Offspring by scriptorum
Offspring is a game about guiding a planet's evolution to life, humanity, and eventually space travel. It's for players who like clicking on stuff and going what the hell just happened and then criticizing the author's weak grasp of scientific theory. Oh yeah!
You are Father Minute and have control of six time children. If you have an available child, you can send them to a space on the planet to work. They'll take 10 seconds and conduct massive change. For example, your child in one move can evolve a rodent from simple cells, or turn a village into a city. Another click can destroy the human you so carefully evolved from a caveman. So, experiment! The game isn't over until you build a "citadel," from which you can launch a shuttle into space and win the game.
Recommend you actually play with 5 seconds or less, as 10 seconds is a bit too zen-like slow for my liking. The game is a little challenging without spoilers, so I'm preparing some below.
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Lava covers the land and water and causes the water to boil, so get rid of it whenever it's in your way. Remember, you're able to assign six workers at the same, so go ahead and multitask.
Clicking on clear land or water sends a meteor to the planet. A meteor spreads minerals which are needed to create cells. Cells can be turned into algae on the water, or if left alone, may evolve into a fish or a reptile, given access to other algae and fish, respectively. Minerals on land tend to blow away. Algae tends to die without access to minerals.
Plants grow next to (two) algae. Plants drop seeds which can be turned into trees (which also drop seeds). A set of three plants often evolve into rodents on their own. Rodents multiply with access to more plants. Rodents can be turned into herbivores.
Reptiles can be turned into carnivores. Carnivores next to a rodent or next to an herbivore will evolve into cavemen. Herbivores will also turn into cavemen if next to some trees. Caveman can be turned into humans.
Humans multiply like crazy. It takes three of them next to a tree to build a basic dwelling. This dwelling can be upgraded into a village and will rapidly grow to city size if humans stay near. When two cities are near each other, one will eventually become a metropolis.
Not all things evolve when clicked on. Humans, algae, herbivores, carnivores, trees, fish, and meteors will be destroyed if you click on them.
Due to a bug in my code I just discovered :) there is only one path for forming a factory, and that is to wait for the smaller city next to the metropolis to downgrade into a storage building (everyone moved into the metropolis). From there you can upgrade it to a factory.
A factory next to a metropolis will automatically upgrade to a citadel. And from there, you can launch a space shuttle. Have at it.
You are Father Minute and have control of six time children. If you have an available child, you can send them to a space on the planet to work. They'll take 10 seconds and conduct massive change. For example, your child in one move can evolve a rodent from simple cells, or turn a village into a city. Another click can destroy the human you so carefully evolved from a caveman. So, experiment! The game isn't over until you build a "citadel," from which you can launch a shuttle into space and win the game.
Recommend you actually play with 5 seconds or less, as 10 seconds is a bit too zen-like slow for my liking. The game is a little challenging without spoilers, so I'm preparing some below.
====
Lava covers the land and water and causes the water to boil, so get rid of it whenever it's in your way. Remember, you're able to assign six workers at the same, so go ahead and multitask.
Clicking on clear land or water sends a meteor to the planet. A meteor spreads minerals which are needed to create cells. Cells can be turned into algae on the water, or if left alone, may evolve into a fish or a reptile, given access to other algae and fish, respectively. Minerals on land tend to blow away. Algae tends to die without access to minerals.
Plants grow next to (two) algae. Plants drop seeds which can be turned into trees (which also drop seeds). A set of three plants often evolve into rodents on their own. Rodents multiply with access to more plants. Rodents can be turned into herbivores.
Reptiles can be turned into carnivores. Carnivores next to a rodent or next to an herbivore will evolve into cavemen. Herbivores will also turn into cavemen if next to some trees. Caveman can be turned into humans.
Humans multiply like crazy. It takes three of them next to a tree to build a basic dwelling. This dwelling can be upgraded into a village and will rapidly grow to city size if humans stay near. When two cities are near each other, one will eventually become a metropolis.
Not all things evolve when clicked on. Humans, algae, herbivores, carnivores, trees, fish, and meteors will be destroyed if you click on them.
Due to a bug in my code I just discovered :) there is only one path for forming a factory, and that is to wait for the smaller city next to the metropolis to downgrade into a storage building (everyone moved into the metropolis). From there you can upgrade it to a factory.
A factory next to a metropolis will automatically upgrade to a citadel. And from there, you can launch a space shuttle. Have at it.
Ratings
| Coolness | 56% | 3 |
| Overall | 3.35 | 282 |
| Audio | 2.87 | 368 |
| Fun | 2.97 | 516 |
| Graphics | 2.92 | 535 |
| Humor | 1.83 | 802 |
| Innovation | 3.76 | 97 |
| Mood | 3.31 | 183 |
| Theme | 2.87 | 816 |
Even with reading instructions. I often wasnt sure if I was messing things up or making them better by putting the meteor there
Quite an innovative concept that definitely could become something more!
Could also make a great mobile phone game!
The gameplay itself is a little tedious at first, having to un-lava everything doesn't really give much of a feeling of accomplishment, but when you start growing algae and fish and everything, it starts to become more engaging.
I'll confess I didn't make it past the stages of rodents cropping up, as I lost interest with trying to figure out how to progress from that point, but as I said this is not my preferred type of game so it's probably more my fault than your game design's. So, keeping in mind that I didn't really delve deeply into it and also that I didn't read your spoilers in order to have a more organic (heh) experience, it doesn't seem like there's a lot of risk of failure here. Your fish and other wildlife don't seem to starve if you neglect to place food near them.
The theme seems pretty loosely fit into this, as well, since as far as I can tell you just arbitrarily described your little helper planet 'children' things as 10 seconds each and made 6 of them so that they add up to a minute. Maybe this is expounded on later, but it seemed pretty irrelevant after the introduction was over.
Overall, I'd probably enjoy it more if it was a little less puzzley and a little more arcadey, if that could be accomplished within this kind of game. Like I said before, though, the aesthetics are great and definitely kept me playing longer than I had expected to.
I jumped in to the game without reading the spoiler section, and some actions felt a little random(especially the kill action for some animals), maybe displaying the action(like next to the tile status) that will be used on a tile, on mouse hover might help?
Overall a nice game, it was interesting how the humans and their cities behaved(and the speed at which they multiplied, lol).
Sprites are pleasant and audio are fitting. Nice work!
In my world I could make some cities in about 10min.
Interesting game anyways !
It might be because my brain has quite much the capability of a cat's brain, or something like that, but I had no idea what was going on...
I still think it was fun... sorry about your toe! ;)
Nice little growth/sim game.
I love the idea of a 10 second god game. Had to read the instructions but was able to move on after that.