Sacrifices must be made - Ludum Dare 43 by great-bobleny
Build a village while making sacrifices to ward off plagues.
Your goal is to generate enough resources to make enough sacrifices to prevent plagues.
The game is very much about sacrificing your population to appease the God. So the primary goal is to get a steady supply of humans to sacrifice, which makes it hard to keep your farms going. But, with such few resources, you will likely have to sacrifice many pigs before you can increase your population.
About this Entry
The game play is not well tweaked at the moment (never enough time).
None of the sound is mine, please download to view the sources.
~~I did not make the four clipart images at the top (people, pig head, pile of logs, corn). ~~All other graphics where made by me. Since this is officially a Jam Entry, I guess I can keep working on it...~~
Edit: R2 released (Dec 3, 2018 4:55PM UTC-500)
All graphics, for better or for worse, are mine. Sorry about that... R2 also fixed a couple of bugs which I doubt anyone would have noticed.
Edit: R3 released (Dec 3, 2018 6:25PM UTC-500)
Corrected starting resources. I modified them for testing, and then forgot to unmodify them.
How to play
I forgot to add how to play the game in game, so it is here instead... :expressionless:
Click on the little buildings in the center, to place them. Use them to generate resources.
Farms do not generate resources unless they are managed by someone. Click the plus icon on the buildings to add people to attend them. The icon will then indicate how many people are assigned to the farm.
Once a building has generated resources, a gold star will appear click it to gather the resources. Important: You can only gather as many pigs as you have corn for. So ensure you have enough corn when you click the Star
Build a Church to make sacrifices, human sacrifices are the best, but enough pigs will suffice.
Build Hovels to increase your population to sacrifice or tend your farms. Note: Your population is hungry, and with each event progression, those without pigs will die.
Build Tree Farms to produce wood to build more farms, hovels, or church's.
Build Corn Farms to support your pig production. Fortunately, pigs don't eat once they are "gathered".
Build Pig Farms to sustain your population and make sacrifices.
Play on Itch https://bobleny.itch.io/sacrifices-ludum-dare-43
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Post Ludum Dare Update: R4 released (Dec 14, 2018 11:23AM UTC-500)
This is a post release, please play the original above and rate before playing this version!
R4 is meant to be the version I would have created if I had another 24-48 hours. The win condition may be the exception (when I thought of the game Friday night, I was assuming there wouldn't be a win condition).
Tweaked the audio and graphics; hopefully they are better...
Added audio controls.
Added difficulty levels.
Added a win condition.
Fixed runaway timers.
Enhanced people management.
Made it clear what resources each building is lacking.
Wood is now required to produce a baby.
*R4 on Itch * https://bobleny.itch.io/sacrifices-post-ludum-dare-43r4
Ratings
| Overall | 803th | 3.07⭐ | 45🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 857th | 2.756⭐ | 45🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 686th | 2.952⭐ | 44🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 406th | 3.622⭐ | 43🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 912th | 2.463⭐ | 43🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 740th | 2.378⭐ | 39🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 837th | 2.838⭐ | 39🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 36🗳️ | 55🗨️ |
I did try it on my phone, that doesn't work well at all...
Same with pigs, you must have the corn, or you will waste the star.
I guess babies don't usually eat meat, but they grow up fast.
The game is very much about sacrificing your population to appease the God. So the primary goal is to get a steady supply of humans to sacrifice, which makes it hard to keep your farms going.
What I found to work well for me is:
Place the three farms to start.
Then assign a farmer to the trees and the corn.
When the corn gets to 3, reassign him to the pig farm to collect your three pigs. (keep moving him back and forth between the two farms).
When you have enough wood (5) to build a church, do that next. (You will likely have to do some pig sacrifices before you can grow your population)
Then place a hovel.
Each time you "hatch" (dob) a new baby, sacrifice him.
Now you should be able to keep your plague ticks under control.
