Feed the Forest
A little forest-growing incremental game about a snail and a worm turning a worthless desert into a value-producing forest.
Thank you for playing this demo of a larger game!
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Feed the Forest
From the esteemed Annals of Richness:
“Once upon a time, in a barren desert, a miracle happened:
An industrious Snail of Water pulled itself to life by its own bootstraps!
In the desert, it found an old creature called The Forest.
The Snail identified a demand: The Forest was hungry.
Smelling opportunity, the Snail set to work…
Settle in, beloved employee-subjects, and experience this tale of grit and initiative!”
Future
Hi! We are Victor, Andrés, and Edd!
We will be making more games about nature, resources, and myths. They will take place in the same world as this game. If you want the newest demos and info, subscribe to our newsletter by clicking this link and entering your email address.
Or you can join our Discord here.
This game was originally made as part of Alchemy Jam 7 and won the Most Engaging Game award.
Download
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Development log
- v0.4.1: helper snail hotifx26 days ago
- MAJOR UPDATE v0.4.0: Steam page and helper snails!28 days ago
- v0.3.0: Bit more juice & fixes46 days ago
- v0.2.0: The snail goes wroom48 days ago
- v0.1.0: The Snail and The Worm , first patch51 days ago
Comments
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the miracle of flight
sadly the mac package is broken. it should still work on Tahoe but does not :/
Damn… I did make the build quite hastily on my old MacBook, I’ll check this out again once I have some time. Thanks for the note!
Beautiful game. Loved it. Any game that lets me plant a forest has my heart.
Hey! I loved this game so much, and built a whole desert ecosystem bustling with dragonfruit and helper snails in the demo (no download) version. However, once the game took me to the P+L screen with the statistics, I chose to resume my game and bought more worm eggs. I got up to five worm eggs before I became confused, as I had heard about 'helper worms'. Are these worms available in the demo, or are they solely for the download version? Please let me know. ;3
What I mean by confused: I did not see any worm activity whatsoever. Just the regular helper snails.
Thanks a bunch for playing!
There are indeed no helper worms, only helper snails. The Worm Egg is just for the ending - it would be a real upgrade in the full game, leading to a rebirth of the Forest that lets you get special upgrades.
Fair play, did not see the ending coming!
That was fun :D it started to lag pretty quickly, though. I'm not sure how much can be done about that, considering the sheer number of fruits . . . maybe a "no fruit animations" option, where your juice count goes up when you get within range of a fruit-bearing plant, but the game doesn't actually render a bajillion 3D objects? I don't know, I'm not a coder myself. I'd just like to be able to play the full game without crashing my PC lmao
A "no vomit noises" option would also be nice. I get the impression that grossness is part of the intended atmosphere, which is cool, but there's only so much vomit noise a person can take, y'know?
As the dev who is the least into vomit noises, I also want a "no vomit noises" setting, thank you for requesting it, it makes it easier for me to justify making it :D
About the lag, we have some ideas for when we expand it. Currently it doesn't lag on our machines though, even in web. What kind of specs are you playing on?
Hi, sorry for the late reply; I didn't get a notification for some reason! I'm playing the web version in Firefox, on a Lenovo Thinkpad with 16 GB of RAM. The lag isn't nearly bad enough to be game-breaking or even really annoying, just a little "woop, might not be able to run this forever / add too many bajillions of plants" flag, you know?
"No vomit noises" gang :D
The demo was already amazing! Its ending in particular made my day as I was paying attention to some early dialog hints (trying to be vague to not spoil others reading this). I didn't notice it somehow, but maybe remove the related screenshot to keep it hidden.
Also all the delicious-looking-fruit-picking made me crave apple juice.
Only critiques are for early on:
a) I'd have preferred a bit nicer intro rather than reading a block of text.
b) I'd have liked some very minor plant upgrade to be added halfway between the berries and the first tree - it was the only point where I was at risk of quitting, and a dopamine trigger was sorely needed.
Thank you! Very happy that you liked the ending :) The full game will go deeper in that direction, this is just the beginning.
Better intro is def planned. And noted about the beginning, we don't want people to quit there!
