BOB by Phyro
A game where the player, as an AI inside a computer of a colony spaceship, has the task to decide when it's a good idea to spend its ship energy, taking into consideration the intentions on these situations.
Each decision the player makes saves or spend the ship's energy and modify the moral and storyline over the crew aboard the spaceship.
The final goal is to make good decisions to make it until the new planet humans want to colonize, without (much) incidents. But it's all about the journey and every kind of endings and tribulations the player may find.
Get on board and don't let the energy run out!
[PATCH NOTES] - Discovered some broken endings that ruined the experience, and as the game is only based on it, we made a fix for it.
[DEV DISCLAIMER] It needs an english spelling check yet, just saying :P
[!!!SPOILER WARNING!!!] - So, if you already played the game, maybe you have noticed it basically runs with 3 attributes, being one of them the visible Energy meter and two other hidden values, Hope and Chaos. This other two keep going up and down following the player's answers, sometimes both changes, sometimes only one, depending on the answer, but one of them always changes. Here are the endings list, as "achievements titles", and how to achieve them. Good luck!
BASIC ENDINGS - New Home - Survive until a certain number of turns. - Powerless - Just let energy run out.
MID-GAME ENDINGS - Spoiled Humans - Keep the Hope attribute at 100% for 4 consecutive turns. - Hopeless Humans - Keep the Hope attribute at 0% for 3 consecutive turns. - Rage Quit - Keep the Chaos attribute at 100% for 4 consecutive turns.
QUESTION/ANSWER DEPENDENT ENDINGS - Cold BOB - Let people be sacrificed and keep the Chaos attribute at 100% for 4 consecutive turns. - Mad Captain - Accept Captain to take command of the ship for a while and keep Energy around 0%~20% and Chaos around 70%~90% for 4 consecutive turns. - Greater Evil - Accept the Alien refugees in the ship and keep the Chaos attribute at 100% for 4 consecutive turns. - Defective Ship - Deny avoiding the asteroid belt, then deny fixing the hull with the machinery and keep Energy around - 0%~20% and around 70%~90% for 4 consecutive turns. - Sick to Death - Accept funding the Doc experiments, then deny the Kid's demand on keeping the lights on, and let the energy runs out.
| Source code | https://bitbucket.org/PhyroPhyro/spacereigns |
| Windows | https://phyro.itch.io/bob |
| Android | https://phyro.itch.io/bob |
| HTML5 (web) | https://phyro.itch.io/bob |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/bob |
Ratings
| Given | 56🗳️ | 25🗨️ |
Played through a few times, and loved the different animations, art, sound, ending, ect. Amazing job on this one!
Glad to know that @mrpiedpiper also has enjoyed playing a few more times as well :)
@synedraacus , Reigns was definetly a inspiration and a name brought up during the planning many times, maybe too much (?) lol
We've discussed mid-production about expose the other decision values to the player, but since the game wasn't planned for it since start we were out of time to do it. The game was designed to work just with the energy bar as a win-lose indicator, but we've found it more fun with the other values endings. We want so much to add more things, like achievements screen to track seen characters and endings, and the other values meters on screen, but it may be after the LD time, of course.
Anyways I really like the sci-fi take and your graphics are truly stellar. I can't wait to see what else you do with this. A really good entry!
The fact you were able to do multiple endings is impressive as well
Thanks to everyone who is commenting on the art, I really loved creating each of the characters and developing the style of the game with the @phyro, knowing that art is making a difference makes me really excited to create more games.
I did 3 rounds of it. On the third I came to notice that it seemed like the events that I was encountering weren't built off of previous events. Choosing not to turn on the contact radio or explore the planet still resulted in a refugee alien event, which seemed a bit odd. Seeing some player agency to influence subsequent events helps sell the narrative experience. That said, the ending screen payoffs were pretty awesome! I got the planet BoB ending, the stranded in space ending, and the riot ending. That you managed to get 10 different endings in the game is impressive, especially if they're all drawn and written as well as the ones I've seen.
Good stuff! I've only run into one other game in this genre in LD44, and I wish there were more of them!
Its short, but also fun to play, I tried few times and safely colonize new planet.
Some jokes are very great, and similartis in characters is also funny :) (StarWars commander ?, WALLI residents of the space station etc) :)
Great entry :)
I haven't reached all the endings and it would be great if there was a chart to explore all of them :) You know somewhere on deep web, made by loyal Bob fans. :smile:
Keep up the good work.
It helps to know if the balancing is on point!
@kaisean-games that's a great idea and I should do a chart on this very page here, as there wasn't enough time to do the achievement screen in-game
@wojciech me and @rodnasca are very passionate about the space setting, so much that our other ideas were nearly all of them in this setting, more or less, lol. Thanks for the dialog mention, I've invested several hours in it, but I really think that it was just because I'm not very used to write narratives :v
I believe @kaisean-games was looking for the endings as well, as he commented well above.
My main complaint with this game is the spelling and grammar. I counted maybe five mistakes in the intro text alone. In a mostly text-based game, that's a big problem. Are you non-native English speakers? It might be worth running the dialogue through a spell-checking program in future. It would also be nice if you had some way of knowing how close you were to your destination, so you could weigh it against how much energy you currently have. (No need to see the other variables, as I think that might make the game *too* easy.)
Solid effort, well done!
The energy idea is pretty good and about other visible variables we agree with you and think that it would go against the game's premise that is leave the decisions to the player and do not "guide" him to a "right" direction. It's about the journey, anyway :)
Like I mentioned on stream, just giving the requestees hints at what's going on (morale, chaos) through visual cues and in text would be enough to clue in the player. I'd also like to see a way to replay unlocked endings.
Great job!
One of them is sure to be a visual feedback in the form of facial expressions to give a hint as to how the population of the ship is feeling with the choice you made. We are also thinking of doing a different illustration for the ten endings, or more, which we did not have time to do during Jam.
Once the stream is finished you can find the video here: https://www.twitch.tv/ursagames/videos
If you want to know when it was played you can find your game in the queue here: https://tinyurl.com/y5rdokvp
And about the questions involving weapons, were you planning on having alien attacks or something like it at some point? It seems unrelated to the possible endings you put here.
@webox thanks for noticing the characters personality, and @avsc yes, we had many intentions over other narratives and stats we've left out of this jam version, but maybe we elaborate more on it in the future. Basically, the there are 2 alien narratives working right now, the refugees and the scientific alien that provides air treatment knowledge, and the unknown planet that once explored you meet an alien proposing to sacrifice people. But there aren't the art to make these differences clear and all, so maybe it feels kinda "random", I guess [?]. But thanks for noticing it!