FoonLudum Dare ExplorerLD47 → Petri Dish

Petri Dish

By johanhelsing

View on ldjam.com

CategoryRankScoreCount
Overall9113.4228
Fun10243.1528
Innovation3483.7427
Theme10173.4028
Graphics7803.5728
Audio7953.1427
Humor5852.9724
Mood6683.5027

Comments

theforceluke 2020-10-06 09:34

Great little game! Nice dynamics and the little eyes made it seem very organic and lively.

superpatch 2020-10-06 10:49

love the concept! I think there's a lot of potential there for a very cute game!

wevel 2020-10-06 10:54

Cool little game. I think it might be interesting if there was a way to break the circles. Also, I'm not quite sure what causes the game over, it sometimes just happens out of nowhere.

johanhelsing 2020-10-06 11:02

Thanks for the kind words everyone! Will play your games later today :)

@wevel: Actually, you can break the circles if you drag very fast. I guess it would have been good with a bit more of a tutorial/intro, though.

The game over appears when you have a monoculture (only one species left), or if the dish gets overpopulated... I put the limit at 300 which is where my machine started to kneel for performance reasons, but I guess I should have set it a bit higher.

The original idea was to make the dish break when overpopulated and have the creatures explode all over the black area of the screen, but I ran out of time.

hank-ather 2020-10-06 19:11

Interesting idea. I have no idea really how to influence the 'battles' to maintain populations, it seems almost random but there has to be some strategy to it... I would have really liked an 'eraser' function!

noah-kuhn 2020-10-06 19:13

This was a fun and very cute game! The audio fit the concept perfectly. I also had trouble figuring out when the game would end but your explanation helps. Good job! :smile:

jamie-simpson 2020-10-06 19:28

very original game, I loved the idea and it was executed well, the petri dish felt a bit small but I assume it was intentional. also the sounds where a bit horror game like but it wasn't too bad.

amarillion 2020-10-06 19:32

It's a cute little sandbox simulation. By strategically holding reserves of the different species, occasionally staging wars to cull the population, I managed to hold on until 13 generations and 700+ deaths.

You could probably give the game more of a concrete goal by keeping track of a high score, in terms of deaths / generation. But I feel that the score would also be very dependent on the starting position.

I like the creepy background noises, it makes the whole thing very atmospheric.

johanhelsing 2020-10-06 19:42

@hank-ather yeah, it's quite hard, and I wish I'd found some better way of balancing it. Basically you have to make sure that one species never exceeds 50% and regularly battle the two strongest factions against each other.

sengi 2020-10-07 17:03

Great job on catching the right atmosphere! I think half of the deal for me was the audio, this style forever stucked with me from Amanita Design games and this brings me warmth wherever I hear it. Pretty awasemo job on the physics is another half of the deal, I don't think I could make such think in this period of time, respect! ;)

devparty 2020-10-08 00:56

Cool Game!

printablealice 2020-10-08 01:11

Pretty fun (and a good lesson on exponential growth)! I found myself playing multiple times. But it's so hard to keep the populations balanced D:

It's a little frustrating that the barrier material never goes away – it takes up space and blocks strategic moves later in the game. Maybe it could degrade after a set amount of time. I agree with @amarillion that high score tracking would let people compete more, even with themselves.

I would've liked the munching/dividing action sounds to be a little more cute and/or squishy to match the aesthetic of the game. The bacteria are so cute with their one little eye!

wassim 2020-10-08 16:11

Very Cool game, I love the physics force impact and it's in the right fun zone, sound effects are funny which is nice :smile:

toulou 2020-10-08 16:46

What a weird game, definitely noteworthy. I love the presentation, the physic works really great. The gameplay is great, I'd love to see a full game with it. You could explore the concept more with more type of cells that have different characteristics.

Overall, good job!

tomate-salat 2020-10-08 19:49

I really not sure what to tell. Because it is really interessting but also really weired. The audio was nothing I'd enjoy. I was too lazy to mute so I thought I would close the game very early. To my suprise I didn't do it and tried it with "ignoring" the audio. Because you did a really good job on the simulation part and I really wanted to try out different things. Actually I wanted to create an epic battle :D.

It would've been nice if I could set the limit for the creatures. Because I've the feeling that it stopped to early (and I really wanted to have my epic battle). On the other hand that kept me really busy with your game ^^.

I wonder what that game would have looked like if you'd about one week time for it =).

mmiyano 2020-10-10 23:33

I liked the physics and concept, but felt it's a bit shallow gameplay wise

pashaloban 2020-10-11 16:14

9 generations and 53 dead Nice

jrevel 2020-10-24 00:37

That's a very fun toy to play with ! The game stopped by itself at a moment, I did not understand why, I still had a lot of entities (maybe too much ?) Overall, great job, the simulation works pretty well !