Dog Days of Summer by incobalt
You're going to great things. Save lives. Help people. That's not going to make it any easier. All you have left are your friends and the dog days of summer. The dog days of summer last from July 3rd to August 11th in the Northern Hemisphere. You've got that much time to cheer up your friends before you have to leave.
This is a short game about trying to pick the best time to tell your friends that you're leaving. Plan activities that your friends will like, navigating their schedules and the weather. It may be difficult to please everyone, but you're going to try.
This is a mouse-driven game. Click on activities to play them on the highlighted day. "Tell Them" is a card you always have, and you can use it to inform the friends available that day that you're leaving. Something might happen if you tell them all before the end.
I didn't get a chance to implement some things I really wanted. I think it would be nice to have an interstitial for each activity. To really drive a sense of story home. I probably could have made more cards. I ran up against the wall for getting some options in the game. Sorry if the sound balance is off! I usually make a volume control, but the deadline was fast approaching!
One final note! I know the text is cut off in the letter at the beginning. That's on purpose! :smile:
This game is heavily inspired by "Dog Days are Over" a song by Florence+the Machine.
The dog days are over
The dog days are done
The horses are coming
So you better run
Run fast for your mother, run fast for your father
Run for your children, for your sisters and brothers
Leave all your love and your longing behind
You can't carry it with you if you want to survive
Ratings
| Overall | 250th | 3.543⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 427th | 3.065⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 56th | 4⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 26th | 4.261⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 494th | 2.957⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 236th | 3.37⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 329th | 2.682⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 85th | 3.783⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 20🗳️ | 24🗨️ |
@mook You know, Al is probably only there for the free food on taco nights. It's not always possible to make everyone happy, but the goal is put out there for you. It's probably a bit of information overload getting in the way (see above). Glad you enjoyed it!
Keep up the amazing work!
@darandin Yeah, sometimes the algorithm makes friends who just can't stand the things that others like. It tries to even out the likes and dislikes, I think, but that might just be the deck building. I can't remember anymore :sweat_smile:
@dzejpi It's interesting that you mention card games, because the concept, at base, is a card game. I generate a "deck" of activity "cards" and that's what you use. I just kindof took all the card game terms out of the game, so it was a little more natural to the setting.
@adam-gould That is a great idea that I wish I had thought of when I worked on it. It would have been really easy to implement that too, maybe only five minutes since I could just reuse what I'm doing on the calendar to highlight. Next time, I suppose!
But still a good job on making something emotional and very complete all around!
The music is a bit, I don't know the word, harsh?
Oh, and it would be nice to maybe highlight the friends that are active that day. Right now it took some effort to keep track of who is participating.
Other than those two minor points I don't have anything else to say, except that it's a nice game!
This one was a cool exploration of juggling varied preferences, and how much effort it can take to plan to suit exactly everyone all the time. This is a fairly complex setup with a great many icons that have critical meanings. It would have been easy to lose me, but your interface design was very strong and made everything very clear. The tooltips were super helpful, but all of the info was well laid out on the screen. A lot of thought and analysis went into just one click of action! An interesting potency.
If I could grant the player a single boon, it would be to highlight the humans involved in the current day's activity that I am choosing. I feel this, but I also doubt it. I feel it because it was a chore to repeatedly and constantly cross-index the icons. I don't even remember my boyfriend's nam- oh wait it was Evan, but really to me he was just HEART_ICON. So highlighting the portraits could have saved me a LOT of work. The reason I doubt this suggest is that I am not sure how much of the effort you want to automate away. The game should not play itself completely, right? And the effort was the experience.
The music and shifting hue of the selection zone were important because they kept the game feeling alive while I did so much of the cross-indexing work.
I never got everyone to 100% but I did have most of them there or extremely close for a lot of the game. I believe everyone was doing well when I threw my party.
Interesting well-done entry! Congrats!
@frib @angelicad @corporation I would definitely have loved to have highlighted the people on the days. If I could make a more reactive, uncluttered UI.
@pkenney This is very kind of you to say! My Cold Equations entry from LD43 was the game I most enjoyed making in the Dare. I'm always looking to bring a narrative to my games. They don't always work out. This one just hit me like lightning and I ran with it. I do think that highlighting the profiles would help, but there's a lot of UI that would help *and* reinforce the work of balancing schedules.
Pretty fun to play as well once you learn which friends like what and what activity icons means. It takes a while to learn it though and the player gets bombarded with information when the game starts.
It's pretty cool that there's quite a lot of humor in this game that's hidden in the game mechanics and not dialog. Well done!
I was streaming my playthrough of your game, here's a recording in case you'd like to see it https://youtu.be/1s0mnrLO_ak
Music will always be very subjective so don't read too much into it :D it still adds a lot to the game and it's something to keep in mind for future games
@frib I compared mine to the song, and there is a softness to the backbeat that I'm not capturing with the instrument, you're right. I think the tempo is also off, so that probably doesn't help. It's honestly one of the best bits of music I've probably ever made with more than one instrument in it, which probably says a lot about my music skills 😂