Tiny Oblique World by headchant

[raw]
made by headchant for LD23 (COMPO)
Tiny Oblique World is a god-simulation/survival/programming game.

Survive in the wildness. Program short combinations of verb+noun, a list of possibilities can be found under options. They consume water and die when there isn't enough to drink. At night some monster might appear.

If you find the compo version hard try the slightly easier jam version.

(You will need love 0.8 to play the .love/source file, get it from love2d.org. Choose your platform for a standalone executable.)

Ratings

Coolness 66% 3
Overall 2.78 549
Audio 3.00 216
Fun 2.30 705
Graphics 2.84 453
Humor 2.73 211
Innovation 3.73 95
Mood 2.74 387
Theme 3.27 304

Feedback

Dramble
23. Apr 2012 · 20:50 UTC
Pretty cool technically, but didn't really have the control or balance to make it fun.
Shephiroth
23. Apr 2012 · 20:51 UTC
The idea seems good, but the time flow is too fast.

Cant manage to survive first day. If send them to get water, cant build house in time.
Danvil
23. Apr 2012 · 21:30 UTC
Nice idea with indirect control, but game is to fast to figure out all the steps to survive.
Naouak
23. Apr 2012 · 21:39 UTC
I didn't understood much of what was going on on the screen. The concept is fun.
fysx
24. Apr 2012 · 06:41 UTC
I really like the idea and the music is just uber-awesome! It is very hard though and did not manage to build a house, yet.
Topaz
24. Apr 2012 · 09:27 UTC
Great game, but there's very little explanation on how to play and the time before you need a house to survive is very small.
davidllanos22
24. Apr 2012 · 09:42 UTC
Pretty interesting, I've died 1 minute after start the game :c I'll try to play later and try to understend what's going on! Good job! :)
CherryNukaCola
24. Apr 2012 · 09:45 UTC
Love the concept, but unfortunately I couldn't actually execute any commands, it just kept printing Hello World over and over again - also started to experience massive slowdown after having open for a couple minutes - it was apparently using up %50 of my CPU :( Too bad, as the game was fun just watching what would happen ^_^ . Maybe you could add some way for the player to know what everything on the screen is?
graytest
24. Apr 2012 · 12:15 UTC
Difficult. I wrote scripts but didn't feel that my minions executed it very well (or I'm doing something wrong). Good idea though!
invaderJim
27. Apr 2012 · 02:13 UTC
Fantastic idea. I made extensive use of "make love." Incidentally, there was genocide.
namuol
27. Apr 2012 · 03:24 UTC
Nice idea. Liked the visuals and sound, although it was very difficult for me to maintain population for more than a few minutes.

It would be nice to program multiple/all people at once, and to add multiple instructions or simple conditional loops/branches. Also, you should just get rid of the need to command your people to drink water...
rynti
27. Apr 2012 · 22:39 UTC
The idea is great, however the implementation is not so well :(
SFX
27. Apr 2012 · 23:05 UTC
I love the idea, I just wish it was easier to program the people.
Muhiz
28. Apr 2012 · 00:45 UTC
Great idea. Wasn't always sure if people were doing what I told'em to do. Just like real life. :)
minism
28. Apr 2012 · 01:25 UTC
Awesome concept but really hard, i always die fast
chrismcr
07. May 2012 · 09:45 UTC
Gonna say much the same I think - love the idea, but found it way too hard.
egerlach
12. May 2012 · 20:40 UTC
I loved the idea of the game, but it was just too hard. Don't have Love, so couldn't try the Jam version.
lucars83
12. May 2012 · 21:16 UTC
The concept is cool, but I couldn't tell if my people were doing what I told them or not. Then they died.
tomhunt
13. May 2012 · 03:23 UTC
a game centered around programming needs good text editing capability. lack of text editing accelerators, copy/paste, home/end, etc is frustrating to me as a programmer.

you could also make this less programmer-centric by doing the programming via icons. i think this would make the game a lot more accessible and easy/fun to play.

interesting concept, though.