design by Josep Valls
• Original soundtrack and audio design by https://ch3ckpo1nt.com/
• Visual design by Otter 841
• Assets CC0 from Kenney: https://kenney.nl/assets/foliage-sprites, https://kenney.nl/assets/cursor-pack, https://kenney.nl/assets/board-game-icons, https://kenney.nl/assets/particle-pack
• Gaia is based on Maria by Sina Scribblecraft.
• Super Dialogue Audio Pack by Dillon Becker.
  
• Pollinators derived from: https://spooniest.itch.io/bees-and-butterflies
• The cards are based on my own freely available hexagonal tiles.

Privacy Notice

The game is fully functional without an active internet connection when using the desktop build or once the HTML is fully loaded. The landscape and user settings are saved in the user's computer. The only information sent to the server is a single startup ping (to identify online players), the card information when a card is donated, and the leaderboard screenshots. Only a screenshot is stored in the server and the automatic screenshots are not sent anymore once the player has taken one of their own. The game doesn't have access to your itch.io profile and no other identifying information is collected from your computer.

In Development

In development:

• Colorblind-friendly cards (with patterns on top of the colors)
• Procedurally generated landscape (it is already drawn online)
• Provenance for gifted tiles (there is already some record of the original owner of a card but only the last gifter is displayed)
• Tradeable pollinator cards with unique properties
• Additional social interactions like being able to request if you need a specific card or preference for flowers
• Weather (clouds, rain) and day/night cycle (with flowers closing and fireflies at night)
• The soil properties are computed and used to determine whether a flower could bloom. Currently they only affect the color of the soil but I plan to bring back the meta-strategy to have plants grow based on the soil contiditions.
• Mobile friendly. The game was designed with mouse only interactions in mind. There are a couple rendering issues I need to figure out and I realized late that some buttons are too small to properly click on smaller devices.

Known issues:

• On mobile, some layers do not render. Click the settings button and disable background rendering.
• Sometimes, chrome "loses" the WebGL context. Chrome needs to be restarted when this happens.
• If you experience issues with your browser you may want to try the windows build.

^ Early game tester :)