Strain of the Gods by JavaSaurus
Many years ago, a race of ancient deities arose from a deep slumber. In their hunger for wealth and power they caused the demise of mankind. At the brink of a complete extinction, only a small village escaped the eyes of the gods, until now. Baring the legacy of mankind, it is up to you to aid the small mountain town of Javalonia to please the celestial beings while slowly increasing its population. How long will you last before you too perish?
* For those who do not want to read the entire manual * : This game is a resource gathering game in the shape of a very minimalistic RTS. The gods will ask you for resources, if you can't comply they will kill your villagers until you sacrifice one to them instead.
Manual
CONTROLS
Key | Action
--- | ---
F1 | Show controls overlay
Left Click| Select a single unit, confirm position to move to
Right Click & Drag | Select multiple units
Tab | Toggle minimap
Arrow Keys| Move camera
Left CTRL + UP/DOWN keys| Follow a villager
The World
Right click on a villager to select him/her. Alternatively you can left click and drag (see image). Then proceed doing the same on a target and select an action. Note that not everything can be farmed, as the Gods do not want you to mess with live trees.
| | | | | |
--- | --- | --- | --- | ---
| wood | 
| food | 
| water
| stone | 
| food |
Villager actions
A villager can do multiple things. They have to, the fate of mankind depends on it !!!! To aid you in keeping track of your villagers, you can hold down * CTRL and the up or down arrow keys . This will make the camera follow an individual villager in its endeavour! You can also toggle a minimap using the TAB * key
Sacrifice
You can sacrifice a villager , should the gods demand so. Or if you are unable to fulfill one of their wishes. By right clicking a villager and selecting sacrifice, the character will find its path back to the altar at the village square. Villagers are really your most precious resource however, so be careful !
_Making a sacrifice_
Harvest
You can manually specify a resource that should be harvested by a villager. Select one or multiple villagers, then right click your target and select "Harvest". Obtaining food is harder than it seems. Berries can be quite rare and the only other option is to tend to the farmland near the village. You can use water to let the crops grow, which can then be harvested for food ! Right click the farmland and water it.
_Harvesting a tree_
Scavenge
When you are in sudden need of a certain resource, you don't always have the time to manage every target for a villager manually. By selecting "Scavenge" you can set a resource type and let the AI handle the gathering for you ! Easy peasy !
Rest
Villagers are also a resource and you will run out if the divine demands keep coming. In order to reproduce, at least * 2 villagers need to be resting in the same house. You can do this by selecting villagers, right clicking a house and selecting rest. If you have at least 50 of each resource * , there is a chance the villagers will reproduce !
_Resting and reproducing_
Notifications
A villager will let you know what it is up to by means of a text bubble.
Object| Type
--- | ---
| found what I was looking for | 
| confused, did you interrupt me?
| brought something to the village | 
| looking for wood
| can't reach what you want me to | 
| looking for food
| there is no resource nearby | 
| looking for water
| thinking about what I need to do | 
| looking for gold
| sick, something went wrong |
Events
Rewards
The Gods will bestow you with fortune or will demand sacrifices to be made. In the former, an idol will spawn on the map. Have one of your villagers obtain it before time runs out and you will be rewarded with a random resource !
Punishments
You are a toy. The Gods will put you in place with plagues and disaster. You can bribe them by following their demands, by clicking the appropriate button in the HUD (if you have the resources). Be sure to do so before the pentagon timer runs out, the consequences might be severe...
Plague| Flood | Earthquake
--- | --- | ---
| 
| 
Special Features
Procedural Audio
The audio for this game is procedural. It is generated on the spot and to prove that, there is a function in the options window that can swap between the generated music and piano music on the fly !
Automated resource gathering state machine
I've spent almost a full day on this and it still is not working as well as I want it to. It is surprisingly difficult to instruct an AI to be confused at times !
Pixel art
All pixel art was created by me using only 3 gray tones from the Arne64's preset in Pyxel Edit !
Used Software
- Audacity
- Pxyel Edit
- Unity2018.2.15f1 and Visual Studio 2017
- sfbgames.com/chiptone/
Developer's note
I have been doing game development as a hobby for the last two years now. I am not a "project finisher", but I am an avid prototyper. I wanted to take the challenge and put as much in this game as I could, using a slice of my skills to deliver the best I could in 2 days. I had tremendous fun writing an overly complex game with simple gameplay mechanics. In a way, I created a chainsaw to carve a chicken, breaking the code more than I fixed it. Resource gathering AI and procedural music in 2 days, with loads of side challenges (drag select, delegate events, ... )
Thank you for reading this page, that in itself is appreciation!
Thank you for the Ludum Dare community. Every issue is a blast ! And I would also like to thank the Twitch community for the fun streams, even early in the morning. Mic-less mind you, as I did not want to wake my son with my crazyness. Yet you guys stuck by my side and cheered me on !
Also thanks for the streams that motivated me and helped me finish the project with laughs and enjoyment.
* https://www.twitch.tv/honestdangames *
* https://www.twitch.tv/rocknightstudios *
* https://www.twitch.tv/akouo_studios *
* https://www.twitch.tv/instafluff *
* https://www.twitch.tv/wobblytrout *
* https://www.twitch.tv/krassenstein *
Untill next edition, you can find me at * https://www.twitch.tv/DrJavaSaurus * !
Thank you for your time and effort playing the game. Happy gaming and happy holidays !
Ratings
| Overall | 219th | 3.477⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 287th | 3.136⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 106th | 3.591⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 83th | 4⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 142th | 3.705⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 142th | 3.333⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 187th | 2.976⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 74th | 3.75⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 31🗳️ | 6🗨️ |
Thank you so much for playing !
