Hi there! Last day of the Steam Game Festival and we haven't pitched our game yet! So here we are!
The 360° exhilarating gardening game in space!
Here is our last project, Janga. This game was initially made for the 2019 A.Maze festival game jam. We decided to keep working on it as the mechanics and mood were very promising.
We have been nominated for the 2019 Game Connection Europe Indies and we just received an honorable mention at A.Maze 2020.
We are still in a prototyping phase, but we need to get some funding in order to continue working on it.
Story
Some planets and systems in the universe have been forgotten by creation, they are blank canvas. You are a Sower, a little being whose purpose is to grow life and bring joy. Your goals are to awaken those neglected places with the help of a super powerful tool: a blowpipe!
Progression
At the beginning of the game, you'll get the power to plow earth. Your blowpipe will gain new abilities very quickly
Your short term goal will be to awake planets with specific biomes by plowing and sculpting the ground. Then, grass, plants and trees are awaking and their seeds are popping up from the ground. Finally, you'll have to tame newly born wild animals. Giving life to the planets make them a fantastic place where to play. Each biomes will show specific properties that will challenge you in providing new species.
Medium term objectives will consist in collecting new pipes to get more creative and expressive ways to play the game, to collect complex plants which have special zany abilities, to gain more experience points thus getting more powerful pipes, to discover many new systems and biomes, to create and to arrange the places you'll make your home from. Sometimes, you'll meet some non player character that'll help you progressing and will add some poetry to your trip, like in "The little prince" by St Exupéry
The long term goal is to reach a meta asynchronous multiplayer objective; the more systems the players create life in, the more all the players have a chance to discover new galaxies and unlock them, somehow as in the Nobi Nobi Boy game. Basically, the game aims at becoming a multiplayers one, for playing together with partners is much fun! As the game is your private and exotic garden, you'll be keen on shaping it your way and making it evolve with your friends.
Actually, I'm alone on the project, my teammate needing some rest and we still don't have funding for more dev power. But I'll keep working on it to create a new kind of Katamari style game!
Thank you for reading me!
Janga: the Nap Update!
Finally! Here is a major Janga update!
In this post, I'll give you some informations about the state of Concrete Games and finally the exciting part, the many new features of the game!
Life is a rollercoaster!
Since January, Matlab, my associate, is AFK. He's resting for health reasons, mainly Burn Out. You know, there's some stress working in this industry, especially when you're Indie with no funding. Just a few weeks after, Ulysse, our marketing officier, left us for a cool job opportunity. Then, we had to move from our office in February, because the building had to be demolished. We still don't have a working place as of today. For this reason and because we are all volunteers and need money to live, Brendan, our beloved 3D artist, went on his way too. Finally, Covid19 came knocking at the door. I found myself in the situation of working alone on Janga since march. Having a kid at home, I was only able to work during the afternoon nap (and sometimes during the night). Also, this update is just released in time as I'll have second kid to be born in a few days!!! I'll take a bit of rest now, sending the demo and our pitch to publishers. And partially working on Janga Game Design. This is the Nap Update!
Let's talk about the content of this update and the future of Janga.
There was a lot to develop for a one guy team. In order to find some financing, I needed to work on two aspects: the game design and the art direction.
Concerning the design, our vision of the game is simple: an arcade gardening game in space.
In order to fulfil this vision, I had to develop an arcade style gameplay and feeling, some cool gardening mechanics, and a space environnement.
The goal of the game is to give life to forgotten planets. The flow of the game is currently to plow the earth, then plant some grass, then some plants, then some trees. And have fun with a few other mechanics.
And now, here is the new features list!
A nice menu, two modes: Story and Sandbox
The Story mode is more like a tutorial and a way to understand how we would like the player to progress. We have great ideas for the story, especially inspired but the Little Prince novel or Terry Gilliam movies.
Gluttons
These are friendly creatures that spawns from the earth. You have to feed them with your main power, the life pipe, so that they explode in joy and helps you plow the earth and spawn some seeds.
Seeds
Grass, plants and trees seeds have different behaviours. You have to catch them to get them in your inventory.
