Nice job (liked art!). A game with proper tuto so good.

Very nice idea! I really liked the concept of it, but I do feel like it's a bit too slow in the beginning. I'd love to play a sped up version, since I really liked the whole idea of micro managing lots of members.

You know, overall a pretty neat little game. I found that I was interacting very little, especially once I found a combo that worked. I just waited mostly. And I think the tutorial could have been vastly simplified. I read a third of the way through, got fed up and figured it out. In game tutorials definitely would be helpful. But pretty sweet art and hey, you had me playing to the end :D

A proper game it's not easy to find correct solution and its fun to try. Great graphics and humor. The weakest point is probably soundtrack but that doesn't mean its bad it works with the mood but could be a little bit more variant. Nothing to complain about good execution.

@pvp Thanks for playing!
@pukami One of my sacrifices was increasing difficulty and speed. Little things like speeding up the production rate or changing the happiness modifiers had some interesting effects.
@wdelvi I agree on the tutorial length. I had considered rebranding it a manual and putting more detail in. It wasn't as crucial without a few other features.
@xesenix I was fumbling with Bosca Ceoil trying to find my way to the instruments that I wanted, so as soon as it felt like it fit, it was time to move on. I'll try a different approach next time around.
Thanks for playing everyone and I hope you had fun!

I really enjoyed the "balancing" aspect of this game. Really forced me to decide how fast I can go without it all going off the rails. Great game idea to go with the theme of LD43.

Thanks @funkyjive I really liked trying to push it off the rails. Thanks for playing!

@arkinrev you can check LMMS its little bit better for creating music I was using it for over a year before I have moved to FLStudio

I would say a little too slow... But we keep playing for the arts and the overall ambiance ! Good job !

My main problem is the slowness, it seems like it take forever to do anything. Especially excruciating trying to get that first recruit.

Really cool graphics

I really like the graphics you have here and the sound as well. It did take a while to get the second recruit the first time through, but I think that's because the one doing the recruiting was unsure. This proved to be very hard and I didn't get very far, but I enjoyed my time with your game. Nice work!

Yeah, definitely a bit slow. Art style is great though.

As many people above said, the game is a bit slow. But I can enjoy its depth, and overall it looks and sounds nice.

Thanks, everyone! Striking a balance on the starting speed was a little bit rough. I've been considering writing a post-mortem. Saturday night I added Textmesh Pro into unity, ran into trouble getting that namespace added, and somehow in trying to fix that ended up wiping all of my data on my main game object which held the variables that handled the main production mechanics and timing. I had to try to remember my balance numbers when I thought it was behind me. On top of that, the difficulty selection was never implemented. I had no idea how long the submission process and whatnot would take, so rather than add a feature with 6 or so hours to go, I tried to polish and upload. I'm glad everyone enjoyed something, and thanks again for trying it out!

Yeah, much like previous comments a little slow... and when i thought i had the hang of it ... it gave me a game over lol I thought i had more time for 3 recruiters to start off... lol Great job on the sound effects and artwork :)

Nice Work! The art looks really great and the music and sound effects fit the game well. The game starts of a bit slow but otherwise it was a great entry.

@meenners In my first play of the game, once all of the mechanics were in, I thought I was doing well and then all of a sudden, GAME OVER! I thought it was a bug, but I didn't have the game explaining why I lost. I checked the debug log and it showed me that I just didn't pay attention to my faith meter. I lost to my own game the first time. Thanks all for playing!

I love love love the art style. The humor too, like the cultist carrying popcorn and soda.

Going through the tutorial, it felt like the rules are _suuuper_ complicated! I feel like the only way to make that work well is to introduce them gradually rather than explain them up front in prose. But, with only 48 hours, totally understandable that there's not enough time for that :) But, once I got into it, I was able to figure out that it is about resource management. I hadn't played a "worker placement" game before but it seems like an interesting genre.

Small bug: You can click the previous lesson button immediately after loading the tutorial, which leads to a blank screen. Also, I paused the game to review the tutorial, but afterwards was really worried that the button "Begin Summoning" would lose all my progress by starting a new game, so maybe relabel it to "Resume Summoning" ?

Great job! I look forward to your postmortem.

Addictve game! When I have a lot people,their voice together become something like incantation!The art is also great.I really like you put everything in one screen,It's very convenient.

A little slow at the start for my tastes, but once it gets going it's really fun and rather addictive! The art style is simple but effective, and the sound really added to the humor elements in the game.

If you wanted to keep going with it, all I'd really suggest is speeding up the rate you get cultists until you reach your first 5 or so, before slowing the rate down to where it's currently at. Would also be nice to maybe see a few added elements come into the equation later in the game.

