Derelict: Gaia Protocol

goffmog 2020-04-21 18:33

I figured the humans were the entirety of the problem here so I started nuking cities as soon as I could. Copenhagen first of course. I'm still pretty far from completing it but the fact that I'm on my third try and still have about a million more games to rate says a lot for how much I like this! It has that "just one more century" quality that all the best GSGs have.

Awesome job making a whole strategy game with a world map within the time limit, and completely from scratch too. The music is great, establishes the right mood, the mini maps are a nice touch too. If there's one thing I would change first it would be to have some visual differentiation between the different types of building on the map. Also you're probably aware of this, but the offset bug gets worse if you resize the window. I think that puts it into the territory where you'd be allowed to fix it post-jam.

joror 2020-04-22 19:56

Great sim-game! I love terraforming type games, and this has a really nice 'start from scratch' look when you start - an orange brownish wasteland.

Starting off was pretty easy, but I started without reading all the instructions too closely - so didn't see that the fusion plant required a restored bit of land. It would have been nice to get that instruction ingame as an error instead of the 'you-are-wrong' buzzer :smile:

That got me into a loss cycle so restarted. The blue water made the outlines of the world pop up again, and love the dynamicness of the clouds, even though they obscure a lot of legibility. Would have loved for the info about the current hovered tile to be more clearly displayed somewhere.

Music and sound offered a good support package :thumbsup: - one small gripe is that the 'place building' and 'click for info of tile' sound is the same, so I sometimes thought I had placed another building when I had not.

All in all good fun. Wondering if I have enough time to make a 'fully green' world happen :laughing:

leon75 2020-04-24 15:47

I didn't expect to enjoy this as much as I did, this exceeded my expectations by a wide margin.

The initial infodump at the intro was too much, I did not even bother to read it more than skim the controls through in a couple of second. Too much abstract info to remember without even knowing what the gameplay is about initially. Fortunately I could figure everything out in-game. The atmosphere is nice, almost like a reverse Defcon, instead of killing everything, you are trying to fix a post-Defcon world.

It was fun and exciting to paint the world green and blue, unexpectedly seeing humans place a settlement. Good sound, and a great song.

thefoppian 2020-04-24 23:31

Good job man! I really, really liked this one, but maybe it's just because strategy games are kinda rare here in Ludum Dare haha. It definitely has a steep learning curve, but once I got the hang of it I found myself enjoying it a lot. Appreciate ya!

beelzeboss 2020-04-25 11:02

Very cool. Its rare to see more complex games it LD. Great Job!

bill-wheatley 2020-04-25 11:07

This game changed my life, the world is green again!

daniil-tcyvakin 2020-04-27 23:05

maybe I did something wrong, but nothing is working :(

groogy 2020-05-07 09:36

@daniil-tcyvakin what is not working? Is the game not starting at all? What platform?

daniil-tcyvakin 2020-05-07 10:47

@groogy I was playing on win 10. Game launched, but I could only move the camera. I didn't get how to do anything else. Please, write more detailed guide.

blay09 2020-05-07 16:30

For anyone confused: do not resize the window as that will break the cursor positioning and end up really confusing. You place buildings by clicking the building, then clicking the spot where you want to place it.

gildar76 2020-05-09 16:16

Great job making a strategy game in this short amount of time. I would love to see this extended with more visuals and features. I also restarted after resizing the window, but I see here that the offset problem is already mentioned.

I would love to see more of these types of games in LD

samboyer276 2020-05-09 16:27

Hey, this was really fun! The simple graphics were quite effective at presenting the state of the map, and the audio fit well too. My strategy was to slowly build up energy with net zero homeostasis, then make as many fusion plants as I could, which made winning easy from there!

It'd be great if you could disable window resizing to fix the issue @blay09 described. Overall, a great game :smile:

randomhuman 2020-05-10 13:26

I love the intro, it really sets the mood, and the gameplay is a well tuned balancing act that was very compelling. I couldn't tell if the graphics were glitched out - everything I placed was a hashed box - but it didn't really matter that much because the colouring of the terrain communicated everything I needed to know.

uvwar 2020-05-10 15:15

Interesting, but I could never figure out what I was doing. I could travel around the map but placing things seem kind of impossible, or I would get the 'error' sound, so I never could figure out exactly what I was supposed to be doing...also whats the difference between the solid and non solid boxes?

groogy 2020-05-10 22:59

@randomhuman I was going for a "glitched graphics" art style, if that makes sense. I'm not great at art, so I figured it would be a good way to "cheat" and just have the shader do some stupid math to make something appear and it sorta worked.

@uvwar Yeah I should have made better in game ux stuff to convey information better. The non-solid boxes are clouds or pollution. Solid is just the terrain.