Falling Ecosystem by sprvrn

Gather resources, build things. The more you mine, the less space you have... Also, beware, the ground is unstable!
Controls: Left click: okay, Right click: Cancel.
LD42: Running out of space
| HTML5 (web) | https://sprvrn.itch.io/falling-ecosystem |
| Source code | https://sprvrn.itch.io/falling-ecosystem |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/falling-ecosystem |
Ratings
| Overall | 100th | 3.827⭐ | 158🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 185th | 3.558⭐ | 158🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 111th | 3.71⭐ | 157🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 36th | 4.287⭐ | 157🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 58th | 4.075⭐ | 156🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 129th | 3.49⭐ | 148🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 92🗳️ | 12🗨️ |
Basically: it's 1 Life of every Tree AND Water you have built.
I found the resources to be very confusing. I figured out most of the basic ones, but I never figured out how to get the resource that was required for building quarries, which in turn means I never managed to build towers/castles, so I'm not sure what effect they have on the game.
The mouseover tooltip that was on one resource was nice, I wish there was one for each of the resources.
It took me a while to figure out how the game works. In my first game I mined a spot at the center of the island, and every went down quickly.
Although the game is cool and I played it to the end, I don't like how the game "progress" or "unfold" to the player. Things like "how to win" or particularly "should I spam mine, or should I wait until the exclamation mark appear?" are not quite clear to the player (I still don't know).
The score need some explaining as well. Maybe instead of score you could just have a "Wonder" building that require loads of resource and player wins by building that? It would be a more "visible" target to aim for.
@avavt What you are saying is interesting. I didn't thought the mining part could be confusing. You can mine whenever you want, but mining the doomed tile is worth it, because it's a resource that are going to waste if it falls. But at some point you have to stop mining and save some free tile for "score buildings".
I should also have add tooltips for the score! Houses and tower "produce" respectively 10 and 50 points.
Good idea for the Wonder building!
Just a question: what are the blue tiles? Is it water?
The sound and the screen shakes were very well done. The whole experience just felt nice.
@velvetlobster Yeah sorry, this is not explained: Houses "produce" 10 points and towers 50 points.
@minibobbo That's not oil, that's water. I drew it I a different color because the sky and the water share the same color... I now realize I should have outline those sprites too... well another UI fail :D
If I were to suggest anything it'd be making the last building generate tiles around itself to make the ending more interactive and fun - that way you could have a clearly defined goal to the game, restore the whole playing field and ultimately fill it with those tile generators to guarantee stability and prosperity for the local citizens. :D That'd probably also require being able to destroy whatever you build and tweak the balance quite a bit, so don't consider it anything more than a random thought from another dev passing by.
Oh, and on something more manageable - I'd make the game require less clicks to get through a tile, it was perfectly fine on my first run but got pretty tedious to do on my second playthrough.
Really well done, thanks for the game!
If you made some type of larger sim city styled game in this theme I'd play it.

suggestion: once all available squares are filled, it should go into fast-forward mode, since all there is to do is wait.
But I love the polish level of your entry, well done.
Here is my score :
