Humble Homestead by Tharbakim
Ludum Dare 49 entry, Humble Homestead.
The scope of the game got away from me a bit, and it was quite ambitious to start with.
The goal of the game is to build up as big of a population as you can - you start with only one member, so you're going to need to work your way up to converting one of your tiles into a camp in order to get started. Run out of food though and things will quickly take a turn for the worse - how far can you push the population in thus unstable economy?
Controls
WASD, Arrow keys, and map border (inside UI frame) can all be used to move the map around.
1, 2, 3 control the speed at which a day elapses.
Space pauses/resumes the game when there are no other frames open over the map.
Basic Mechanics
Resource management for three resources: * Coins (used to buy land) * Meat (used to feed population) * Grass (used to feed animals)
Grass
- Rabbits require 1 grass per day
- Chickens require 2 grass per day
- Cows require 5 grass per day
Meat
All population members require 1 meat per day
Win Condition
Technically the game is endless, but the maximum detected population size is 200 (controls the top left label, Farm of LudumTown in the cover image.
Loss Condition
If you don't have enough food to feed your population, your population will die off or move on to other more inhabitable settlements. When your population hits 0 you lose.
Post-Release Changelog
- Fixed animal menu not displaying correctly when more animals than screen space were present.
- Increased starting population to 2, to work around flaw in the population growth calculation.
- Made the population growth apply to the population count, and fixed the comparison that generates the message.
- Fixed call to
voidToGrasshaving displaced arguments after the map had been adjusted for a purchase on the top or left border, resulting in a broken map. - Fix title not being set on purchased tiles
- Fixed sloppy calls to
Math.random()being done incorrectly. - Allow land purchases with exact currency
- Label camp tiles correctly after grass tile is converted
- Fix a random number in a random event being off by 1
- Fix crash when random event spawning non-chicken occurred due to not importing all possible animal classes
- Fix animal deaths not being calculated or applied correctly
- Fix town size not being detected correctly
- Fixed deep copying issue with map expansion
Fixed camp tiles throwing an error when processing a purchase
Balance changes
Known Issues
Viewing a land tile and then returning to the game triggers a reload of the game map (intended), and resets the time on the day (unintended)
| Link | https://gitlab.com/tharbagroup/ld49 |
| HTML5 (itch.io) | https://tharbakim.itch.io/humble-homestead |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/humble-homestead |
Ratings
| Given | 5🗳️ | 6🗨️ |
From what I understood, the number of grass tiles indicates how much grass currency you have. So at some point you will have more animals than your grass can sustain so you have to sell the surplus animals to make money to buy more grass to support more animals. Animals produce meat which you need to keep villagers alive. Villagers consume 1 meat per day.
The biggest issue is how slowly you get resources. Getting animals is way too slow which is a problem since animals are the only way to get money, and money is the only way to support more animals. Meat isn't an issue since you start off with a lot of it, and you get more every day.
I think animals should produce products than can be sold. Like the chicken produces eggs which you can keep as meat, or sell for some money. Otherwise, the management slows down to a halt and you're just sitting there waiting for more animals to appear so you can sell them to buy more grass. Or maybe you can build settlements that produce money. So that animals aren't the only source of meat and money in the game.
I know you said the scope of the game got away from you, and 48 hours is nowhere near enough time to make a balanced and engaging civilization management simulator. I think you made a good foundation for a game in this short amount of time, and if you wanted to you could turn this into a full fledged game building off of what you've made. Great job
Some minor things I didn't like:
- moving the camera is annoying. When I move to the edge of the screen to click on the animals, the camera just starts moving to the left while I'm on the animal management screen. This makes it hard to keep the land plots on screen
- The background music makes it hard to concentrate, especially early on when I was trying to figure out where everything is/how the game worked.
- You should add some visual indicator, like a progress bar that shows the time of day. The morning/day/night wasn't very helpful