Bow-wow Before God by Papabirb
New and Improved Description!!
Welcome, Omnipawtent Overwoofer! You have been created for one purpose and one purpose only: to oversee to the needs of the Pupreme Being themself, DogGod!
GAME NAVIGATION MAP:
HOW TO PLAY:
As soon as you click on "play", DogGod's stats - FULL, for hunger; RUBS, for belly rubs; PATS, for head pats; and FUN for entertainment - will start going down pretty fast. If any of them reach 0, you lose - even worse, you disappoint your adorable heavenly lord!
Your job is to prevent this by organizing Human, Animal, and Special sacrifices - only one at a time - for each of the four continents available. Be careful, though - DogGod's followers don't like when they lose too many animals or people, and Special sacrifices make you lose both!
This raises your Sacrifice Points for each of the three types of sacrifices, which can be spent in the Sacrifice Shop. There are two types of items for each of the DogGod's stats:
- "MAX" - can only be bought using either Animal Points or Human Points as indicated by the smybol to the left of the price, and permanently maxes out the stat it's under. You win if you max out all four stats!
- "+25" - can only be bought using Special Points, and temporarily boosts the respective stat by 25, buying you more time to max it out - but be careful, because this makes all the stats go down faster!
You can buy these items by clicking on either the name or the price involved.
One other thing to watch out for: disasters! It's tough being a human on planet Furth, danger is always around the corner. When dangerous situations happen (signified by warning sirens), the continent stats go down rapidly - it's best to turn off the sacrifices for the continent(s) involved, but most importantly, you need to go to the World Manager screen and click the flashing "BLESS!!!" button to perform a miracle and end the danger - sometimes you'll need to do it more than once though, because low human/animal population counts as danger and you'll want to get it back up to sustainable levels while they rebuild. You can use the World Monitor to check on how high the continent stats are - Green for good, Orange for getting low, Red for bad/near danger, and Gray for disasters happening! You can hear the change in continent stats as signified by downwards slide whistle sounds when things are getting bad, or an upwards slide whistle when things are getting better.
Good luck!
DEV COMMENTS
(pasted from the original description)
This was my very first game jam event & I’m proud of where I got even if I had a 15 hour delay from catching up on homework, and while I don’t consider it “done” since there’s a lot more polish I want to add, it’s nothing a bit of post-jam ironing out can’t fix after semester’s over. I was going to keep polishing and finagling up until the submission deadline, but I am so physically exhausted that I was falling asleep while playtesting it, so I’m gonna go ahead and get this submitted now. Can’t wait to go forth and play everyone’s games later!
I do have a post-jam want list for it, that hopefully I can pursue:
POST-JAM VERSION GOAL LIST
- More/Better music
- Fancier Graphics/Scripted Animations/Cutscenes-ish
- Tutorial
- Proper menu/win/lose screens that don't end or quit the game abruptly
- More polish in general
CREDITS
Made with:
Coding: GameMaker Studio 2
Art: MSPaint, Paint.NET, GameMaker Studio 2
Music: LMMS 1.1.3
Sound samples (music):
https://freesound.org/people/MisterTood/sounds/9032/
Sound samples (sfx):
https://freesound.org/people/LordForklift/sounds/448394/
https://freesound.org/people/Zott820/sounds/209578/
https://freesound.org/people/jamesabdulrahman/sounds/263621/ (attribution license: not modified, except for exporting from Audacity as .wav so I could actually use it)
https://freesound.org/people/InspectorJ/sounds/410804/ (attribution license: not modified)
https://freesound.org/people/InspectorJ/sounds/402581/ (attribution license: not modified)
https://freesound.org/people/joedeshon/sounds/79677/ (attribution license: not modified)
| Windows | https://papabirb.itch.io/bow-wow-before-god |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/bow-wow-before-god |
Ratings
| Overall | 893th | 2.922⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 865th | 2.741⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 568th | 3.083⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 669th | 3.233⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 452th | 3.617⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 536th | 2.903⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 253th | 3.397⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 820th | 2.879⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 25🗳️ | 37🗨️ |
congrats on your first jam :)
- The graphics and relentless dog puns are really charming.
