The Small Black by Phlip45

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
| HTML5 (web) | http://forgettable.altervista.org/LudumDare/LD38/main.html |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/the-small-black |
Ratings
| Overall | 744th | 2.524⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 718th | 2.333⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 350th | 3.19⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 710th | 2.476⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 18🗳️ | 15🗨️ |
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:
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.
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!
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!
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.
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.