The God Of Adventurers by Lucille Blumire

[raw]
made by Lucille Blumire for Ludum Dare 46 (JAM)

screenshot_1.png

You are The God Of Adventurers!

On the small, remote island of Shrea, a lone inhabitant with the wish to explore has called upon you. It is your job to expand the island, offering them new places to explore. However, exploration comes with great danger, and it is your job to keep a balance between their need for new areas to explore and their health. Building new towns may provide them with shelter so they can heal, but will cause more Shrean inhabitants to get interested in adventuring, which means you have even more adventurers to take care of! How many days can you keep adventurers both interested and healthy before someone either perishes or gets bored?

Controls:

This game is entirely mouse based. Select the tile you want to place down from the right menu and place them into the world by clicking on an adjacent tile to your current island. The other buttons are for mute and song select respectivly.

Some helpful hints:

-Your adventurers have three stats: The red bar is health, the blue satisfaction and the yellow is level.

-Your adventurers require two things: New areas to explore to keep their satisfaction up and nearby towns so they have somewhere to heal up after taking damage during their adventure.

-Every adventurer tracks their unexplored territory individually and will prioritize seeking it out when uninjured.

-Every town you place down recruits a new adventurer, making it harder to keep track of all the little buggers.

-Higher level adventurers will want higher level areas to explore (the little numbers in the bottom of the tile), lower level adventurers will lose a lot of life in these areas, watch were you place them!

-Tiles with the same level are mechanically equivalent, use them to make your island look pretty!

Credits:

Art and Sound: Iasper

Programming: Lucille L. Blumire, Tomathor

screenshot_2.png

Ratings

Overall 1688th 3.288⭐ 35🧑‍⚖️
Fun 1923th 2.969⭐ 34🧑‍⚖️
Innovation 414th 3.727⭐ 35🧑‍⚖️
Theme 1591th 3.485⭐ 35🧑‍⚖️
Graphics 1473th 3.439⭐ 35🧑‍⚖️
Audio 857th 3.383⭐ 32🧑‍⚖️
Humor 1121th 2.931⭐ 31🧑‍⚖️
Mood 1868th 2.984⭐ 34🧑‍⚖️
Given 34🗳️ 39🗨️

Feedback

Massassen
22. Apr 2020 · 13:54 UTC
Great game, but it needs some work <3
Robin49
22. Apr 2020 · 16:06 UTC
Nice entry, even if i didn't understand all. That's pretty fun :)
marcusnystrand
22. Apr 2020 · 16:11 UTC
little bit confusing for me but I love the artwork
gamescodedogs
22. Apr 2020 · 16:16 UTC
Thank for the game :)
I've never saw this kind of gameplay and I love it. Expanding lands tactically + pixel art + music with a bit of nostalgic 8bit sounds = great mood for me :)
Wish you the best of luck!
Squid
22. Apr 2020 · 16:20 UTC
Really interesting concept. It is a little challenging figuring out what all of the tiles do, especially with the different tiles with the same numbers. Nonetheless pretty enjoyable for a minimalist city builder It looked and sounded really good.
Curtis Pelissier
22. Apr 2020 · 16:22 UTC
That's a funny game, but I'm always loosing whitout understanding the situation.
Avzgui
22. Apr 2020 · 16:24 UTC
A quite interesting entry! :smiley:

It tooks me two or three run to understand how to not get every adventurers bored :laughing:

A little suggestion for improvement:
Textual notifications are cool (and made me think of dwarf fortress :heart:), but they are too fast...
Adding some audio/visual feedback about adventurers’ status might help :thinking:
Acr515
22. Apr 2020 · 16:26 UTC
This was a pretty interesting game! I don't particularly love the lose condition, though; only one of my villagers got bored and the whole game ended. I feel like there should be some kind of bar showing overall satisfaction that only has the ability to fall within a certain threshold before failing the player. That would also make it a lot easier to regulate everybody's status, since with all the bars on the screen right now, it's a little difficult.

The chat log on the side of the screen also didn't do a whole lot for me. I mostly ignored it just so I could meet the needs of the villagers. The visual aesthetic of the game besides the chat log was well done, and everything seemed like it fit together pretty well. I also appreciated the little music changer you added in there! Great job with this game!
Maxathon
22. Apr 2020 · 16:29 UTC
Lovely FFIV/SNES Dragon Quest-style graphics!

The thing that would take this from "interesting toy" to "game I'm invested in" would be progression for the adventurers. Leveling up, and earning equipment, and maybe even an evolving world state (like, level 5 tiles always have a boss that can be permanently defeated).

I had fun with it! Nice work.
Epicular
22. Apr 2020 · 16:47 UTC
Loved the interesting, unique concept! Graphics and audio all worked together really nicely, and it was satisfying to build my own little island.

I'm still not sure what the different tiles do. I mostly just dropped a random assortment in the hopes that the adventurers wouldn't get bored. The text log on the side didn't do much for me - even with only one or two adventurers on screen it moved too fast for me to process.

In general this game is designed brilliantly - adventurers need new tiles to keep from boredom but they also need cities as checkpoints... but building cities adds new adventurers to entertain, thus creating a feedback loop that demands you to rapidly expand without neglecting any area of the map. Really great work.
🎤 Lucille Blumire
22. Apr 2020 · 20:23 UTC
@curtis-pelissier @robin49 @marcusnystrand we've added some helpful play tips to the games description!
fabula_rasa
22. Apr 2020 · 21:26 UTC
That was pretty cool!