Fun silly game, love being a SNAIL replating a forest, creating a ARMY of silly blobs to help me!
<3 🐌🐌🐌🐌🐌🐌🐌🐌🐌🐌
Love that there is a native linux build, the game got me hooked tbh
niceee thanks for the kind words, I am the one building (and deving) on linux, so your comment feeds my linux forest
trying to create a diverse enough ecosystem from three types of plants kept me entertained for an hour lmao. great game, absolutely love it. would be nice for the butterflies the worm talks about to actually be present and to maybe have visual pond upgrades... or little streams (let dreamers be dreamers). 10/10
You didn't see the butterflies? Usually when you cover the map there will be bunches of them here and there, they are not so big...
Visual pond upgrades is very cool, noted down! Little streams Im not sure what you thinking about lol, opening water ways in the desert? Snail terraforming ™️
ohh! very interesting, wasn't expecting that to happen after buying the worm egg... can't wait to find out the full story and see how deep the lore goes. love how the snails rolls around to sprint, its so fun!
<3 thanks so much
A little gameplay, a little critique ;)
Thanks so much for this lovely playthrough. We have noted your various comments, very useful.
This game will never become a realistic ecosystem simulator (incrementals are too explosive and too simple for real nature!) but keep an eye out for a future project from us, if slightly more real ecosystem simulation is your jam!
Snails are awesome
heck yeah
Great game, absolutely love it. really fun and entertaining. however, the helper snails getting stuck is a large problem that needs to be addressed. from what i can tell, a fruit spawns outside the mountain in the far leftmost corner and the helpers will swarm there, unable to do anything else
Thanks for pointing it out and for the kind words! Pushing now a fix for the snails, should be up in some minutes 🐌🐌🐌
This is a great concept, both for ties to real-world reclaiming of desert and the hinted deeper story. The sound design for the fruit pickups is so satisfying!
Thanks! The desert shall be no more!
Bubble pops are amazing
[Thanks freesound]
the helper snails should be able to be assigned to a certain pond. i dont need them collecting where im already at
That is very cool, but commanding hordes of helper snails goes into another dimension of controls, so definitely not an easy one. Noted though!
Seems like there's a glitch where fruit will get stuck in the mountain and then another where your helper snails will home in on the fruit and just stop dead. I had 6 helpers trying to get one, and they wouldn't even give me the fruit they had.
Thanks for reporting it! We did an update that should make fruit spawns more reliably fall "inside" the level, also updated colliders and helper snails have a time out to bring you fruit, just in case they still get stuck somewhere. Should be up in a minute!
Thanks for the report! Update incoming! 🐌
Bless the Maker and His water. Bless the coming and going of Him. May His passage cleanse the world. May He keep the world for His people.
🪱🪱🪱🪱🪱🪱🪱🪱🪱🪱🪱🪱🪱🪱🪱🪱🪱🪱🪱🪱🪱🪱🪱🪱🪱🪱🪱🪱🪱🪱🪱🪱🪱🪱🪱🪱🪱🪱🪱🪱🪱🪱🪱🪱🪱🪱🪱🪱🪱🪱🪱🪱
fun game, but i decided to cover the whole ground with grass before buying trees only to realise that you are unable to spawn trees on grass. that sucked and i wish i knew it sooner or there was an option to remove grass and spawn trees instead or they just spawned on grass anyway but oh well
nvm found it but honestly prices have gotten a bit to high for my liking so i think ill quit anyway
Thanks for playing! We’ll be tweaking the speed at which you gain fruit and will work on prices. We’ve also noted down that you cannot place trees on top of already planted tiles, it’s kinda a bug and a feature at this point, will work on this more :D
Regarding removal of tiles, it was not clear/hard to find the bombs? What do you think would help to find that bombs can be used to scale up the forest by replacing bushes?
honestly it wasn't hard to find bombs but by the time i got enough to buy them i already forgot about them and rediscovered them later. i bought them once, was dissapointed that i only got 10 of them for that much money and ultimately decided that i don't care enough lmao.