The god events are random and occur by chance on a roll every minute. The difficulty of their task depends on how much resources and villagers you have aqcuired in that time.
You can track the villagers by holding left ctrl and pressing up/down. There also is a minimap (press tab to toggle it). Did you have the volume sliders up? I tested it on my side after having downloaded the same version and the audio is working on my side
Could you also provide some further details on where they get stuck "between 4 tiles" ? Because I cast their position to ints upon arrival so that should definitely not happen, but thank you for reporting it !
** EDIT **
I have updated the manual to include the key combinations. Thank you for telling me that !
Considering the audio, I discovered the problem : I had stored my settings locally in the player prefs and those were loaded into the build. In case someone would play the game for the first time, the default values would be set to -40db (completely silent). You'd need to mess with the sliders in the configuration to hear anything ! This should now be fixed however (wasn't really a bug in the end, phew :)...
I love the art style.
Well done !
First off, posting a single line comment "anonymously" just proves you have an non constructive mindset and just want to troll about. Odds are you don't even have a "submitted - finished" game and just want to go around and see where you'll get responses. I hope I am wrong and you are not an immature bored person.
Secondly, should you actually want to go into a discussion on what can be improved, I suggest you read through this page first, it is extensively documented what is going on. On top of that, there is a tutorial in game that explains everything yet again. So "difficult to know what is going on" is a very, very poor comment. Maybe in a future edition I need to make everything AI based, including the player !
Thirdly, this game is heavily based on AI and is a hybrid between an idle game and an RTS. You can literally have the AI do all the work for you until something pops up. Most people appreciate the complex backend code that went into this and I would love to see what your game entails. However, as said earlier, I fear this is just a troll comment and there's nothing backing this pointless comment up.
And lastly, this is a compo game. If I had another day I would have included monsters, constructing buildings and much more.
Kind regards, in fear of you being a troll I disabled anonymous comments. Feel free to man up and contribute in an appropriate way to this project.
-main menu doesn't work after you die
-torrential downpour seems to just kill all my people no matter what. maybe i did something wrong? but from what i understood all but one were in the houses
-when pressing ctrl + arrow key to select a villager, it only worked if you held ctrl. letting go stopped the camera where it was until you held ctrl again
some other things that i think would be helpful:
-more detailed minimap, i.e. show a box of what the player can see (minimap was much bigger)
-faster scrolling
-more responsive moving (sometimes villagers wait a few moments before moving)
overall the game was very pretty and kinda eerie, which i liked, but the constraints of ludum dare make more complex games more difficult to create. good stuff though.
I relly like the idea, it's a very nice game, I like it! :smiley: :thumbsup:
Mmmmm, maybe you can add the ability to move the view, pressing the middle mouse button and dragging it. :thinking:
Really nice game, very, very good job! :v: :smile:
_____
@tylerstraub
_____
-main menu doesn’t work after you die
*** That seems like a pretty nasty bug, I can still try to fix that in a post-jam ? ***
-torrential downpour seems to just kill all my people no matter what. maybe i did something wrong? but from what i understood all but one were in the houses
*** You can stop the punishments by sacrificing a villager, I'm sorry this wasn't clear. They should indeed be safe in the houses though so this might also be a bug ***
-when pressing ctrl + arrow key to select a villager, it only worked if you held ctrl. letting go stopped the camera where it was until you held ctrl again
*** I designed it to be like this, but this is just a toggle in my current setup, I will re-enable it in the post jam ! ***
some other things that i think would be helpful:
-more detailed minimap, i.e. show a box of what the player can see (minimap was much bigger)
*** This also can be an easy fix, thank you for the suggestion ***
-faster scrolling
*** I agree, I actually have support for mouse scrolling but I removed it due to some glitches. I will also re-enable this in post jam ***
-more responsive moving (sometimes villagers wait a few moments before moving)
*** This is definitely true, but mostly is only to be solved by updating the pathfinding for longer distances on the (very) big map. I hope this did not freeze the game for you? ***
overall the game was very pretty and kinda eerie, which i liked, but the constraints of ludum dare make more complex games more difficult to create. good stuff though.
*** I indeed fell for the scope trap, but I hope the end product was still somewhat enjoyable :)***
_____
@myfriendtames
Mmmmm, maybe you can add the ability to move the view, pressing the middle mouse button and dragging it.
*** That is a great suggestion. Like I said in reply to @tylerstraub , I will re-enable the mouse functionality in the post-jam :) ***
_____
@ursagames
Thank you tremendously for playing. I love your stream, I'm very sorry I missed my own game mostly due to timezone differences, but full kudos to you for going through all these beautiful games ! One of the nicest LD streamers :)
_____
*** UPDATE ***
I added a post jam version with re-enabled mouse camera control :) I'd need to refactor the AStar algorithm to be more efficient, but that might be out of scope for this jam. Lessons learned !
First, it looks good. However, it's really hard to tell what is what outside of trees, houses and villagers. At first I randomly clicked things cause I had no idea what was what. I would make the resources much more obvious, even if it doesn't look as good.
Actually that's the problem I have with the game overall. As I said there is a lot of stuff, like menues, tutorial etc. and it's really impressive, but it doesn't bring much to the game IMO. I think you should have focused more on the gameplay, and make it feels as good as possible, and make it as fun as possible. IMO everyone can make a menu or a tutorial, what I'm much more interested in is the gameplay (maybe it's only me tho).
If you'd like to rewatch the playthrough, you can find it here: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/346056936?t=30m19s
Good luck on your ratings! :D
💜 Elysia Griffin AKA Button Feedback Lady