Saturday Casual Gaming

 

In Which I'm Gaming Again!!!

It's a hot and hazy summer's day, and I have not had the guts to go outside. My father has been burning our wood pile down slowly because it was starting to put off its own heat waves and we do not want it to spontaneously combust. My mother has been gardening. We entertained the idea of taking the cat to the beach for the first time, but she has been hiding in her blanket fort all day after she had a brief outing this morning.

Instead of being active (beyond my usual squats and self-soothing rocking lol), I've been starting an indoor garden!

Oh, not a real one. I have a black thumb, not a green one lol.

But as I may have mentioned on Tuesday, I have found itch.io and been able to start playing new games!

And today's title is "Plant Daddy" by Brady Soglin.

In this game, you're the eponymous Plant Daddy - a lonely college grad who has just moved into their first apartment with nothing and no one. You buy your first plant - a "garden plant" - and start caring for it. As your plant grows, it will give you Leaves, which are your first currency, and after it fully matures, it gives you Blossoms, which act as a second currency. As you gain these Leaves and Blossoms, you can spend them in the store tab for such niceties as places to sit (or set plants on), artificial lighting, and even room expansions. Mostly, though, you'll be using your currencies to buy new plants.

Sometimes, you'll get special traits on your plants like variegated leaves and fancy stem colors! You can get special pots for those plants with the Nursery item, and you can even develop seeds from them, so if you want an army of variegated Tiny Trees named David, you absolutely can. Yes, you can name your plants. I am naming all of mine.

You can also buy decorations and more places to set plants down, which the game strongly encourages you to do.

Yes, that's a plant next to a candle on top of a cardboard box, and yes its name is Dan.

Zoomed out to show that to-do list on the wall above the shelf
It's how you find your objectives!

How's Annie?

Anywho, this game is really fun! It's relaxing and quiet and cute and you can easily lose a few days just trying to work your way through your To-Do List and raise an exceptionally cool plant or three. Currently I'm about 50 blossoms away from unlocking the next room - the bathroom - where I can then proceed to grow mushrooms on the back of my purchasable toilet lol!

There doesn't seem to be any way to pay-to-win in this, either! No "pay 99 cents to speed up" or "buy x amount of currency for 3 bucks of real money" stuff that I'm used to from generator-based idle games like this. It's refreshing and pleasant and as long as you don't turn the sound effects up too much while watering, you're not going to have to go to the bathroom a bunch of times.

In short, this is a perfect game with a deceptively simple interface that leads to fabulously deep gameplay. It looks cute, the "story" is adorable and relatable even if you're a plant-killer like me, and sometimes it's nice to just look at a room full of potted plants named things like "Leroy" or "Chad" and think "yeah, this is exactly what I wanted this to look like". 

All in all, this is a game that is absolutely worth a playthrough!

So Go Enjoy Something!

FC

Thursday Art Walk

 

It Is So Nice Out!

Today's been Very Much A Day, but at least the weather has been lovely. It's been warm and sunny all day long. The breeze is cold, but can you really beat a 49℉/9,4℃ day where the grass is green and the lawn is getting starry with wildflowers?

Even if those wildflowers are dandelions?

"Dandy"; watercolor brush pen on watercolor paper; 2022

I'm still figuring out the best ways to use and blend these brush pens, but I'm fairly happy with the way the flowers & leaves came out!

I was working on the confetti-ish background when my mom's mom stopped by to visit and needed help with some medical stuff (as far as I'm aware, she's going to be alright!). That took some doing, and then the cat needed out, so I got her ready while my mom enjoyed her coffee. After walkies, we ate some ginger snaps and I finished up the painting.

Confession: this painting is, for some reason, uncentered. It's far more on the left-hand side of the page than the right-hand, and I don't really know what I was thinking. Also, the brown shadow for the ground is too high up and not rounded enough, so it looks a little clumpy. I should try this again sometime!

I was thinking of maybe taking a walk today but... honestly, I'm already worn out and my back hurts, so I'll probably just stay in unless my mom decides to take bottles back or something.

I might sketch some more and see if I can start next week's drawing, too!

Regardless, that'll do it for me today!

Go Enjoy Something!

