The last Ark by Thiradil
Description:
Avoiding the cold of the surface, you have to flee aboard a monstruous machine to go deeper and deeper in order to survive.

Controls:
The Ark: Q/D for right and left or the arrow (need a worker on the room to be available) The workers: left click to take control and right click to assign one of them to a room
Programs used:
-Godot -Paint tool sai -Krita -Gimp -Git -Audacity

The Team: Raynorr: Game Designer Pitivie: Programmer Thiradil: Art design
First Ludum Dare and first game jam for our french team, we previously worked on a technical demo with godot. The whole game jam went quite smoothly and it was an interesting experience.
We wish you all an happy ending for this Ludum Dare and we'll wait for your critics and feedbacks, Thanks!
27/04/2021: [BUG FIX]: Engine's asset blinking is now corrected
| Link | https://gitlab.com/Pitivie/ludum-dare-48.git |
| playable version | https://pitivie.itch.io/the-last-ark |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/the-last-ark |
Ratings
| Overall | 1108th | 3.419⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 1323th | 3.067⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 870th | 3.25⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 290th | 4.083⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 1105th | 3.517⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 1153th | 2.37⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 1174th | 3.3⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 46🗳️ | 36🗨️ |
I reached about 34'000 and enjoyed the game, but I had a lot of questions about what was going on.
- It took me a bit of time before I realized Oil and Water was found in the ground while drilling, but I'm still not sure what it is used for.
- I wasn't sure if Heat was a good or bad thing to have, at first I saw it super high and I was scared I was overheating, later I had frost on my screen so I figured I had to stay hot.
- Food I guess is just created in the greenhouse. But I'm not sure what the other stations do, does the engine just need to be repaired sometimes, does it provide other bonuses if it is manned ? And boiler room I have no idea, at some point I thought it gave speed, but i'm not so sure anymore.
These are just a few details I thought about, overall the game is excellent, I think it deserves great ratings. I'm just sharing what my thought process was while playing because I really liked it and I hope it can help you!
And the drill animation is fantastic!
The game in his current shape is really easy, we'll add an increasing difficulty.
Thanks again!
Overall very nice!
Game idea is nice. Juggling different needs are nice.
Game state feed back is there, but still lacking. Some more words or icons would help read the gauges faster.
Alarm sound is nice, but if the warnings can actually be written down it would be nicer.
If have warnings, it help to put more visual cues.
The tutorial sheet is nice to have, but the moment i jump into the game i forgot half of them.
Oh and you have nice aesthetics.
Oh yea, it took me some time to realize that we are mining resources. Some more feedback such as toast messages or throwing particle effects here and there would be great.
On the subject of particle systems, might as well throw particles when certain station needs care.
UI wise, nice putting bar charts for the resources. But i have trouble understanding black is oil, since it is so black i thought it is the background of the bar, and the silver part is the bg. Would help if the bar is inset into the rectangle so that i would get that it is the black rectangle that is shrinking.
Short feedback:
- You can add room names on the game screen. There is just enough space, as marked on the printscreen.
- If the game size were a bit bigger, it would be easier to aim with the ship.

Keybindings are strange and confused. The description on the LD page says something different from the in-game one ("left click to take control and right click to assign" on the LD page, the other way around in the game) and in reality left click works fine for both selecting and assigning the worker. So that's a bit confusing at the start. And I could not get used to Q being left instead of A.
A restart/retry button on the end screen would be nice, so a player doesn't have to reload the whole page if he/she wants to try again :). And I liked the menu music more than the in-game one. Felt more moody and fitting.
It's a fun entry!

I think this would really benefit from a bit more downward visibility/predictability so that the player could route intentionally between resources. It felt like steering only occasionally had impact when I was directly on top of something, but I still felt like I had very little control over planning upcoming resources besides food/heat.
Lot of great stuff going on here, nice entry :)