Unstable Ground by gamepopper
Physics-based city builder where you manage a small city on a large mound of earth that could topple at any given moment.
Every city must start with a power plant, a house, and a shop. After that, you will be given other buildings that can get more people into your city, and prevent the population from going down.
But whatever you do, try not to get the whole place to fall over for as long as possible, especially when the weather can blow it in one direction.
This game requires the mouse. Left-clicking will select, grab, and place buildings while right-clicking will remove buildings. Even the menu will use the mouse controls!

| Link | https://github.com/gamepopper/LD49 |
| Link | https://gamepopper.itch.io/unstable-ground |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/unstable-ground-1 |
Ratings
| Overall | 169th | 3.693⭐ | 46🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 144th | 3.693⭐ | 46🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 95th | 3.864⭐ | 46🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 8th | 4.466⭐ | 46🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 129th | 3.841⭐ | 46🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 188th | 3⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 129th | 3.603⭐ | 41🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 28🗳️ | 44🗨️ |
In my first few tries I probably was doing something wrong, because even after placing all 3 starting buildings people still die, and I lost before I got another building. Personally, I would like the new buildings to show up a little bit faster, but overal good job! My best is 30 day, 23 people.
Except the one time I lost when all my people were dead, even though I could clearly see them running about? I'm not quite sure what that was about
Graphics are nice and fit well with the gameplay. The audio is little bit too repetitive. It could be a nice mobile game.
Great entry !
The graphics are simplistic, but it is very satisfying to look at the town moving around and to see those little guys running from one place to another.
Sweet and polished little game. Good job!
Had a lot of fun playing with this and seeing how the balancing worked!
Really nice graphics and audio.
About the graphics, there is some horizontal misalignment of the structures, but if I were to guess must be because of the rotation of sprites and the rendering order. The full screen is a little pixelated, but that is just a detail that of course can be fixed with more time.
I know that is difficult to code and fine tune a physics based game, and for that you did a great job. I could go on so more, if you want you can pm me. This entry is in my top 10 for this ludum dare. Congratulations!
If you’d like to rewatch the playthrough, you can find it here:
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1173738676?t=1h10m26s
Good luck on your ratings, see you next LD! :D
💜 Elysia Griffin AKA Button Feedback Lady
https://www.twitch.tv/elysiagriffin
...I was really really bad at it :sweat_smile: I managed to get more than 10 people at one point, but every attempt after that was worse and worse. Couldn't work out a good strategy to stop the wobbling.
I think this game is going to rank pretty highly in the end results, it's one of the most distinctive looking games I've seen so far! Amazing work!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_c61TA_VfM
I feel like there are a lot of mechanics that I don't understand. What do the buildings do? Is more buildings better? What causes people to die? I didn't realize that you can move buildings until I saw it in your gif, but that seems useful.
I found that I could last a while by keeping my buildings in the center, but if I added too many buildings I'm forced to place something near the outside and the city would fall over. After a few tries I made it to day 43 with a population of 25.