FC

Thursday Art Walk

 

In Which I Have A St Patrick's Day Picture For Ya!

I am beat lol.

You may wonder - what exactly did I do to get so tired?

I'm almost ashamed to admit that I'm so tired from... shopping two days in a row and taking my cat for a couple of walks. Like, yeah, I walked around town yesterday, and yeah, that was after a shopping trip that turned into a semi-surprise hangout with my guy and a delicious Thai lunch. It was really fun! I loved spending time with my guy, then trundling back home and pounding out that Wednesdaymania blog from yesterday!

I'm also out of shape and still having trouble sleeping, hence me being pooped again lol.

But tired or not, I still managed a fun little painting for you guys!

"Lucky Spring" Watercolor; 2022

I'm still experimenting with different weights and colors and tones and I know that Oxalis don't grow like that and their flowers are rarely pink-tipped, but... I'm really pleased with how most of those leaves came out. I'm pleased that the watercolors I used actually went where I wanted (for the most part) and look how I wanted them to look (largely). I'm really quite pleased with this little sketch!

Would I do some things differently? Yes! I'd actually sketch it first if I did it again, then lay in the sky tones (which I'd do wet-on-wet, rather than trying to blend out the markers, which works... sort of).

But I still think it looks good!

I hope all of you guys are staying safe and having a good St Patrick's Day out there!

Go Enjoy Something!

FC

Thursday Art Walk

 

In Which Today Was Busy As Hecc!

Today I took a nice walk! Well, two actually... 

During the first walk, I went down to my local library because they have free books and also someone dropped off a few (read: SIX!) crates of veggies from their garden for anyone and everyone in town to enjoy. I showed up later in the afternoon, so I ended up with a smaller variety, but that just made me super happy that so many people wanted the veggies! I got a lovely summer squash that we ate for dinner (perfect flavor!), some tiny cucumbers that tasted like candy (I ate two of the three I picked up and tossed the third out for the crows, who loved it so much they hopped across the yard with their beaks full!), some beets? radishes? no one seemed to know but I picked up four of them, and a normal looking cucumber as big as my hand from middle finger to wrist.

I also found five Joyce Carol Oates books my partner didn't have yet and picked those up for them.

Now, before I hit up the library and its vegetal treasures, I swung by a local shop near my house that services most of the restaurants in town - they're a wholesaler, but the public can shop there, and they often have Jarritos and Mexican Cokes and also some local sodas and San Pellegrino. I picked up a can of Mtn Dew and a bottle of lime-flavored Jarritos along with a small bag of locally made potato chips! Those with my cucumbers made a fine, snackish lunch :)

With my jaunt complete, I headed home and checked on the cat, who was snoozing in my finished-project-box in my room. My partner swung by for the books just as Evie woke up and she tried to escape, so once the books were safely away (and I'd hugged my love a *lot*), I waddled back inside, threw on my shoes, and wrestled the cat into her harness. She hates that part. She loves being in the harness, but god help you trying to put it on her.

After wrestling a very wriggly kitty into her harness, I managed to clip the lead on her and we went outside to... sit mostly, to be honest. She doesn't move much once she's out there unless she's annoyed with the quality of the grass nearby.

Here are some pics from our "walkies":

A maple tree in my yard with one branch changing color

A flowering bush  my mom planted a couple years ago

The Shade Garden

She saw... a bug? I saw nothing.

That time she saw a bird, but it saw her first lol

Grass is delicious. Apparently.

After the nomnom grassfest concluded, I went inside and started sketching up a landscape on that new hot press paper I bought last week!

Base Colors Only

I'm gonna see how well this paper really handles the layers of color and the different pen elements I'll add later. I'll also see how well it handles the tape I bought - initial positioning indicates it'll be just fine!

Here's hoping that I can get this image completed (it's super blurry in that pic because I could not get the lighting right...), because I love the photo it's taken from, which is a view of Cerro Gordo, CA.

Also, please someone stop me from buying things because I bought more paints tonight. One is a stick of Buff Titanium so I can do better sand colors, and the others are... it's another paint set. I have a problem.

lol

Speaking of problems... I'll probably be helping my grandmother pick up an organ tomorrow. That's several hours in a vehicle with her crazy dog. Love my grandma. Love my mom who'll be helping pick up the organ. Don't love heavy lifting or neurotic dogs as big as me..