Now in the newest update, the bombs are now cheaper and easier to use (they are thrown straight up, instead of at an angle)! Hopefully this helps some! Also the pacing is generally a lot faster, so prices should be more surmountable.
same
Oops. Fell off the map, This was a fun quick game.
oh no. where was the gap? we'll get out the patching kit 👀
I went looking for trouble and found it. lol go straight down from the south pond and hug the wall. it is near the little rocks if I remember correctly. If you have trouble finding it let me know and I'll get a screenshot.
I kinda want to leave that gap now :D
Dude. If you mash e while traversing through desert, you'll plant things way more space efficiently!
That’s the speedrunning strat
I bought bombs but can't figure out how to use them
Press space!
Controls don't work
Sorry to hear that, could you expand on this? Which browser and OS are you playing on?
Did you run out of time to add the wizards/helper worms?
...😳
we mayyy have... But, now we had some more time and they're both now in the game 👀
Can't work out how to get or use bombs after buying the upgrade :S
Press the space key or B button (if on xbox controller) 😉
Super cute game, I had a fun time!
It would be nice if the different plants each had a use case instead of just being a stepping stone. It would also be nice if there were ways to cultivate/improve existing plants so that there was some choice between growing wide and growing tall.
It felt like it took a while for there to be a meaningful upgrade. Even adding a one-off starter upgrade that boosts all stats for 5 apples or something would be a satisfying way to start off rather than grinding storage upgrades till you hit 100 or 500.
Upgrading your speed seems super nice, but you have to slow down to collect the plants anyway or the apples just roll past you. Maybe they should move towards you automatically once you tag them for collection? Or just move faster in general.
I thought the worm was an enemy at first and almost stopped playing before finding the shop xD
In most cases it felt faster to just save up for the next tier plant/egg rather than building up your upgrades much.
I'm assuming the reference to helper snails and founding wells at the end screen is a red herring? Spent some time walking the perimeter and throwing bombs but didn't see any obvious clues.
This is great, thanks for bringing all this feedback, and yes, the worm is disturbing, we wanted it to be a bit like another dimension
Regarding the secret findings, we are also looking for them... 🧙♂️
Hey! thanks for playing and all this great feedback. We've addressed some of your comments in the most recent update! Especially more fruit upgrades, upgradeable pull force, more clear that the worm is a shop, and more upgrades to buy in between plant tiers :)
We also got the helper snails added!
I had a very relaxing time growing greenery and collecting my harvest as a snail, thank you for making this.
I love this game!!
the game loves you too <3 (or we do, at least)
I'm actually in the Jam too! When submission period ends it would be nice to support me by playing and rating my game MORNING!!
Can you find a wizard and helper worms? I look about with bombs but just get zero every time. yet is comes up in the achievements so they must be there somewhere....
👀
Update: You may be able to find them now :D
Oh exciting...
The snail's movement is really satisfying, especially the sprint/rolling. Only thing is that when your apple storage is full, apples littered around you block your path. This isn't an issue once you get apple storage upgrades though.
I do think upgrade cost scaling is a little high at the beginning, but nothing out of the ordinary. It is quite tedious to go around gathering apples manually with no automation feature until you get the collection upgrade.
Overall, great game!
Thank you for the feedback!
Yes, the fruits blocking you is a reminder that they shouldn't be lying around 😂
And our initial idea was to hire new snails that would do the collection for you, but of course collection range was just easier so thats what we started with
Upgrade scaling is smoother now in the newest update! And you get an automation feature (helper snails) much earlier in the game. Thanks for your feedback!
Perfect game for a Saturday morning when the brain is soft and malleable for dopamine intake. The snail controls make me want a racing game.
Highly suggest downloading to avoid endgame browser lag, completed in about an hour. Great stuff!
Thanks so much. cereal and dopamine is the breakfast of kings. really want to add a racing mini-game now :D
Cool incremental game. It would be nice if there are other things thing picking up fruit and water. Like interacting with other animals
Thank you! Completely agree, would love more animals :D What animal would you have liked to see the most?
We now have helper snails in the game that puke fruit at you :D
I can't do anything with the fruits I grew, nor can I change from the bush growth.
Did you buy the fruit storage? That's the first upgrade, maybe it's a bit unclear atm. You gotta buy it a couple of times before you can afford anything else.