Lawn Care

Prompt 3: An interesting interaction between a rule and a goal was with flowers and gaining access to a spot otherwise impossible to reach. In this game, you move a lawn with a person and mower that you’re able to control with wasd or arrow keys, but the player character is able to step on sticks where as the mower will break if it goes on the same tile as a stick. This surprised me at first but it made sense after thinking about it. Moving the mower around was simple enough and to navigate the maze of sticks took little effort unless you were trying to go fast through it which easily made me start over a few times. The mower had to cut all the grass in the level but when it went over a flower it would teleport the player and mower over 2 tiles. This made me wonder how it would affect the gameplay and quickly I realized that it can be set up to trap the player. This trap got me a few times as I didn’t realize why my mower was breaking after hitting the flower but it was set up to send the mower straight into the sticks. The other way the flower was used was to get into an area that wasn’t available otherwise by teleporting over a wall of sticks. This acted as a one way gate though as there was no way to get back over the wall of sticks since it was an enclosed area with no flower to teleport over with.

Prompt 2:

The general role of the game is to use the weeder to remove weeds. The player is bounded with the weeder which looks very realistic. In the real world, when people try to remove weeds in the garden by a weeder, they must hold the handler and control the weeder and control the direction of weeder should go. Besides, when the weeder touched the fence, the game will display that “the remover broke!”. This important role throughout the whole game. When the weed remover is broken, the player cannot use that and just leave the remover. As a result, the level is in a dead loop, because you cannot achieve the goal that removes all weeds. In another word, when the player broke the remover by crushing to the fence, the game is over. The player should focus on the fence and prevent breaking the remover. The rule restricts the player’s movement, and it restricts the path to achieve the goal. Besides, the player should predict the path they are trying to do and trying to prevent crushing the fence. After all, the reason why the rule, the weed remover will be broken after it touches the fence, make the game so fruitful is it closes to real life and let us feel the connection between the world and the game. In the real world, you are always careful when you using the weed remover, and you will not allow your movers to hit a wall or a fence. The only purpose of using weed remover is to remove the weed, and this game’s rule also did that.

Prompt 5:  The images, sounds, and writing heavily affect the player's experience in Lawn Care.  The visuals, particularly all of the green color, make the player feel like they are mowing a lawn.  As silly as that sounds, it can be difficult to make the player understand the environment with such a limited low pixel-based design environment.  The green background on the itch.io page adds to this as well.  This game was specifically interesting for me because I actually enjoy mowing lawns.  I find it to be a relaxing time to not think about much, except avoiding obstacles and not missing spots, which are the exact goals of this game!  The environment and art design combined with my experience mowing lawns made it immediately evident what the goal of the game is: just cut all of the grass.  The addition of sound as feedback for running into bushes or flowers lets the player know that they are making mistakes.  The sound effect for cutting grass informs the player that they are doing the right thing.  The added detail of literally breaking the mower is a nice addition as it really makes the player feel helpless that they can wander the lawn with no tools to do their job.  The contrasting color of the player and the mower help them stand out on the lawn, so you don’t easily lose them in all of the green.  The text at the beginning of the game also made it obvious what the player is to do, along with the title. The third level stumped me on how not to break the mower and move on with the level.  Nonetheless, the images, sounds, and writing helped me to identify with this game and easily understand/relate to it.