Good job, really solid entry! :)

@tom-robson Thanks for playing! I had sort of two elements/systems that I would have liked to get in that would address the starting speed. First, is difficulty. When I was coding, the cultists produced every second or less, and that got out of hand quickly. I wanted to keep that with a difficulty selection on the main menu. Harder difficulties would produce faster and it would be a lot more hectic, and harder to get that stable cultist state near the end. Secondly, I really wanted to add an event system where little tentacles would pop out of the pit with either buffs or penalties to keep things fresh from game to game. it would have started (in easy mode at least) with a big buff to the recruitment bar to start. I was too unsure about the time I had remaining and tried to add more polish and get everything posted, so the LD43 version is basically on easy mode.

@shawn-moore Thanks! I noticed that tutorial bug later that evening after posting. I should have called my isFirstEntry() function to ensure that the button was disabled. I started with the idea of a tutorial, and when I made the scriptable object lessons, I shifted gears and wanted to call it the "Ritual Manual" or something else. My "relaxing" cultists were going to have a random relaxation animation, like inflatable pool toys. I only really had room for one "relax area" image since I had committed to one screen, and the TV was the darkest relaxation activity that I thought of.

@shiqichuan Thanks! The inantation was a happy accident. I had only recorded and mixed one sound for each activity and I was very worried that a screen full of cultists would have gotten too annoying, so I tried to keep them short and low key. In the end, since they all "produce" at their own pace, and the sound is keyed off of their production, it ended up sounding better than I had anticipated. I don't think the audio reached the annoying threshold, and adding variant sounds might push that point out a little bit more. Thanks again!

Interesting ideas, a bit slow to progress and a bit hard to figure out when you're doing things correct. Very nice 2d graphics

Interesting game, really! :smile:

Its graphics are pretty awesome, I love them! :scream:

Really good job, funny game! :v:

cool compo entry!

really like the visual feedback of the followers mood

funny! Feels a bit slow in the beginning though. Cool Idea. Nice sounds. Really embrace the cultist mood

Nice idea, nice graphics, terrible music but I liked the sounds made by the cultists. Seems slow, maybe the pace picks up but I didn't get that far in.

Amazing art nice looking game

Had fun keeping a balance between the different meters. The start to the game is pretty slow, but overall the gameplay was enjoyable.

well, a good game. The graphics are comic arts ( my opinion ) and the gameplay is good. Good Work!

I agree it's a little bit slow, especially at the very start, but other than that it's excellent goof horror and very ambient and I'm living for it – much as I will also be dying for it, splayed on the obsidian slab in honour of the Great And Unknowable Ones. I'a I'a!

Thanks for playing all! It does pick up after that first new cultist, but he still takes at best about 36 seconds to get. The art is definitely more comic which was for a few reasons: It was faster to draw exaggerated and identifiable silhouettes rather than to fully paint them (for me at least) Easily half the time to sketch, line, and paint than it would take for me to compose, value, and color a fully painted image. I can let the lines do a lot of the work. Secondly, the exaggerated lean towards the cartoon style hopefully made a horror genre a little bit more approachable. The backgrounds are mostly muted tones to keep the focus on the game objects and UI, which ultimately matter the most since they are the mechanics. And just for timing, I limited myself to 3 values per color, with the exception of the town streets because of the lighting it called for. Colored with midtone, added a single color for shadow and a single color for highlight. The light cast from the building in the upper right really needed the glow and didn't look right without that fourth color. Technically the moon did too because that needed to fade completely to black. As for the music, next time I'll have my recording equipment ready so that I can just play it rather than trying to program what I was going for. Unless I can get more familiar with some of the other tools mentioned, playing it is just going to be easier. Thanks again for playing all!

Nice game, a bit slow for my taste (would have been perfect with speed controls), but I definitely enjoyed the art and the overall mood.

Absolutely loved it. My favorite of these group-management sims that I've seen so far this jam. In the mid-game it was fun trying to balance all the meters while still getting cultists in, but it gets a little trivial once you get enough cultists but since there's an end condition it just feels like a satisfying ramp to the finish. Loved the art and the particle effects to show which meter they were contributing to, and the theme is on point. Also always appreciate a tutorial (even though I didn't even have time to put one in lol). Great game!

Fun! I won on my second try, had just one lonely cultist sitting in the library when all of his brethren jumped into the pit.

Did start a bit slow, but was fun for the middle and end.

I liked that it was a slow build up, helped me with my strategy :). Nice music & sound effects! The controls worked well and the UI was quite clear. I liked that you included a tutorial, would have been quite hard otherwise. I thought getting the worship meter up was a little too time consuming, and it was hard to tell how much cultists you needed to sacrifice to win. At one point I had a truckload of cultists and I sacrificed most of them only to find out I only got the bar halfway full! A very smooth experience nevertheless.

