Interstellar Cruise by Drauthius
== Goal ==
You are to build a space station to meet the needs of visitors who are beamed onto your vessel. Order various kinds of facilities to acquire random shaped parts to accommodate your guests; please them and they will keep paying the citizen tax - fail and face the consequences of bankruptcy. Citizens have needs: hygiene, sleep, hunger and entertainment. If one or more of their needs are not met their happiness level will decrease. When their happiness is low, they will go red, signifying their displeasure with your provided services, and may leave the vessel soon.
== Plot ==
In the distant future where automated production and robotics has made human labour redundant, the biggest problems are boredom and personal well-being. You, a relatively young supercomputer (about 1.2 picoseconds old), after having looked around the immediate vicinity in your solar system, you want to amuse yourself by building a new “Interstellar Cruise Vessel” for bored humans.
== Instructions ==
Click the buttons to acquire the various room types, right mouse button rotates the piece 90 degrees, while left mouse button attaches the part to the already built station if the position is valid.
== Credits ==
Created by a team of four.
Programming: Albert Diserholt
Art: Sunisa Thongdaengdee, Pierre Althinsson & Worai Col
Music & sound: Worai Col
== Highscore ==
Our highscore is 236 inhabitants, can you beat that? :)
== Tips & Tricks ==
1. Start out slowly. More money is gained when more people are in the space station, and the bigger the space station is the higher the upkeep cost. So just start out fulfilling the basic needs, and when the rooms aren't enough, then begin to expand.
2. Using the corridors and four-way connectors is important. A space station with higher interconnectivity means that people can reach their destination faster and fulfill their needs faster. Happy customers are paying customers!
3. The people get bored quickly, and need to be entertained.
== Post-jam versions ==
We've done a few modifications to the game after the jam. These changes are:
* Made it possible to throw away the currently selected piece, for a small fee.
* Made it possible to pause.
* Modified collision detection when placing pieces. It should now be possible to build things a lot closer to each other.
* Added some more visual queues about which room is being built, fixed some graphical anomalies with furniture and people, and added screen shake.
* Big rooms will now take a while before they appear, based on number of pieces already placed.
* The initial portal room is now in the centre of the map.
* People with a great need to use the bathroom will run a bit faster.
You are to build a space station to meet the needs of visitors who are beamed onto your vessel. Order various kinds of facilities to acquire random shaped parts to accommodate your guests; please them and they will keep paying the citizen tax - fail and face the consequences of bankruptcy. Citizens have needs: hygiene, sleep, hunger and entertainment. If one or more of their needs are not met their happiness level will decrease. When their happiness is low, they will go red, signifying their displeasure with your provided services, and may leave the vessel soon.
== Plot ==
In the distant future where automated production and robotics has made human labour redundant, the biggest problems are boredom and personal well-being. You, a relatively young supercomputer (about 1.2 picoseconds old), after having looked around the immediate vicinity in your solar system, you want to amuse yourself by building a new “Interstellar Cruise Vessel” for bored humans.
== Instructions ==
Click the buttons to acquire the various room types, right mouse button rotates the piece 90 degrees, while left mouse button attaches the part to the already built station if the position is valid.
== Credits ==
Created by a team of four.
Programming: Albert Diserholt
Art: Sunisa Thongdaengdee, Pierre Althinsson & Worai Col
Music & sound: Worai Col
== Highscore ==
Our highscore is 236 inhabitants, can you beat that? :)
== Tips & Tricks ==
1. Start out slowly. More money is gained when more people are in the space station, and the bigger the space station is the higher the upkeep cost. So just start out fulfilling the basic needs, and when the rooms aren't enough, then begin to expand.
2. Using the corridors and four-way connectors is important. A space station with higher interconnectivity means that people can reach their destination faster and fulfill their needs faster. Happy customers are paying customers!
3. The people get bored quickly, and need to be entertained.
== Post-jam versions ==
We've done a few modifications to the game after the jam. These changes are:
* Made it possible to throw away the currently selected piece, for a small fee.
* Made it possible to pause.
* Modified collision detection when placing pieces. It should now be possible to build things a lot closer to each other.
* Added some more visual queues about which room is being built, fixed some graphical anomalies with furniture and people, and added screen shake.
* Big rooms will now take a while before they appear, based on number of pieces already placed.
* The initial portal room is now in the centre of the map.
* People with a great need to use the bathroom will run a bit faster.
Ratings
| Coolness | 100% | 1 |
| Overall(Jam) | 3.43 | 398 |
| Audio(Jam) | 2.98 | 530 |
| Fun(Jam) | 3.15 | 522 |
| Graphics(Jam) | 3.26 | 615 |
| Humor(Jam) | 2.48 | 619 |
| Innovation(Jam) | 3.30 | 397 |
| Mood(Jam) | 3.16 | 564 |
| Theme(Jam) | 3.46 | 704 |
I hope that you will consider continuing development, because it has great potential! :)
Great work for a weekend, I hope to hear that this gets some more love after and turned into a fully treated thing for, say, newgrounds.
There are two rules of thumbs that can help you at any stage of the game though. Abundant usage of the 3 and 4-way passages ensures high connectivity between room types, making it easier for the citizens to traverse short(er) distances in order to have their needs fulfilled. Second, the wee fellows are easily bored, so there must be enough entertainment rooms around.
The story behind it is really neat, but maybe you could have introduced it in a short sequence at the beginning instead of showing it with an image?
I would have liked a way to cancel my selection but maybe that's the hard part of not knowing what you get and where to place it.
My biggest gripe is there's no way to cancel room/corridor placement once you've selected something. Second place would be how there's no indication what the different types of room are once you've placed them - it would've been nice if the buttons for each room type were color-coded to correspond with the rooms.
And yeah, it feels really unforgiving at present. XD It's hard to determine the exact interplay between happiness and income, for one.
All post-jam features answer my complaints.
The game is not too obvious at first, I bankrupted too easily the first few times. Then I realized I don't need so much TV sets :)
Great work!
After that I felt the game was a little easy, I had very little need to expand or build more than 1/2 of each room as none of the needs were particularly high. Got to around 63 citizens before ending my game.
Like others have said, not being able to cancel selection is a big problem. Sometimes the game wouldn't allow a connection that looked perfectly fine to me, which was frustrating.
Overall though, great game and I'd love to see more of it :)
A few suggestions (maybe they've been addressed in new post-jam builds?):
- I'd like much stronger visual feedback on the state of needs (maybe scale or color-change based on severity)
- Some of Triple-town's features, particularly a swap-spot for an extra tile, or a random chance of getting a destruction tool, would go a long way in extending playability, I think.
- If you buy a specific connector piece, it seems like you should be able to return it, rather than sell it (sometimes I mis-measured).