Another shameful failureish!
Well then, Ludum Dare 22 went past quickly and silently. The theme was “alone“, which I didn’t like too much. I had a coupla nice ideas, but as often happens in games of mine, the one I chose eventually proved out to be too ambitious.
My concept was to procedurally generate an island, and then put the player onto it and allow him/her to wander freely, trying to explore and find cool stuff. A concept like this quite much *cries* for feature creep, and that’s quite much what happened. I lost my motivation/inspiration towards the end of the compo, but managed to get it back in order to add some more meat to the thing. In the end I was left with something called “Incomitat”.
As it stands, the game is kind of confusing. There’re surprisingly many things to do, and I enjoy playing around by myself, but for anyone else it’s probably a thorough mystery. For example, there’s a hunger meter in the game that the player can fill by eating things. However, due to the time limit I managed to cram only few foodstuffs. The result is that any normal player will probably starve due to not realizing that they have to find a gun from a random abandoned house, then some ammo and then go shoot some bunnies or birds.
The concept is something I’ll absolutely want to return to later on; it fascinates me and I’d really like to make a game where the island was genuinely full of cool stuff to find. However, as it stands, I’d have to tweak a lot of the code and try to make that cool stuff available for all players instead of those who manage to think the exact same way I do.
Go play the game!
Also the summoning for the Ghost King was very cool, and the birds flying away when a tree falls was a nice touch.
Would love to see this expanded.
This was a wonderfully fun game.
I too, managed to stave off hunger, both by herding animals and farming at first. My biggest qualm with this game would have to be that items are automatically picked up, making item storage much more tedious. I also wish that the destruction caused by the axe was a bit more accurate.
Also, there was a bug in which wooden blocks would reappear in spots where I removed them from the next day. Very annoying, but a good source of infintie wood!
I died… The idea is quite fun, but there are too many things to do – and I didn’t even know where to start! I died the moment I arrived home with a bag full of goodies. Woe with me!
I wish I read what you said – but I thought it might ruin the experience. I died of hunger…
Yeah, the hunger is quite cruel atm. I’m in the process of making it less threatening; I’d want the secrets in the game be the ‘thing’ instead of trying to constantly find something to eat!
Awesome game! Currently playing, going to give a better review in a while.
Reminds me a little bit of survival kids actually.
Also, is this using the map/world generator you had going, or is it something similar you built from scratch?
Using existing code would’ve been cheaty and doing such a generator isn’t very complicated, so I made a new one from scratch. It would’ve been a bit trifly to change how the original worked, too (I’d have to have removed a lot of features and make the generator work with much smaller maps).
I personally don’t think the game is as unintuitive as you think. I managed to summon the Ghost King on my third playthrough (didn’t beat him, though) without seeing anything that gives away how it’s done. As for preventing starvation, prior to finding a gun and ammunition I managed to stave off hunger by building traps out of logs around my house to lure in rabbits and then finishing them off with my axe.
Selecting inventory seems to be slightly broken, though. Often while trying to move items around I would end up shooting instead and wasting all my bullets.
Anyway, I enjoyed this and hope you revisit the concept later in a way you’re more satisfied with.
Whoa, that animal hunting mechanic is wonderful! Gives me a lot of inspiration! :) I’m quite sure I’ll have to change hunger works, but perhaps just adding more things to eat might help.
And yeah, the inventory has proven out to be the weakest chain of the engine; I’ll have to rewrite it.
Thanks a lot for the feedback and compliments!
Your play link lands on a 404 page. =[
Whops, I hate case-sensitivity!