- I love the contrast of a cutesy dog character demanding human sacrifice. ([All hail Mr. Poofers.](http://homestarrunner.com/ween18.html))
- I was pretty confused by the shop screen. It was unclear what to click on to purchase a boost, or that "MAX" and "+25" represented two different boosts for sale, as opposed to being two pieces of information about the same item. I was also thrown off by the icons for the type of Sacrifice Points being redeemed. For example, the max boost for Pats requires 1105 Sacrifice Points, but there's a Human icon to the left of the number 1105, and an Animal icon to the right of the number. Since the Animal icon is in the same cell as 1105 and the Human icon is not, I thought it required Animal points, but it actually requires Human points. It was only after I noticed the icons outside the table to the left that I realized that the icon to the left, not the right, represents the type of sacrifice required. I'd recommend shifting the icons and numbers in rows 2 and 4 to the right, so that the appropriate icons are in the same cells as their respective numbers.
- That said, once I figured out how to play, I got the hang of it pretty quickly. I think you have a solid set of core mechanics here. You may want to tweak the balance, though; I was able to hold out for the max boost in each category without having to use any Special Sacrifice points.
- I know you want to do a proper tutorial for the post-jam version, but in the meantime, perhaps you should mention the disaster/blessing mechanic in the description. I wasn't sure what the alarms represented at first. (Speaking of which, are disasters caused by anything specific, or are they random?)
* Thanks! It's hard to think of that many dog puns in a short amount of time, haha. Continents don't lend themselves well to puns.
* Me too! It evolved naturally as a theme once I got the idea for my mechanics.
* Yeah, I'm not happy with the shop screen. My problem is that I made the actual pixel size of my screens too small to properly render details like menus, so in a post jam version I'll probably be redoing all the art and editing the coding to fit a bigger resolution pixel. I couldn't fit the prices and the icons in the same cell, so moving everything to the left like a dollar sign equivalent was the best I could do with the space I'd given myself to work with. Next time, I'll make mock-ups so I can find a better actual size for my screens, if anything just so I can use smaller fonts (relatively), as anything smaller than 8pt font was unreadable on these screens, making the UI difficult to design.
* Yeah, I agree. Tweaking the balance is what I'd planned to do up until the submission hour, but I had to get some sleep, so I got it to a point I was mostly satisfied with and put it up as is. I definitely consider it still in progress for balancing the timing of things and how many things do what. I might need to look up some information on game balancing, because as is it's a lot of random plug-and-play values I've been using to see how it feels.
* Good idea! I'm not great with descriptions, I'll add that in real quick. The disasters are actually both random and caused by something specific: in general, there's a chance for random natural disasters to occur (which mostly just means going into disaster mode with randomly chosen flavor text); if your Followers or animals (or both) for a continent drop to 0, it goes into disaster mode with a special version of the Sad Continent sprite, with specific flavor text to match.
Thanks for playing!
srsly i didnt understand anything. i just waited around until i had to press bless.
the graphics were cool and i stayed for the puns, but i didnt understand the controls and im done
@morriss Thanks!! I'm happy I was able to add as much polish as I did, even if the game still needs a lot more work & even more polish going forward.
The graphics were cute and the whole thing seemed well put together.
I really enjoyed your artwork on the world map ;) The god reminds me of the pokemon Swirlix :D
Seperating the sacrifice shop screen and the god stats as well as the sacrifice screen and the continent screen made it quite hectic and resulted in a lot of switching back and forth between screens - I think the game would be more fun if you reduced the speed and the need to switch between screens.
Still, great work for a first game jam! :)
Oh yeah, and a short overview about how the game works in the description on this page would be good!
@swanijam Yeah, the shop is the least intuitive part; I made my pixel canvases too small to actually get good amounts of detail onto the screen. The good news is that the way I compensated for that + the game not being fully balanced yet goes well with clicking buttons randomly :wink: I'm glad you like the UI, that's definitely what I was going for! In the future it might be less spatial since traversing without a map can be kinda confusing and I think it adds to the hectic unintuitive-ness, but it'll still be function-based pages that take some amount of time to go between and thus have the aspect-neglecting, hopefully. Thanks for playing!
@peachtreeoath Thanks! It's definitely really hectic at first, that's the major flaw of not getting enough sleep to finish balancing it before deadline. After finals I'm gonna fix it up to ease in a bit slower and work up to the hectic-ness. Thanks for the link to Tangerine Tycoon! I'm enjoying playing that one on the side, it really is the same UI which is super cool since I've never heard of this game before. Very Cookie clicker-esque, but with minigames. More aesthetic polish is already in the works (easier to juggle a few art/music pieces vs. finals rather than programming/balancing/assembling everything vs finals), and a tutorial is planned!