The Small Black by Phlip45

[raw]
made by Phlip45 for LD 38 (JAM)

screenshot.png

LD38 -- Theme: Small World
The Small Black
A short press-your-luck game where you must survive an hour of in game time for a space ship to come rescue you. Your space ship just crash landed and you are trying to keep up the vital systems.
I know just a handful of javascript, html, and css so the game doesn't look very good but it was fun to make.

Link: http://forgettable.altervista.org/LudumDare/LD38/main.html
Source: http://forgettable.altervista.org/LudumDare/LD38/source.zip

Ratings

Overall 744th 2.524⭐ 23🧑‍⚖️
Fun 718th 2.333⭐ 23🧑‍⚖️
Innovation 350th 3.19⭐ 23🧑‍⚖️
Theme 710th 2.476⭐ 23🧑‍⚖️
Given 18🗳️ 15🗨️

Feedback

theslate
01. May 2017 · 14:57 UTC
The sounds added a lot. I would have liked to see more flavor around why things are breaking. Good music!
🎤 Phlip45
04. May 2017 · 03:08 UTC
@theslate Not my music technically (I've since switched off rating for music and art and the like I think. Hopefully that works.) Thanks for the comment!
Iron Leonem
04. May 2017 · 04:41 UTC
Thank you so much for the play! A humble beginning, but really solid mechanics. I can't wait to see what you do next!
somethinboutgames
04. May 2017 · 12:50 UTC
Trying to stretch a resource until you are saved is a cool idea, however I think there's just a minor flaw in your implementation: If I'm trying to get saved and the more time I invest in a repair the more likely it is to succeed, why should I even spend just tiny amounts of time?

Right now, the best way to win is to spend 6 time units on every repair, that way you'll be done the quickest and succeed on any repair you attempt.

What if instead of time it'd cost another, not replaceable resource like tools, parts, energy, whatever to make a repair. Then you'd have to really decide how urgently you want something fixed, how many parts/energy/whatever should you use to attempt the repair or could you even let the damage drop a little further before doing something about it?

Anyway, I think this really has potential, just that little logical mistake :smiley:
IDidGame
04. May 2017 · 19:16 UTC
Can only agree with the previous comments.
I really liked the idea and the flavour text there is(the different endings are especially cool)
Adding more different text to the actual gameplay would have been great.
Also lengthening the bars to maybe four or five stars and rebalancing around that might have been good since that would dial the luck factor back a bit. On the other hand that might take away from the hopeless, stranded in space vibe that i liked.
maartene
04. May 2017 · 19:48 UTC
I really like this game. It's easy to pick up, easy to understand what is happening. Sound/graphics are effective. And the RNG can be appropriately brutal for this type of game (bit rogue like). A bit more strategy would have been nice, luck is a large part of gameplay now.
andrewl
04. May 2017 · 19:50 UTC
Really inventive - the premise is really interesting and the sound effects and music were pretty cool. I think you could have been a bit more ambitious with the graphics, but a good attempt for 48 hours!
huminaboz
04. May 2017 · 21:06 UTC
This is the start of a really good idea, you should expand on this.
MCjammydodger
06. May 2017 · 14:49 UTC
Interesting idea which could make for a great game if it's expanded upon and made less luck based.

Because this game is heavily focused on randomness, I felt that staying intact by the end of it wasn't very satisfying as it's mostly to do with luck rather than skill. All I had to do was spend 6 minutes fixing the most damaged component and hope that luck was on my side.

If you added more strategy into the game it could be very fun. Good entry though!
elektropapst
07. May 2017 · 10:21 UTC
I like the idea of your game. As already mentioned in the previous comments, more strategy would be nice. Keep on working on this. :rocket:
Flaterectomy
07. May 2017 · 10:27 UTC
A simple concept, and it was immediately clear how things worked. That said, there was a sense of having little real impact on the game. It seemed random whether I was successful or not. Some way to improve my chances (more time spent fixing something translates to more experience fixing that thing?) might've been nice.

The art is as simple as the concept, which I didn't mind. The icons you made translate well, but the CSS styling has room to improve. The music works very well. Nice work!
quadtree
09. May 2017 · 06:02 UTC
Interesting idea, but the game seemed very random. It probably would have been better if there was some distinction between the three repairable things, as well. Good choice of music, though.
acotis
10. May 2017 · 21:05 UTC
I love the music! The sounds were good too, but they were too loud I think -- I wanted to hear that music!

I liked the gameplay a little less; it seemed a little too based on randomness. Perhaps there could be a second mechanic to make it more interesting? I might also make it so that a system always falls to one bar before breaking completely -- otherwise it's hard to tell what happened when I go from 3-bars to game over. But of course I'm painfully aware of the limitations of 72 hours :)

Anyway, congrats on making this in JS! It didn't feel "website-y" like most JS games do.
Scriptorum
10. May 2017 · 21:39 UTC
I loved the custom text when one of your systems fails. I didn't like the time box -- it's not a great control and going beyond a fix time of 1 didn't seem to have any benefit. It could use some more interesting choices: what if you had a hand of cards to choose from, and each card indicated the time cost, chance of success, and how much it would repair/damage the systems? Say, `(2min) 60% Life:+3 Gen:+1`.
rubyleehs
15. May 2017 · 12:33 UTC
Interesting game. Though really unbalanced. Once i died from lack of oxygen after doing a 6mins repair even though I had 5 bars of oxygen left.

Making the game require more of some form of strategic thinking would be nice. Perhaps at low oxygen/heat you are less productive or when the generator is low, it takes longer time for help to reach due to weaker help signal or decreases effectiveness of oxy/heat generator.
boorik
16. May 2017 · 16:05 UTC
Hard to survive!! Nice music. Good Job
Doug Graham
16. May 2017 · 23:22 UTC
Interesting idea. A little too random for me, but I did mange to win.