Super awesome!

Cthulhu Fhtagn!
Amazing, nice art and gameplay. But way too slow.

upd: It's way better in mid and late game!

Finally found some time to sit down and play some of the Ludum Dare entries, including yours. Very interesting concept. The slow build up was cool. First I didn't get that you can entertain your cultists to get their satisfaction up, probably should've read the how to play first :) Liked the game overall! Keep it up.

I enjoyed this game for one playthrough, but I have two thoughts:

1. The strategy ends up being too linear in nature. The timers and increments are extremely regular and don't cascade into each other, so it was straightforward to find a pattern that kept all the numbers under control indefinitely.
2. The game has to do some tell-not-show to get where it's going(lengthy manual), because it's focused on mechanics that manipulate abstract numbers, which creates a need to learn the abstraction at play. It doesn't matter if the abstraction is actually very simple or well-explained: each one you add increases the likelihood of "it is so complex" "my head hurts" types of feedback.

There are many examples of computerized strategy games that are successful with an abstract approach, but they still have to invest a ton of effort on UX to make it parse well...and a major allure of video gaming is in being able to minimize the need for the player to do any parsing of rules in their head, instead communicating the bulk of feedback through a visceral, direct interaction and its result. When the rules, interactions, and scenario synthesize well, the game nearly explains itself, and all you need to know are the basic controls.

In most of AAA, this means the cross-genre combat template of equipment, formally named skills, cooldown timers and status effects. For strategy games, it tends to mean moving away from aggregate values and towards fungible items and agents. There is probably a way to revise this game to depict more things visually, although it admittedly would also probably go out of scope for a jam project.

Thank you for the detailed feedback @triplefox and thanks to everyone for playing.

There were more visual features that I would have liked to add. Moving away from aggregate values is a dangerous move for a worker placement game. It's a game type that I love, and a game type that is grossly underrepresented in the video game space. If the agents act on their own the game moves toward an RTS, and if the agents are minimized or the agency completely moves to the player, it becomes a management simulation or 4X.

The largest missing component of the worker placement game is the competition between other players for production space. One feature to mitigate this and improve the play was a random event system where tentacles or villagers would spawn in a zone and prevent production in that area for a certain amount of time. Given the other constraints like the limited number of board spaces, a complete blackout of a zone could lead to an unwinnable state.

Mentioning linear progress was a good reminder, I forgot to add the production variance to my task list on GitHub. The difficulty settings will be adjusting the extremity of production bonuses, but the cultist production variance will create some inconsistency in production rate and possibly the production amount (if that plays well.)

I'm also looking into timing the ritual with online scores to see how quickly people can complete the rituals. Post LD at least.

Thanks for the great feedback, and thank you all for playing.

You made a very polished, and well-balanced game there.

The amount of well-designed graphical assets is amazing. I love the expressiveness of the characters and their little animations. Everything is visually coherent and communicates well what is happening. The cultists' faces play an important role here. Full marks on graphics!

It is generally very hard to get the player to understand a complex game like yours and although your tutorial is fairly wordy for a game jam, you set up an interesting atmosphere to get the player engaged and overcome that hurdle. The option to return to the tutorial was a very important decision that pays off nicely. The tutorial itself is great, using well-designed graphical elements to explain the game bit by bit. I half-read the tutorial, then jumped into the game and returned twice to clear some details but then it was a downhill ride as I got the game mechanics down.

The difficulty is not too hard which is fine for a jam where players tend to have limited attention spans, and finding out how to beat the game is rewarding when everything runs in a stable manner.

By the way, I love your sound effects. They don't seem to be made with an audio generator, did you record them yourself or did you find a clever bfxr setting? The soundtrack is also very good, remaining subdued in the background but setting the mood nicely.

I only have a minor nitpick, and that is that the cultists' faces are a bit hard to see behind the books in the library, but maybe that was done on purpose.

Overall a very enjoyable game with outstanding visuals

@cerno-b All of the sounds were just recordings of myself, making sounds with my mouth. For the voices I tried to do a sort of "head-voice-dog-whimper" sound and then just keep my tone sort of nasal. I experimented a tiny bit in Audacity to pitch shift the sound up and down. It was about a 5 semitone shift. Then, adding a little bit of noise reduction and reverb where it was needed. Mostly default settings for those. I wanted them to sound like they could be people, just generic, and not me.

For the music, it's in the key of Ab, and a lot like movie soundtracks, it's mostly 2 alternating chords.

The cultist face behind a book was intentional, so that it's a little bit more difficult to grab them as their face changes.

Thanks for playing!

@arkinrev Wow, thanks for sharing some of your ingredients. I'll try to remember those for future reference.