10/10 Idea. Easily one of the best idle games I've played. great choice of colors, very addicting

Really nice to play, love the effects as well :D

I've always wanted to grow mold and here it is!)
And seriously, the game is super addictive, fascinated with the head, the first 3 playthroughs were educational, and then, when I realized the strategy of development of the colony went games! Great wagering jam theme, scouring the terrain makes you think.....
Perfect choice of graphics for the realization of this idea.

One technical thing first... the game is really small on my monitor and there is no way to make the window full-screen. It is really hard to read what's on screen :slight_frown:
The mechanics are interesting, a nice twist on the game of life. It takes a bit to understand exactly how to play. I read the tutorial but I am one of those guys that skims through tutorials quickly and then forgets what each color does :smile:

@tanis
Alt+enter for fullscreen

LOL! I don't know why I didn't think about ATL-Enter... I played your game again in full-screen, it makes a world of difference. I managed to survive way longer than all the previous matches

This is a really cool idea! It's a nice, easy to play sim game. I really like the music, it reminds me of pokemon's music. Also great job adding a tutorial, pretty rare to see that in a game jam and it really helped!

Absolute ton of fun, really engaging, lovely complementary audio, really enjoyed it!

Really cool concept! Feels like I'm a scientist now.

Really fun and interesting game, it's a little hard to understand what to do though, I was a bit confused because I would place the colony down and then put food on it and then they would grow fast but also die incredibly fast at the same time so I couldn't figure out why that was happening, but I enjoyed the game quite a lot and thought the cycles with buffs was a really nice mechanic for the game so it didn't become bland. Good job!

Mechanics in this game are really cool, as I love simulation games it just flows
Great game to spend a ton of time in ;D

@congeesetador I actually forgot to mention this more clearly in game but in keeping with the theme, one resource is actually "space" itself. This is why when they have their growth spurt through the food, some of them die off fast because they are competing with themselves for the space.

Very fun to see the population explode, in all the ways xD

It looks and sounds nice and the gameplay is easy to manage. I only wish there was a bit more control in placing the resources. Like, if we got 5 each time and they were smaller. A circle only gets so far when it comes to precision.

@powerofsin
>I only wish there was a bit more control in placing the resources. Like, if we got 5 each time and they were smaller.

Yes, I agree. I'm tempted to keep working on this into a bigger incremental game and this would be reworked for sure. Being able to simply level up how much resources you get would be an idea.

Cool game! At first it's a little hard to understand when your colony is about to die, but after a couple runs it becomes simple and fun to grow your colony! Thanks for the alt+enter answer, I played at the default resolution on a large monitor for about half an hour because F11 didn't work and the fullscreen button wasn't active)

Fun at first but after a few games I understood how to keep going forever.
I love the NES-style music!

Here is the game state when I decided to stop (also the game becomes very slow):

@sentmoraap
Yeah at a certain point your bacteria get a bit too powerful. Definitely needs some end game balancing.

Fun game. I like the simplistic art style and the sound effects. Cool interpretation of the theme.

"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe... Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion... I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain... Time to die."

My first few runs were in the lower range, but after a while I got the hang of it and now the purple rule the petri dish (or are at least in a periodic-food-induced balance of terror with the reds).

Super fun gameplay mechanic, I've been completely sucked in and immersed trying to get those guys to multiply, it's really the type of game that draws you in. Genius take on the theme too, it fits perfectly with limited space in the petri dish and bacteria, very cool and creative. Music has that dark mysterious science vibe to it, which, of course perfectly compliments what is unfolding on the screen. Great game all around, super fun!

This is a pretty fun game! you are trying to keep your little bacteria alive while the red bacteria just casually overtakes the entire petri dish! Still got a score of 13K what could be a fun addition is good mutations, like green buddies that hunt the red baddies, maybe upgrades to increase the range of repellant and disinfectant, so much you can do with the game, but I really liked the jam version a lot! I have not tried the post jam version yet, might give it a go too and see what happens :D

Really fun game! With my first attempt I got to around 6k score before all my bacteria got eaten, but in the second game I knew what I was doing, so I managed to survive a while longer. And that gave me enough room to experiment with different strategies, so eventually I've managed to learn how to survive basically forever.


And as you can see some of the bacteria got out of the petri dish, which I don't think is a good thing for all the people outside.

If you do work this into a bigger incremental game, I kept thinking about how it would be nice to be able to finally get rid of the red bacteria once and for all. Maybe a system could work where if you'd mutate enough to become completely resistant to the reds, you'd get some time of freedom, then a new mutation would appear with a different type of enemy, maybe requiring a different solution to evade or defeat.

Also, great work on the audio-visual side of the game. It looks, sounds and feels fantastic, everything seems well polished.

Cool game, super innovative and great use of theme.

Love it! My only gripe is that the Repellent seems pretty much useless. Once your bacteria start reproducing and Predators start spawning, there's not a lot you can do to keep the two apart. ^_^;

Also, I'm glad to know I'm not the only one who noticed that bacteria have a habit of spilling outside the petri dish. Put the cursor close enough to the edge and you can feed them, too!

I also noticed there seem to be some issues with how the predators seek their prey. I would sometimes see them run off to the bottom-right corner of the map as if chasing a "phantom" bacteria that somehow hit the top of their priority list. (It didn't help that there was, in fact, a dead bacteria right outside the petri dish there!) At any rate, their pathing seems a bit buggy at present - which, honestly, is hard to notice when there's a bloodbath (cytoplasm-bath?) going on in the middle of your petri dish ^_^;

It's a really cool game, 5/5, had plenty of fun (scored 9461)! And the music is great. One remark though, I think game over should not be triggered as long as you have colony resources, if you have no more purple pop, it should just stop the counter and let you place a new colony anywhere.

super cool concept, very nice presentation!

Really fun entry, these are the kinds of games I hope for when I start Ludum Dare. The concept is really good for the theme and the execution is great, well done!

this is so great! i absolutely love micro-colony management sims, especially with some random chaotic elements mixed in, and this was such a fun take on the theme. the animations and sounds when the colony eats the food is perfect too

Woah!! This is so good. Super polished and super fun. The music and graphics fit each other perfectly and the gameplay is so much fun. I lose and I just want to keep trying again. Had to stop just so I have time to play a few more games but I might well come back to this one. Lots of high scores from me! It's just satisfying to play the way things just pop both visually and in terms of sound. If I have to complain about anything at all it's that it seems really tricky to separate red from purple when you need to disinfect but I think that's probably the point so it's not really a complaint :p Loved it!

I love it! Many years ago i programmed something similar and it was always wondrous to watch how it would "evolve". Very fun!

I wasn't sure about what my goal was, thought it was just about keeping things going. Eventually i was game over, but i did not understand why (i am guilty of not reading anything outside of the game). I could never make good use of the repellent - i tried to separate the blues from the reds, but it never really worked out. Maybe it would be cool if the repellent would repel only reds. In any case, i had a really good time, lovely entry! :)