Witch Hazel

This was adorable and felt well done for a student project. However it didn't feel like a full game, it felt more like part of a demo. Would love if it was turned into a full game though because I really liked the theme and graphics. I was so sad when I finished collecting everything in about 15 minutes of gameplay.

no settings in the main menu, only after starting a new game. can't get an a+ for this now. if you can put your own names there, why not the how to play (as in, these are the non-rebindable controls) and options, stuff that's actually useful? and speaking of, why is the credits in 4:3 with black bars on the side? anyway, separate volumes and windowed mode, wasd for movement, space to water, left click to interact (i.e. harvest). arrows don't work, bad news for non-qwerty people, and the girl walks from corner to corner, which is a bit weird. could easily stop halfway and reach two plots. could also easily move faster. would need hotkeys and mouse wheel to select seeds from the hotbar and mouse should work for movement as well, plus middle click to water. there, 100% mousable and I don't even have a degree in gamedev. nor do these guys, hopefully. time's constantly ticking, plant seeds, water, wait a bit, harvest, repeat. no goals in sight but I made some cool gigaplants that exploded all over the place. I was hoping it'd happen with all the different seeds, megatree and whatnot, or combining them would result in different mutant plants, but sadly no. there's some stuff in the tra…

A game with no goal/purpose is not a game. Teach your students some game design. This is pathetic. Only good thing about this is art.

"Witch Hazel" is a student project from DigiPen. One of the first things students should be taught in game development is that 3D graphics became mainstream in the mid 1990's with dedicated 3D cards like the Voodoo3 and the ATI Rage. But the students were deliberately mistaught that's it's okay to release obsolete 2D games in the 3D era of gaming... certainly any professional developer seeing a prospective new hire who doesn't even know about 3D gaming probably isn't going to give them a job. Needless to say if an educational institution taught me incorrectly on purpose, I'd ask for my money back. The students made a 2D iso "farming" game... this is basically a cut down version of Facebook's Farmville game, but without the toxic microtransactions and nags (I guess that's a good thing). But gamers will of course want to ask the question: Why did I spend thousands on a bleeding edge gaming rig to play glorified browser/mobile games that aren't even full games but instead homework assignments? We also have to question what value there is for gamers on Steam when institutions flood the store with low quality 2D video game homework assignments... sure, it might make the students f…

this is a great little demo/final project type of thing. i love the art, and the planting and watering "feel" really nice. i think this kind of demo might be better on itchio, but it's good experience to build out a steam product page too -- lots of stuff required that players don't really think about. great work!

I didn't really get anything out of this. A bit too freeform. Grow some plants. sometimes the plants grow different if you mix them up. Not sure it's really a game yet.