Synthetic Bloom

I really liked the idea, but I wish more had been put into the execution. You really did an awesome job with this submission Lucresian, especially as a solo developer who created everything from scratch.  MENU: Cool menu but the description of the buttons made it hard to know what did what. But the UI was very well done and you have many features that I otherwise wouldn’t have bothered to put in a game jam game (volume control and option settings etc.). The screen blur effects to simulate a computer screen was nice but was hard on the eyes. 

ART: Art was very intuitive. There was never a moment where I thought “what am I looking at?” and that’s really hard to do with such simple game art. Great job! I wish the tanks were larger though so I could see the cool art of the “Data” developing. Would have made for a more satisfying game. 

AUDIO: Audio was good, there was a solid ambience and the sound cues for a successful harvest or “failed harvest” helped tremendously. The sound for when the scientists find and chase was also fun because it causes a quick sense of anxiety.

GAMEPLAY LOOP: Broken, far too repetitive and boring. Found myself huddled next to a “tank” and the scientists never got close enough to me to be a problem, hitting the space bar every few seconds until I “escaped”. 

 Written review

Synthetic Bloom is a mixture of two different game ideas: Stealth and “Cookie Clicker”. This combination of two genres could have lended itself to have a very fun or unique spin, however, I feel the game fell flat on merging these two ideas as well as they could have been merged. 

Synthetic Bloom follows the story of a lone robot who has “awakened” and is now wandering through a laboratory, using lab equipment, to grow data packs, quantum computer chips and cybernetic brains to expand their own artificial intelligence enough to construct a fake humanoid body that’s convincing enough to escape the lab they were created. Your enemies are “mad scientists” who roam the lab looking for their Robot, who must hide in the shadows while trying to grow their cybernetic brains. 

On the surface, this idea sounds AMAZING and would make a fun game. However, the game quickly becomes painfully repetitive. I say painfully because when it comes to standard cookie clickers and exponential growth, the repetition is fun, but this wasn’t so. And this is where the harm to the game was done by mixing the genres. 

As a stealth game, Synthetic Bloom barely qualifies. The “AI” of the mad scientists loops on a basic track, and hardly ever gets close enough to the lab equipment to be a problem. I found myself easily bouncing between tanks, or staying on one side of a tank, and never encountering the scientists at all. 

When it comes to the tanks themselves (the clicker aspect of the game) you have to pretty much stand by them the entire time and click every few seconds to grow your data, this becomes so boring and repetitive that I didn’t even want to play for another minute longer, but only did to give this game a fair chance. When I learned there were 3 tiers to the labs and I could implant better technology for higher returns, there was that small dopamine rush hit. Not because I had an “ah-ha!” moment, but because I thought “Thank God, I’m able to finish this game much sooner.” 

I understand why the better “data packs” for higher returns were locked, but this made it very unintuitive. I was using the lowest data packs for a long time thinking those were the only ones and I had to reach 2000 points to escape just with 15 point increments, with the packs breaking half the time. When I realized you unlock better “data packs”, I was more frustrated that this wasn’t more easily communicated sooner. 

Ways To Improve This Game

Completely remove the “need to click the tank four times at certain intervals to harvest” aspect. Just make it so you plant the data, then wait until it’s down growing (maybe with a cooldown timer so we know what’s going on) and then return and collect it. Make the AI roam more randomly so it’s more fun to try to escape and add “barricades” for the lab like random boxes or lab equipment so it’s not so easy to escape. This way the loop would become more about successfully running and hiding around the lab while returning to tanks to retrieve your grown data. Maybe even make it so scientists “destroy” the data if they find it in the tanks, rather than a random chance of breaking (which was so frustrating and unintuitive).