FoonLudum Dare ExplorerLD23 → Smallworld Survival

Smallworld Survival

By norgg

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CategoryRankScoreCount
Coolness288
Innovation923.19
Theme993.13
Mood1962.29
Audio2161.00
Overall2182.38
Fun2192.04
Humor2201.50
Graphics2561.70

Comments

xsmalldeadguyx 2012-04-23 19:49

Pretty good. Graphics weren't great and the sound was non-existant. Pretty innovative and could evolve into something great :)

justinmullin 2012-04-23 20:45

My clicking finger hurts. ;) I'm not sure if you're meant to do anything here but restock houses on food. I was a bit afraid to experiment with random clicks after I smote poor 11 year old Tayoj Marome...

riamudimentis 2012-04-23 22:21

Really innovative!

mesene 2012-04-23 23:19

I liked the concept.
I wish there where any objective like get 30 population or arrive to year x...
there's a lack of information of what means the shape, the color and how do they reproduce.

I enjoyed it ;)
(didn't worked on firefox, had to use chrome)

sodaware 2012-04-23 23:20

An interesting concept, if a bit lacking in presentation. Couldn't figure out what to do at first and accidentally smote a settler. Could be fun with a few additions (tasks for them to perform or basic resource harvesting / converting).

norgg 2012-04-24 10:40

Mesene: Thanks. Not sure why it wouldn't work on Firefox, it's a java applet and works fine in mine, might be an issue with your java install (applets are still kind of terrible, but it was the easiest way to deploy for now).

Anyone else trying this out, I'm wondering now how many people figured out what the shapes and colours mean (which should be reasonably easy to figure out) and how reproduction works (for which I suspect the details are probably a bit too obscure).

angrygeometry 2012-04-24 10:47

this was pretty cool!

bastiandantilus 2012-04-24 20:34

Yeah, errored out in Nightly. Sorry. :/

netguy204 2012-04-24 20:46

Interesting. I'm glad you made it and I'm glad I played it.

It captured the smallness of the theme almost by making commentary on the smallness of humanity. Or maybe I'm reading into too much here.

Strategically, I felt pretty limited. I'm guessing my goal was to make lots of people and I'm guessing the best way to do that is to cram them together at a food source. But, if that's correct then it's really a test of my ability to click... a bit more breadth/depth in the simulation would make this a much more interesting game. By breadth I mean things like: Kinds of food, people who produce food, food affecting characteristics of people. For an example of depth: when people die maybe people who knew that person don't want to eat where he ate anymore...

What you have, in my opinion, is an interesting starting point for a game and I hope you pursue it.

norgg 2012-04-24 21:40

netguy204: Thanks! Yeah, this is a bit of a prototype for a much larger game I'd like to make that I'm still at the vaguely thinking about stage of. I don't think I'll be doing much more on this code base as such though, probably starting from scratch.

The best way to keep people alive and get them to reproduce should be to keep them spread out into smaller groups, though however you have people split up it still gets into quite a clickfest around population 30 or so.

shigor 2012-04-25 00:36

Is there something else to do then just spam buildings with food?
It really looks more like a very simple prototype of something more (and probably too complicated for LD game :). In current state there's not a lot of reasons to play it.

catman 2012-04-25 09:56

Weird but good! I'd want to have more to do, thought!

caribou 2012-04-25 15:54

It's typically the kind of mechanic i love ! I quited at almost 10 minutes of play as i understood i couldn't actually lose. I'd love to see it evolve into something <3.

strega 2012-04-25 21:37

Interesting game. I think I killed all my people :<

johnfn 2012-04-25 21:41

Neat! I'm a big fan of sim games :-) Add a few more actions for me to take, and make the population grow faster, and this could be really cool.

aeveis 2012-04-25 22:58

seems more like a simulator than a survival. I thought it was cute was there were babies though because it was just a small small circle. when I first played I killed everyone because I clicked on them. After that I just put food on the squares and that seemed to be all? Anyway seems like a good start to something.

jwolf 2012-04-25 23:05

It's always good to see more sims! It's neat to see the change in behaviour of the agents (tend to stick around buildings more that have food / stop moving so much?)

Yeah, the gameplay could use a bit more than just clicking on buildings.

lansiir 2012-04-26 00:36

Cool game, but why no source code? I really want to see it :<
If I could suggest two improvements, it would be to give me something else to do, and to slow the clock down a bit.

norgg 2012-04-26 09:34

oldtopman: Have put the source code up, wasn't a requirement of the jam to provide source, it's kind of messy. Also because I thought it'd spoil the game slightly.

I stupidly didn't keep the exact version that I uploaded for the jam around, the non-fixed version there should behave the same, but with an added debug mode if you press "d", showing the path finding as well as dark grid squares where the cached distance values weren't cleared. The fixed version clears those, making the pathfinding work much more reliably.

The pathfinding is a start at A* which wasn't properly finished because it worked "well enough" for this.

toast 2012-04-26 10:51

Kind of a bit basic, but I get what you were trying to do and it looks like a good a startpoint.

sanguine 2012-04-26 14:53

Pretty decent, but feels more like a small fun tool than like an actual game.

alwaysgeeky 2012-04-26 16:55

Cool, needs better graphics but still fun :)

jiddo 2012-04-28 10:38

Very innovative idea. I like it. It was fun, especially to mess with them and see them running back and forth across the map trying to get the food that I placed there. Tho I think that I've worn out my spam-clicky-finger again. :(

moop 2012-04-28 20:50

Interesting game. Took me a while to realise I was the one causing the deaths by smiting. Oops.

cyboot 2012-04-28 20:51

i like the concept but it gets boring a little too fast. Just clicking on some field isn't that difficult.
But maybe i missed the point :D

But the pathfinding is interesting. I think it has some potential in it :)

gritfish 2012-04-29 03:39

Kind of cool.. with a limited amount of food, it could be really addictive.