Controlling more than one adventurer gets pretty hectic fast but the gameplay is generally nice. The lack on an ability to pause made me just place random tiles around usually and didn't leave much time to read the feedback, which is a bit of a shame.
kleinzach
22. Apr 2020 · 22:11 UTC
The audio and sprite work were really good. I think the game suffered a bit from complexity and obscurity of mechanics, but I enjoyed it more the longer I played.
Vatigo
22. Apr 2020 · 22:36 UTC
I liked this game, quite innovative gameplay mechanics. Graphics and audio are great too. I only wish there was a pause button so I could have read notifications in peace and figure out which adventurer is what level and what they were doing. You did a great job with this one!
sharbelfs
22. Apr 2020 · 22:50 UTC
if you don't read the rules (like I did the first time) game is a little confusing, but after reading the rules, and some tries game becomes fun to play. The concept is very nice. One thing that would be nice to have is like a level indicator in the hero, or something like that, so, I know if the hero evolved or some tip about what terrain should I put next. By default I tried the rule to keep easier terrain close to cities and increase the difficult as it gets far from the cities. Very nice game, well done.
🎤 Lucille Blumire
22. Apr 2020 · 23:35 UTC
@sharbelfs the golden bars beneath the characters indicate their level, going from 1 to 5!
twobitadder
23. Apr 2020 · 00:00 UTC
i love the concept - i love the frenetic nature of it but i admit it's a little difficult to track some of the finer points. do characters only touch spaces once, or not return to spaces that are lower/the same level? what determines where they go, is it just a random walk? stuff like that. overall though, it's really not an issue, and i do really enjoy how fun the concept is, and the art!

edit: nevermind, i just read your tips above. ok, that's on me for missing those!
Twistashio
23. Apr 2020 · 00:34 UTC
Hey, really like this game concept and home it is expanded more in the future, Never seen a game that plays like this so its a very cool thing you have got here. The art and music are really good. I was easily able to sit down a play! Good job!
Jason Woerner
23. Apr 2020 · 01:26 UTC
After a few tries and hiccups getting my adventurers killed and boring them to death, I made a pretty large (compared to previous attempts) map and made it to day 68! I loved the pixel art, and having several music tracks to swap between was a pleasant surprise. Other than more content, I don't have a lot of notes for this one. Very well executed jam game :D Great work!

Here was my 68-day setup, in case anyone is curious:

![god_of_adventurers.jpg](///raw/abc/d2/z/32a07.jpg)
🎤 Lucille Blumire
23. Apr 2020 · 02:10 UTC
@jason-woerner I'm loving seeing the different strategies people employ! I've seen people have similar success going for big maps and lots of adventurers, as going for maps with as few adventurers as possible, it's really fascinating to me the different ways people come up with to play our game <3
Hellequinne
23. Apr 2020 · 02:23 UTC
Took me a bit to figure this out -- things happen quickly, and there's a lot of small text. ;) But it's fun and inventive and I love the music. Great work!
Hare Software
23. Apr 2020 · 11:54 UTC
It took me a bit of trial and error, but I managed to create a small island that was interesting enough for a few adventurers it seemed. Fun idea for this theme with graphics that do the job. It was a bit unclear to me what certain terrain types would do at first and there was not always time to read the text that was scrolling by, but overall it's a really nice game!
Teo Yong Jie
23. Apr 2020 · 19:27 UTC
i think this game has great potential, the lack of instruction and the speed of feedback makes this game a difficult game to pickup and understand. A bit more polish and i think this game can be a very very interesting and unique game.
BinarySpark
26. Apr 2020 · 15:23 UTC
Cool game, nice aesthetic and charming sound work. Though it seems to be a bit difficult to pick up due to the speed at which happens (the different tiles could use some explanation for example, or things like suggestions of nice tile combos) I enjoyed playing it. Has potential!
SaltFactory Studio
28. Apr 2020 · 05:05 UTC
Graphics are great, I love the visual look that you have going on. The gameplay itself is also pretty interesting and has a lot of depth for a game jam submission. I know there probably wasn't enough time, but adding a tutorial for the different mechanics that you have in the game currently would help make the game a lot more enjoyable for players. Overall though, nice job!
_delph
29. Apr 2020 · 10:22 UTC
A nice concept and pretty well executed. Graphics were cute (lots of variety of adventurers!) and I liked the music.

I found it difficult to figure out what level adventurers were and so they tended to get bored! I actually did best on my first try where I was kinda just randomly clicking as I didn't understand what the numbers meant on the tiles. Wasn't sure if their movement was random wander or if they'd seek out appropriate difficultly.

It ran quite fast, a speed setting might have been nice, as the days just flew by! So I hardly had time to read the notifications.
BlueCalx
29. Apr 2020 · 12:19 UTC
Made it to day 85 ! The gameloop is smart and kept my entertained throughout my journey to reach day 100. Never managed to reach my destination though.
Overall a solid jam entry and nice take on the theme, congrats !
I would have loved roads to link cities and make adventurers travel faster in later stages of the game.