Galapagos by espekia

[raw]
made by espekia for LD24 (COMPO)
Uses the Java implementation of Astar pathfinding available here: https://github.com/yoyo03/SimpleAStar

To play, just extract the zip and run galapagos.jar.

Gameplay instructions are in the game's menu.

Linux version hopefully coming soon.

Made in Java with jME3 and LWJGL.

My first Ludum Dare entry.

Ratings

Coolness 64% 3
Overall 3.15 270
Audio 1.20 600
Fun 2.67 438
Graphics 2.61 482
Humor 2.23 311
Innovation 3.88 31
Mood 2.45 465
Theme 4.33 8

Feedback

dredlockz
27. Aug 2012 · 11:24 UTC
wow! the best implementation of the theme i've seen so far. It's a really interesting simulation.
Rellikiox
27. Aug 2012 · 11:29 UTC
It was hard to know exactly what I should be doing to achieve my goal. Besides that, it's a cool game.
mariscal
27. Aug 2012 · 11:34 UTC
Really good game! I miss some sound but really enjoyed playing it, good work!
r4m0n
27. Aug 2012 · 11:38 UTC
The lack of predators make population control quite hard, but it DOES show what happens when you leave a species without predators in a limited space :-)
PeripheralGames
27. Aug 2012 · 11:45 UTC
Nice Game, I found it quite complex and found myself bewildered at times but other wise quite good
Dietrich Epp
27. Aug 2012 · 11:56 UTC
Oh, population dynamics. At first I thought, "cool, the birds are having chicks" and then "wow, that's a lot of chicks" and suddenly they wiped out all the food and died off...

I don't know if that was your intent, but it's a cool thing to see the system do.
Yann
27. Aug 2012 · 11:57 UTC
That's a nice game, the only thing it suffers is the lack of visual feedback. After I played 3 of 4 levels mindlessly spawning the appropriate tree, I end up noticing that their was an health bar.
And that the weird disappearance wasn't a glitch but death.

Then this game became more a matter of timing for population control.
The last generation should be the closer to the goal, so you just have to wait for them to die and just feed the youngest to evolve faster.
So in my opinion Good innovation and good fun, and Excellent implementation of the theme (:

As suggested, I think you could expand the idea with predators and the ability to hide/run/etc (:
goerp
29. Aug 2012 · 14:07 UTC
good take on the theme, interesting gameplay. And I like games that look like this.
Grouflon
29. Aug 2012 · 14:21 UTC
Interesting, but may lack some statistics or infos about the birds to understand what you're doing
Cyboot
10. Sep 2012 · 20:02 UTC
I think its the best theme game i played so far, great job on that!

One thing i have to say:
I know its hard to find a good way to introduce the controls and infos about the gameplay and a simple text is easy and fast do do.
But I think thats the worst thing to do, because noone likes to read long text (maybe thats a problem with that comment too xD) especially before they start playing.
So I think most skipped the text and dont remeber the controls/tips
Long story short, good intro is very important :)

I just wrote longer text to game that are worth it, and yours was!
Really great job, looking forward to see more LudumDare entries from you :)
nate427
16. Sep 2012 · 15:03 UTC
Very original idea and quite fun!
Datw
17. Sep 2012 · 15:09 UTC
The idea is nice, but it gets broing after some time.
brett-kaplan
17. Sep 2012 · 15:46 UTC
The graphics and feel of the game are nice, you did a good job of not overextending yourself.

One thing you might want to consider for the future would be to add more feedback for the player, like little animations or sounds as they interact with the game. Especially for placement games like this, making the game react immediately to actions can make it feel much more vibrant and alive. A good example of this would be World of Goo.
PaulSB
17. Sep 2012 · 22:25 UTC
This is great! A real considered look at the theme; was great to watch the birds go along their way eating and pooping out eggs, I played for quite a while! A bit of sound and visual polish would have helped, but really good job.
Maple
17. Sep 2012 · 22:50 UTC
There's been a couple of games I've played this LD with this sort of idea (generally speaking), but I must say this has been the one I played the longest. My only problem is that it would be nice to see how close you are to the goal -- Once you know what to do, it gets kinda boring and you don't really know how close you are to finishing the round. But otherwise, it's an interesting game, and I like the graphics/animation.