The last Ark by Thiradil

[raw]
made by Thiradil for Ludum Dare 48 (JAM)

Description:

Avoiding the cold of the surface, you have to flee aboard a monstruous machine to go deeper and deeper in order to survive.

Illustration.png

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

Tutorial.png

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

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🗨️

Feedback

Konect
26. Apr 2021 · 05:41 UTC
I like the game but at the first time I don't understand the goal and controlers
🎤 Thiradil
26. Apr 2021 · 07:58 UTC
Thanks for the feedback, we'll add an overlay with the controlers and goal of the game!
Salepate
26. Apr 2021 · 10:35 UTC
Incredible voice acting! It was hard to correlate what room fills/unfill one of the 4 gauge but nonetheless really fun to hear the engineers.
Pe7e
26. Apr 2021 · 10:47 UTC
Seems cool but it's hard to understand whats going on. It's been running while I've typed this and nothing changed except score going up.
JedeMac
26. Apr 2021 · 10:52 UTC
I was so happy when I saw the theme because I knew I would see many games like this one, and I love digging games :p

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!
🎤 Thiradil
26. Apr 2021 · 16:23 UTC
@jedemac Firstly thanks for your complete feedback, it seem like you have been playing it seriously to be able to understand all the mechanic by yourself! We'll try to make the gameplay more understable for newcomers.
The game in his current shape is really easy, we'll add an increasing difficulty.

Thanks again!
azagaya
26. Apr 2021 · 17:22 UTC
Great entry! Liked the art and the concetp. I would make the difficulty scale up a bit faster. Solid entry anyways, congrats!
itsonrandom
27. Apr 2021 · 12:18 UTC
Art looks good and moody! Music and sound is good too, although for some reason it was jumping a bit when I was playing. I found it a bit hard to see what's going on around the machine as there's not a lot of screen space, and not really obvious how to interact with the people working on it, but nice work!
mxbi
27. Apr 2021 · 12:23 UTC
Cool game! took me a few minutes to figure out but I like the art and idea
Too_Lazy_Cat
27. Apr 2021 · 12:26 UTC
I like complex games, but it will probably push a lot of players away. As an idea maybe you can do a smaller dril first with less complexity and upgrades to bring it to the curent state?

Overall very nice!
the_martijn
27. Apr 2021 · 12:30 UTC
Fun idea, but I still don't get why you use Q and D as movement instead of A and D
dicksonZero
27. Apr 2021 · 12:30 UTC
The fonts in-game are difficult to read​. (After-thoughts: That is indeed the Q button as opposed to the small a button for Q/D controls. btw nice control to use Q/D but is not common, so it got some time to get used to)

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.
xyfeng
27. Apr 2021 · 12:45 UTC
Love the cover art, hahhh. It takes some time to figure out how to manage the workers to work in the right position. The results of workers' work are kind of ambiguous...(no offence, just my own feeling, hahhh)After getting used to it, I have a pretty good game experience.Still, Cool idea! Good jobs!
wowa
27. Apr 2021 · 18:49 UTC
As many already pointed it out, it takes some time to figure it out. But it's overall good entry, well done!! :)
Eugenik
27. Apr 2021 · 19:48 UTC
the logo design and the graphics are realy gooood.
Flatgub
27. Apr 2021 · 21:45 UTC
I quite enjoyed it! I think you've managed to balance the right amount of "juggling people around to keep all the bars up" without it being too tedious. It did kinda feel a little bad when I'd lose due to running out of oil just because I hadn't been able to find any, but I guess that's just the nature of RNG. Other than that the audio and visual presentation is quite nice, I like the silly noises the people make!
Tyler Roberts
28. Apr 2021 · 14:16 UTC
I had a good time playing this one, and actually didn't have an awful time figuring it out initially. Great jam game
zimny11
28. Apr 2021 · 19:17 UTC
What a cool game! It was fun even though I know I'm bad at multitasking.
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.


![Bez tytułu.png](///raw/ad6/b2/z/415a4.png)
🎤 Thiradil
28. Apr 2021 · 20:01 UTC
@zimny11 that's actually a pretty good idea, never thought about thoses empty spots, thanks for the feeback :v:
fabula_rasa
29. Apr 2021 · 12:51 UTC
Pretty engaging once you get the hang of it! It took me a bit of trial and error to realize that my drill machine is actually gathering water from the ground :laughing:, I thought it's all oil there.

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!

![Screenshot_3.jpg](///raw/732/a2/z/418df.jpg)
Jin9310
30. Apr 2021 · 16:09 UTC
This is really nice idea. As I am huge fan of FTL and any simillar game, this definitely caught my eye and would love to see more. Eventhough it would be cool to have bit clearer visualisation of the management, it is really great entry. Congrats on that and thanks for this pleasant experience! Good job
alpharock6
01. May 2021 · 22:24 UTC
Took me a few tries to pick up on all of the mechanics, but once I figured it out it wasn't too hard to pass 15K points!
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 :)