disembARK by Crygos
Premise
The request from a higher entity is clear. The flood is coming and you need to save life on earth by getting two of each species on the ark you built.
Wait. Scratch that. Nothing is clear. Is it "at least two" or "exactly two"? You would think a higher entity would be aware of such grammatical shortcomings!
Whatever - the ark is cramped anyways - let's make that exactly two. The more precise, the more better, or something... But what to do with those pesky individuals you have to get rid of now?
Well, Noah giveth and Noah taketh away!
Controls
Use your mouse to drag and drop your problems away.
The game is compatible with touch on mobile, but might be a tad bit small for most smartphone screens.
Gameplay
SPOILERS AHEAD for anyone who wants to figure stuff out on their own.
Every animal species has an individual counter that mustn't be higher than 2. Every surplus animal weighs down the ark and makes it sink deeper into the water. Get rid of the excess animals by ~~throwing them over board~~ letting them disembark peacefully and the ark will again float better. But be aware! If you get rid of too many animals (by reducing or keeping the count of a species below 2), heavenly lightning strikes! This damages the ark and adds a permanent penalty to its buoyancy.
You win by surviving the 40 days of the flood. The difficulty modifiers change how many seconds a flood day lasts in the game and how often and how many animals enter the deck in later days.
Surviving is not everything! Surviving gains you a maximum of 75 points out of the possible 100. Get a high score by not making any mistakes (getting rid of too many animals) and having the ship in perfect species balance at the end of the 40 days.
Please post your highest scores and your chosen game difficulty!
The Tools
Engine: Godot 4
Art: Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Animate
Sound/Music: LMMS, Audacity
The Team
Idea: Everyone
Crazy Code by @crygos & @bumble
Awesome Artworks by @bardicmischief
Scenic Sounddesign by @kingcookie95
macOS Users
For some reason the game loads quite slowly under macOS (2-3 min). If you use this configuration, you will need to let it load a bit longer to get going. This also happens when transitioning to the credits for the first time. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Ratings
| Overall | 225th | 3.923⭐ | 86🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 114th | 4.006⭐ | 86🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 280th | 3.702⭐ | 86🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 131th | 4.298⭐ | 86🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 533th | 3.673⭐ | 86🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 396th | 3.482⭐ | 86🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 27th | 4.386⭐ | 85🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 403th | 3.726⭐ | 84🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 78🗳️ | 131🗨️ |
Initially i thought it would be easy, but it got well out of hand.
One of the animals had a speech bubble, but i was so stressed that i only realised the speech bubble as i threw the animal overboard.
I LOVED the ending screen when i failed!
I hope no animals ware harmed during the development of this.
Fun, simple and entertaining.
Great entry!
Anyway, thanks, a solid entry and a really nice and funny take on the theme!
The spawn timer gradually becomes faster with time, so the sudden spike mostly results from the bigger waves. We wanted to create some frantic ramp up moments - maybe we overdid that here for normal :sweat_smile:
Overall we expect everyone to be able to finish easy quite well (without it being boring). Normal to be a challenge to survive but easy to get a good score once the survival is no problem anymore and hard to be challenging in both regards. But then, it is not like we play-tested with others :smile:
BY FAR!!! the best game I played this jam so far. 5 Stars all the way. I hope you win and this masterpiece will end up in some sort of museum.
Awesome job, one of my favorites so far!
btw, why there are lions but no lionesses?
well done tho
I was a bit unsure about the rules though, I first expected to lose if I didn't manage to get less than two animals of the same type at the same time, but it seems to be the ship that slowly sinks. It's cool but I noticed that only at the end of my playthrough, maybe a bit of feedback would have been good.
The gameplay itself is simple but works pretty well, I like how it's quite manageable for some time, but at the end the only strategy is to throw as many animals overboard as possible to survive. That was genuinely hilarious !
I haven't tested this fix myself, but from what I've learned, for chromium browsers at least, it seems one has to switch to the metal graphics backend. Either with the command-line flag --use-profile=metal, or switching to metal for the angle graphics backend in chrome://flags.
Sadly, it looks like the only real options to fix this are at the end of the player right now. I don't think that we can expect anyone to start Chrome with experimental flags just for our small jam game - but good to know that fixes are in the works, thank you!
I played on easy mode but even then at the end it's massive chaos and the amount of animals is overwhelming. So much so that I felt like giving up at some point and just waiting for the last few days to pass. Also nothing seemed to happen regardless of how well I was doing so it wasn't immediately clear what the game win/lose conditions were. Regardless, the core mechanic works well and I feel bad saying this but I smiled as I dropped the first few animals :D Maybe music could have been a bit more interesting and less repetitive.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCpGOQwIhzI
Very interesting to see all the interpretations of the gameplay and graphical effect, which I would have never thought of! But this is how we learn to create the right learning curve for our players next time! If you want to know how the game actually tallies up points and win condition then the text in the description under **Gameplay** will clear that up - it is definitely non-obvious :sweat_smile:
Thank you for playing it and giving us valuable input for the next time we participate in a jam! :smile:
A strategy I used was to constantly move all animals I want to keep to the front of the boat and try to keep them there while mercilessly throwing every other animal off the boat. Did it go well? Not really, but I did beat the game like that anyways (with severe casualties), so that is a win in my book!
However, as mentioned in the description, it doesn't run smoothly on Mac. Every time I finish playing, it causes my browser to become unresponsive.
But overall, it's still a really great game. Well done!
very funny concept and very confusing.. by the end I'm throwing whatever I can get my hands on :D