Pain in the Cave by esquellington

[raw]
made by esquellington for LD36 (COMPO)
So what tech is more ancient than "rendering" on cave walls? None, I bet!

The tribe is diminishing, only a Hunter, a Gatherer and a Scout
remain. To survive, they must feed the fire with wood to remain warm and
safe, hunt and gather themselves a healthy dose of prehistoric
proteins and carbohidrates and avoid being eaten by wolves, ran down
by bisons and annoyed by birds that steal their crops...

Controls:
- Click on tribemen to select them, and then click on a target resource to
collect it (Hunter->Meat, Gatherer->Cereal, Scout->Wood), on an animal
to attack it (Hunter), or anywhere to move (All).
- Actions cannot be interrupted, so use your 21st century brain to
plan ahead your actions in the -100th

Notes:
- Code and Postmortem at: https://github.com/esquellington/PainInTheCave
- Web play using love.js from: https://github.com/TannerRogalsky/love.js
Prefer FullScreen, as art is 1920x1080 with no resizing (sorry:_)
- Requires L枚ve2D (>= 0.10.1), run as
love PainInTheCave.love
- Developed in Ubuntu 14.04, but "should" work wherever there's Love.
- Source and art at github, no license, do whatever you want with it.
- Song "Krakatoa" Joseph Gilbert / Kistol (through http://opengameart.org/)

Version 0.1 (31-08-2016)
- Fixed: Repackaged as PaintInTheCave.love (was .zip, badly packaged)
- Fixed: Gatherer/Scout not appearing after being arrowed)
- Fixed: Starving when Cereal==0 but Meat>0
- Added: Interruptible actions
- Added: Selection changes automatically when current character dies

Feedback

馃帳 esquellington
28. Aug 2016 路 23:21 UTC
There's some resizing problems, works best in fullscreen in a 16:9 monitor
Traf d-Lo
29. Aug 2016 路 06:34 UTC
Tried the web version and it automatically went to full-screen, no problems there. Nice art style/concept and nice fading end (I lasted about 1.5 minutes lol).
馃帳 esquellington
29. Aug 2016 路 08:00 UTC
Thanks for trying it, difficulty is quite high by now, no time to balance it, so 1.5 minutes is a *great* score ;)
janiq
30. Aug 2016 路 19:39 UTC
It has nice atmosphere with the music. Characters are not able to stop once orders are given. I think they should be able to cancel the command and accept the new one. I tried OS/X version but it seems you have uploaded zip file containing sources. It is not runnable. I did it by compressing the content as LOVE file and running it.
馃帳 esquellington
30. Aug 2016 路 21:20 UTC
Hi, thanks a lot for playing and for the feedback, I'll try to fix a few bugs and allow canceling orders.
Palmish
02. Sep 2016 路 22:43 UTC
I tended to focus on controlling the hunter and only using the others passively when there were no wolves or bisons nearby. That seemed like a good tactic, but perhaps not what you intended. Died by walking into a bison rather than shooting it. I think it's difficult to tell if the hunter will walk or shoot. I once accidentally shot another guy when I meant to just walk past him. I also think I saw wolves spawning in at the fire a couple times.

I quite liked the cave painting style art.

I like games were you control several characters with different abilities, like Lost Vikings! I think you could develop this into something cool. Perhaps the gameplay would have to be a lot slower, though. One problem is what happens when a character dies. If they are all essential, the game is pretty much over, and that is pretty difficult to prevent.

My best score was 143s
loveapplegames
03. Sep 2016 路 22:26 UTC
I like the graphical style, it's intriguing. Perhaps making the lines rugged like the background would make it look more natural. The concept of controlling 3 characters is interesting, but the game could use more polish. For example:

- animals pop onto the screen randomly, sometimes right on top of the characters. Why not move them in from outside of the screen?
- the bison is huge, it takes up a big part of the screen
- collision is a little dodgy sometimes
- it is hard to distinguish between moving and shooting. Why not use a different control for shooting?
- the game would benefit from better death animations
馃帳 esquellington
04. Sep 2016 路 23:30 UTC
Thanks all for the interesting feedback @Palmish and @loveapplegames, I agree with most of it.
I'm tempted to keep improving the game but I should probably focus in having a life instead... I'll post updates here if I do improve it, anyway :)