Anyway, that'll do it from me today! I just wanted to give you a peek at the painting I just started!

Go Enjoy Something!

FC

Saturday Casual Gaming 311: Terrarium Garden Idle

In Which I Grow Plants

I will be honest: I have a brown thumb. I do not grow things well. I want to have plants, but I've actually killed fake plants before (you pick em up the wrong way and suddenly the inside wire snaps and you have a very crummy plantlike object).

Now I can have nice, healthy plants in my pocket without having to worry about them being dead!

Because they were never alive to begin with.

They're pixels.

Green Panda Games made a game for mobile called Terrarium Garden Idle, and it's pretty darn fun!

It's also a very attractive game!

So you start out with some weird greenish orbs and buy yourself a lil plant. Then you just tap the crap out of it to get more green orbs. Eventually you level up. The more you tap and level up, the more plants you can unlock. Every 20 levels or so, you can open a new shelf to give yourself room for your obsessive plant habit.

And once you run out of space/make enough orbs, you can literally jump to a new world.

There's a lot of plants.

This is a great little time-waster app, and despite Green Panda's affiliation with Ubisoft (gag), this game is somehow not pay-to-win. Yeah, you can buy pink diamonds for special stuff, but if you're like me and you don't care how fast this goes, you can just... chill. Yeah, you can watch ads for powerups, yeah you can buy them with green orbs, but I've never needed them.

Then again, I'm not a high enough level where the wait time for a plant to grow becomes an issue.

So yeah, this is a fun game on the app store, and you should probably go play it if you need something to do at, say, the DMV or something.

Go Enjoy Something!
FC

Saturday Casual Gaming 302: Merge Flowers vs Zombies

In Which I May Have Been Duped

If, like me, you've been a PC gamer most of your life, you've likely come across a game called Plants Vs Zombies, a strategic tower defense game by PopCap. If you've played it, you'll know it's both ridiculous and addictive, so imagine if you saw something that had a shockingly similar name but a slightly different gameplay style on Google Play for free? You'd probably check it out, right?

Well, I did.

I legit thought it was an offshoot for about... five minutes.

Similar style to Plants vs Zombies, too...

Within a few minutes, I realized that, despite the cosmetic similarities, and the fact that both games have you defending your home from hordes of the undead using only horticulture, they're not actually from the same company.

For one, Crazy Dave never shows up, and he's maybe the best part of Plants Vs Zombies, so I was very disappoint.

Still, Merge Flowers vs Zombies is a pretty decent game, and it's forgiving enough that I can play it distracted.

It's also bananas

You have a lawn with limited space. You know how to instantly crossbreed two plants to make a new kind of plant. You have a ton of ads to watch for bonuses and extra plants.

Yeah, this game is basically just a blatant cash-grab. As fun as it is, it has a new ad for you to watch every five seconds (maximum!) and you can't get too far too quickly without sinking in hours watching the same six ads over and over and over and over and over.... and over again.

You can ignore the ads, of course, and just wait for new plants to auto-spawn, but that takes a lot longer than watching a 15-30 second ad.

It's merge-style gameplay, so you drag and drop a plant on top of its double (if you have one) on your board to upgrade it to the next level of plant. Different plants have different abilities (massive damage, freezing, slowing, poison, etc). The more merges you make the more damage your plants do, and so on and so forth. It's an incredibly basic game with no surprises.

The lack of surprises is this game's strength - you don't have to do some clever combination of things to unlock the next part of the game, it's straightforward and tells you what you need to do to win from the very beginning. When you fail a level, you still get a (small) reward for trying. There are drones carrying extra plants that you can click on and watch an ad to get those plants on your grid (they seem to buffer, so if you're out of room but want the extra plants, go for it). The hordes of zombies are consistent and simple.

Basically, this is an excellent waiting-room or airport game - something to play if you've got time but need your attention elsewhere.

As a standalone "I want to play video games" kind of game, however, it's not quite like Plants vs Zombies, and I'm surprised they haven't been sued.

Go Enjoy Something!
FC