Objectives
You have to fill planets with life (plow earth, plant seeds...) in order to complete them. Plowed earth gives you the ability to walk faster. Grass allows you to jump higher.
Inventory
The inventory will not work as classic crafting games. You can have only one type of tree on you, and I like this idea. Especially because one of our assessment is that too many games have over complex and frustrating user experience. Let's try to make things simple and enjoyable! (Especially for dad's and mom's that miss time to play more ːsteamhappyː)
New Pipes and Pipes menu
- With the Build Pipe you can build blocks which have their own gravity. - The Vacuum Pipe allows you to vacuum a tree and have it as your new tree in your inventory. - Grass, Plant and Tree Pipes allows respectively to plant grass, plants and trees. - The Love Pipe allows you to merge two trees into a new species.
Pipe Menu
New Earth painting power
Build blocks with the Build Pipe
Trees
I made a diversity of trees. You can merge them to create a vast diversity of shapes and colors!
Planets
They are procedurally generated with a good amount of different kind of shapes. There are moons! There are oceans!
Biomes
Planets lives within Biomes, represented by clouds and colors. Biomes have an influence on the aesthetics of some of the vegetation and the planet.
Sunset, space, colors and art direction
We made a lot of improvements to aesthetics. Things are looking more and more like the game we want to make.
More music and juicy sound design
Janga radio! Everything dances on the beat!
And a lot of small tweaks to already existing features
Little Disclaimer
Remember, it is still a prototype. There are bugs, the gameplay is not complete at all, we are testing things to make an exciting arcade gardening game. The Story mode isn't representing what we would like, and there is too much text for the tutorial. But if you finally like the prototype and would like to support us, don't hesitate to give us some feedbacks in the Steam community or in the form within the game.
I hope that you'll like this new version. As a final note, feel free to join us on our Discord if you want to participate and live our studio life and/our see our latest advancement or sales. https://discord.gg/Y5GXXaT
And if you want to find the progress of Janga directly in your mailbox, here is the link to our newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/c47f87e5fd15/jangaopendevnewsletter
And don't hesitate to talk about the game, give some feedbacks and follow/wishlist on Steam!
Thank you so much for playing!
Tom.
Janga OpenDev n°1: the 360° exhilarating gardening game in space!
Janga, the 360° exhilarating gardening game in space!
Hello there!!
Hi to you and welcome to our new open devlog about Janga: our 360 ° exhilarating gardening game in space.
First things first, we have some news about Concrete Games, indeed, since April, a lot of things happened inside our modest studio from Brittany.
Two people joined us in this crazy journey:
Brendan, our new 3D designer and Ulysse, the communication/marketing guy (hello, it's me!).
The core for the development team of Janga begins to take shape, that's why we have a big update with lots of new features just for you, wink wink!!! Ah and yes, we are also in discussion with publishers for Janga, nothing official or concrete(???) for the moment, but you will be the first to know when we will have feedback!!!
And now, it’s time for Janga's big patch note.
Download the latest version (for free of course)right here
A new universe composed of procedurally generated planets, each with its own gravity and type of vegetation
A new blowpipe: the Life Pipe, which allows you to paint the ground and grow grass.
A new version of the Ice Pipe that allows looping and creating 360 ° ice bridges.
A new version of the Bubble Pipe that can inflate bubbles as big as you want, and swim in like a real dolphin, yeeeeee!!!!
Little nice animations for the growth of the trees
A physics of the character completely recoded to work with the spherical gravities with more dynamism in the movement and the jumps
More joyous and festive new music
- An online mode to invite your friends in your world to create together!
- Funny functional plants
- A system of plant mix to find new wacky species by genetic combinations
- Animals that will propose challenges to test your control of blowpipes
- lots of sounds, visual effects, for more understanding and fun
- And of course: new blowpipes!
And that’s the end of our patch note, have fun with these new features, give us plenty of feedback if you can (or want), it would give us a huge help to improve our Janga!
Feel free to join us on our Discord if you want to participate and live our studio life and/our see our latest advancement or sales. https://discord.gg/Y5GXXaT
And if you want to find the progress of Janga directly in your mailbox, here is the link to our newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/c47f87e5fd15/jangaopendevnewsletter
