Biomass by xlambein
A game where you try to grow the biomass of your planet.
Goal of the Game
There are asteroids passing by. Each type of asteroid carries a kind of resource necessary for life. However, life is fragile! In order for it to develop, you need to provide your planet with exactly the right resources, by diverting asteroids away or towards the planet.
Complete the current "recipe" to produce more biomass. When you reach enough biomass, your life forms will grow to the next stage, requiring different resources. Be careful though! If an asteroid not required hits the planet, it will cause a small-scale extinction, which reduces your biomass. In the worst case, this might throw you back to a more primitive life form.
Controls
Click and drag on an asteroid to move it. It works like a rubber band: stretch in a direction, then release to send the asteroid flying the opposite way.
The menu on the left shows:
- On top: your total biomass
- Below that (in white): the current "recipe" for life that you need to fulfill. Each asteroid remaining is half-transparent. Asteroids that have already been collected are full coloured. The number "+xxx" indicates the amount of biomass gained by completing that recipe.
- At the bottom (in red): the next "recipe" for life, that will be unlocked when your total biomass is at least equal to the number at the bottom of the recipe.
This game is best played on a touch screen, in landscape mode. Try it on your convertible laptop, your smartphone or your tablet.
End Game
There is no upper limit to your biomass, but you lose if you ever reach 0. In that case, the game crashes, because I didn't have time to make an end screen! :-D
About the Theme
The game talks about life, but the "currency" part isn't really there. That's because I wanted to add a "store" part to the game, where you'd spend your biomass on upgrades. Unfortunately, I realized this wouldn't be possible with the remaining time, so I focused to make the basic game fun enough to be played as it is.
| Source code | https://github.com/xlambein/ldjam44 |
| HTML5 (web) | https://xlambein.itch.io/biomass |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/biomass |
Ratings
| Given | 11🗳️ | 5🗨️ |
It also works really well with the mouse, so even if you don't have a touchscreen you can play have fun ;)
I made 270, before losing some biomass and giving up ^^
Simple mechanic, worked well, but it went from slow paced waiting for the right colour to suddenly everything happening at once.
At the beginning it took me a while to figure everything, but once I got it everything clicked into a very innovative concept. Playing around with the asteroids was fun and felt solid. I didn't get to play long enough to see if there were any visual impact on the planet as you keep evolving life, though, but that would be cool to see.
My main issue with the game at the moment was that it felt too RNG-dependent.
I'm not sure if you were using any specific asteroid spawn logic, but it felt like the choice was completely random out of a relatively large pool of types. Because of this it could take ages (no pun intended) for the next useful asteroid to appear.
This was specially annoying at the beginning, and considering that you lose quite a bit of progress any time you get hit by the wrong asteroid it ends up becoming frustrating. I do appreciate the progress loss from a "narrative" perspective: after all, it only makes sense to provoke a mass extinction if you have an asteroid impact on the planet. The problem comes from the potentially long waiting times until the right colours appear again.
A couple of possible solutions for this could be to reduce the number of different types that can appear at the beginning, and then increase it as the player progresses. Another could be to force guaranteed spawns if there haven't been any for a while.
Despite of these things, as I said at the beginning, the concept is awesome and it's probably a game I'd keep playing for a while if you can balance it. I'm also curious about the "store" functionality you had to leave out.
Good job!
Few minor nitpicks about the gameplay:
- at times, especially at beginning there was a lot of downtime (just flicking stuff away, waiting for one stone, and waiting...)
- the bad impact had both big effect (resetting your progress and possibly knocking you down a level) and too little of an effect (basically just set you a bit back) at the same time; I think the impact should be bigger but it would be easier to get back on so it doesn't drag jumping up and down levels.. but not sure how that would work :)
Overall a good idea, very well executed.