Total Pollination by homeworld
As captain of a mining expedition, you're tasked to gather the precious fungal Spice. Build, expand and defend your mining facility, but make sure to send your stockpile back to the surface before lurking fungal monsters get drawn to your stash! The more you stockpile, the more aggressive and deadly the enemy becomes!



How to play: Build with the buttons in the UI, or with the 1-6 keys. The game has a linking system: click on a building, then click on the other building you need it linked to. Mining facilities connect to depots, and depots connect to the rocket! Make sure your resource line is secure!
Credits:
Psyk - the face of the girl in the intro
Bram - Code, design
Mart - Code
Morr - Concept art, Assets, the splash screen illustration
Dan - Assets, a bit of design
NOTE: PLEASE download the LOW-QUALITY potato-pc version if you have a low-powered laptop or a potato pc! The high quality version is quite resource-intensive due to the technology we used!
| Windows | https://homeworld.itch.io/total-pollination |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/total-pollination |
Ratings
| Overall | 380th | 3.625⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 696th | 3.174⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 544th | 3.188⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 221th | 3.896⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 57th | 4.5⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 253th | 3.667⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 14🗳️ | 11🗨️ |
@notspaghettigames Thanks for trying it out! The money only increases once a shipment flies off, looks something like this:
https://giant.gfycat.com/FicklePerfumedCurlew.webm
This also gets rid of your resource, which lowers the aggro and amount of enemies spawning, hence the theme!
@randompast Thank you! We bit off a bit more than we could chew, but glad it's out there!
@saphires Thank you!
@hijomo High praise! Thank you very much!
@matthew-di-mare-miller We're definitely recruiting a sound person for the next one, we just had to make the decision to abandon sound entirely at some point; very unfortunate!

It's really harm not audios effect and a quit button.
Great job
It took me about three minutes and then glancing at the comments to realize the mouse button indicators were swapped and I thought the connect mechanic just wasn't working. There also doesn't seem to be a way to pause, restart, or quit the game. The first time I played through, I thought the difficulty was way too high, but then I realized how much faster it is to get spice when you have the depot close to the mine and not having them walk from the spice areas close to the shuttle.
Overall, fantastic job! I would love to see this game fleshed out and have a full release after LD! Keep up the great work!
come check out my game if you like
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/virus-detected
Some music & sound effecto would have be really nice though. Don't forget, you are in the Jam! Use the Creative Commons music / generated music.
The mechanics were a bit klunky at times, response time between clicks and feedback on what succeeded and what didnt was a bit hard. (sound helps with this too)
Is the only way to close the game alt+f4 ?
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EJwgR2i5TylM1iKH9BQqIWteyJlr0L1i/view?usp=sharing
Regards:
redlabs
@nils-gecko-munch Thank you for the kind words!
@tolmera Thank you!
@joror You're right, next time we'll definitely add a sound person to the team!
@tay Yes, tower range and easing the player into the game (so it's less confusing) would've gone a long way; if we end up working on it some more, they're definitely going in!
@illabom Thanks, We definitely will!
@drekler THANK YOU for taking the time to write the feedback! We considered a menu, but it felt like most people wouldn't actually bother spending time in there and just hitting "new game". However, we've received a lot of feedback about the lack of a way to elegantly exit the game or pause the game, so it's definitely going in for our next ludum dare, or if we end up working on this some more!
Unfortunately we've only noticed the flipped mouse tooltips after @ramou pointed it out in these comments, and we didn't feel comfortable with making any more additions and fixes to the build after the submission period ended, but it's definitely getting fixed after the voting period!
@gufovsky Thank you, we'll do better with communicating the mechanics next time!
The only problem I found were the switched mouse controls. Other than that everything is great. Congratulations!
At first it was very easy but then even though I didn't built any new structures it got much harder each wave (because of the spice I was accumulating) but because I didn't have any money left I couldn't do anything. I could only observe and see whether my units would survive. I also even though I had more than 15 spice packages I couldn't send my spaceship away.
Another thing, the game world is pretty small, I would have loved if I could expand more and have several bases.