Then build a couple more hovels to have a steady supply of humans to sacrifice.
Once you have about 3 hovels, you should have a frequent enough supply of humans to both sacrifice and to grow your farms.
Other than the confusion, this was a nice town management game.
It also seems possible to place buildings on top of each other and render them unusable.
The mechanic of sacrificing resources in order to delay negative events is interesting.
It would be good if the different resources had multiple uses so that there were more trade offs and decision points.
This concept could be developed into a fun game with some work.
When I get a bit of time, I intend to fix this bug and many of playability issues.
This ended up being a bad way of forcing you to use pigs.
Did anybody record playing this game? I feel like Im utterly incapable of playing it (never having more than 3 citizens reliably) and I would like to watch other peoples tactics O.o
@dk5000p
@simon-strange
@tornoz
@norb
@furtive-pygmy
@joramwolters
@justalocalhero
@kruemelkeksfan
@firebug
Thank you all for your honest feed back. I have finally gotten around to creating a post release which I think addresses most of the problems.
If you have the inclination and time, please give it a try and tell me what you think. I have some ideas that could turn it into a mini 4x or city sim game.
Remember, this is a post release, please do not update your rating.
R4 is meant to be the version I would have created if I had another 24-48 hours. The win condition may be the exception (when I thought of the game Friday night, I was assuming there wouldn't be a win condition).
* Tweaked the audio and graphics; hopefully they are better...
* Added audio controls.
* Added difficulty levels.
* Added a win condition.
* Fixed runaway timers.
* Enhanced people management.
* Made it clear what resources each building is lacking.
* Wood is now required to produce a baby.
**R4 on Itch **
https://bobleny.itch.io/sacrifices-post-ludum-dare-43r4
First of the jam one - most of the stuff was fixed in later versions. Mainly the crazy timers and the clunky UI. I gotta say though, that I kinda liked the pace picking up, just at a slower pace. I can't tell from my R4 (medium) run if that is still in, just too slow or that was removed entirely. You could also make the sacrifies just slow down the event progress (not revert it entirely) to make the events still pop-up from time to time (that would mean a change of the win condition though).
If you wanted to lean more towards the sacrifises and the morbid, you could have the player raise the workers, so that at first they would be useless except for sacrifises. They could age as well and the same would apply for old workers. (I told you the idea was morbid).
Nitpicky time:
* UI should show the requirements at all times (it's great too see I can't make more of something, but I'd like too see at a first glance that making babies requires wood. (And while we are on the subject - why do babies require wood? Is that a dirty joke?)
* the notification sound could be more abtract and/varied - the crying baby sound started to get on my nerves pretty quick (maybe I'm just not paternal enough?)
* the music is followed by super a long delay
* the buildings could be placed on a grid
Overall, a nice entry and if you added some extra depth and polished the visuals and player-feedback I could easily imagine playing it on mobile.
Thank you for the feedback. Mobile was what I was thinking when I created it. When I have the time, I would like to implement some other ideas I have to see how they work out.
I actually shortened the baby cry in R4 because it was so annoying... lol
What I never got around to in the Jam version, was making wood more relevant. So the R4 hovels have a chimney on them for burning wood to keep the babies warm.
I was wondering if anyone would notice the long delay at the end of the music. There is only the one song, so I wanted a delay to break it up.
In R4, I separated the building ticks and the event ticks. This made it easier to balance the game with different difficulty levels. The building ticks are a constant 5 seconds on all difficulties. On medium, there are about 12 event ticks per event, and they start at a 35 second interval decreasing to a minimum of 25 seconds over a period of about 10 minutes.
Your right though, I think R4 would be more fun if the building ticks also sped up, as the game progressed. This would have been much more difficult to balance though.
If I do a mobile game, it will use a grid or predefined plots.
I never considered making the workers more personable. That could have been fun, but there is no way I would have had time for that...
I like the idea of training them, as opposed to just being born with traits like most other games implement.