2048 - Space Corp Limited by Heremeus

[raw]
made by Heremeus for Ludum Dare 54 (JAM)

It's the year 2048 and Space Corp Limited embarks on a mission to construct the Genesis Dome on Mars. Your mission: Create production chains to upgrade the starting hub to a fully self-sufficient Bio-Dome. But beware; space is limited and you'll often have to transform facilities and adapt the production chain to your current needs.

Controls

The game is controlled with the mouse. You start with a hub building and you can build new facilities on empty construction sites. Existing buildings can be upgraded (the hub needs to be upgraded first) or replaced with other buildings. The game can be paused by clicking on the play/pause icon in the HUD (or by pressing spacebar). Buildings will produce resources every year (every 3 seconds), if they have enough input resources and workforce available. Build residence buildings to house more workers.

Credits

Code and "Art" by Daniel Reiners and Armin Willer, background image by Laura Willer

Music from https://2hac.bandcamp.com/album/jade-mechanism-2hac-volume-20

Main Menu Sound: Milau - Jade & Mechanics

Game Ambient Sound: MistRiven - A Cruiseliner Fit For Ghouls, mistriven.bandcamp.com

soundtrack adapted, licensed under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

Post submission fixes

  • Fixed broken text boxes (where text was not readible)
  • Removed game pause button (it serves no purpose because we ran out of time to implement losing the game after a certain year)
  • Fixed buildings not resuming work after their problems were resolved
  • Fixed victory text not showing up
  • Fixed audio spam
  • Fixed win screen not showing up

Ratings

Overall 692th 3.44⭐ 27🧑‍⚖️
Fun 884th 3.019⭐ 28🧑‍⚖️
Innovation 922th 2.875⭐ 26🧑‍⚖️
Theme 305th 4.02⭐ 27🧑‍⚖️
Graphics 806th 3.16⭐ 27🧑‍⚖️
Mood 483th 3.635⭐ 28🧑‍⚖️
Given 18🗳️ 27🗨️

Feedback

AXLplosion
03. Oct 2023 · 12:03 UTC
I didn't have the patience for playing very long, but the content and progression is very solid! I wish the introduction had clearer instructions to get started, and it would be nice to see the status of every facility without clicking on them, same with the hub upgrade requirements.

I like the audio, and including narration, that's quite rare so it's a welcome addition!

Nice work!
captainzo
03. Oct 2023 · 12:08 UTC
Great game, hard to understand at first but after it's addictive. "Limited space" is very respected. Good job !
bongo227
03. Oct 2023 · 12:12 UTC
I almost got last base upgrade, but I ran out of regolith and didn't have enough to build another mine! The narration was fun, and I liked the building descriptions. I think some more information in the UI would be good, like how much workers a building was using etc. Also if the game didn't pause while you where in the building menu I think it would improve the pacing somewhat.
Thierry
03. Oct 2023 · 12:13 UTC
I found the game quite relaxing, which I like a lot. I also like the progression. The narration of my actions makes the game feel like a classic strategy game, which helps the mood. Towards the end, though, it dragged a bit because you just have to wait until you've collected enough of the resource you need and don't have to make any changes to your production chains in between.
🎤 Heremeus
03. Oct 2023 · 16:05 UTC
@bongo227 oh, that shouldn't happen. In theory, you can always transform an existing building getting a 100% refund and with the regolith mine being the cheapest building it should always be possible. Might have been a bug though causing it.
Jahwffrey
04. Oct 2023 · 04:01 UTC
Nice job! I loved the guy talking to me. I'm very glad he told me when things deactivated because of resources. Neat mechanics and good theme!
Phillip Scott
05. Oct 2023 · 07:50 UTC
Liked the idle game like nature of this, liked the voice, was a little chatty when things were flipping on and off. Enjoyed my time with it. Something that I would like to see would be icons to show you upgrade level (it also took me till about half way through to realize that I could upgrade other buildings :smile:)

![image_2023-10-05_085004396.png](///raw/123/b3/z/5fb8c.png)
JamesW
05. Oct 2023 · 17:14 UTC
This is a really fun game! I love this game! It seems a bit overwhelming to remember the resources and buildings at the begining t, but soon all become clear to me. The AI-generated voice is natural, and art fits the game very well. Also this game is a very rare well-balanced simulation game in game jams. One of my favorite ones. One minor complaint is that I want a speed-up button :D
Blue Pin Studio
06. Oct 2023 · 07:09 UTC
Awesome entry! I loved the voice acting, it brought a lot of charm to the game. One improvement you could make is by adding the name beside the icons and the icons beside the names for all the resources. Its really hard to get to grips with what is what
LDJam user 371030
06. Oct 2023 · 07:15 UTC
Wow, amazingly polished and has a great mood! Bravo bravo!
I like the progression. As others mentioned, it's a bit overwhelming but *not* because there is too much but because it's not always clear what you need to do to progress / that's the hardship around UI design anyway - it's much harder than it seems to convey all messages properly. Still I was able to figure it out and progress Although I had an issue with upgrading the main hub.. not sure why - I had resources and it didn't work.. it suddenly worked and I was not sure what I clicked.

Very very solid game! LOVE the voice. Aaand.. *construction complete* reminds me of Dune 2 ;) and not only. Very relaxing game. Only if it was a bit clear-er it would be PERFECT! Good job.
LDJam user 248799
06. Oct 2023 · 13:01 UTC
Oh it has a voice! A little annoying when a lot of facilities keep disabling themself, but it sure adds to the mood!

Loved doing this game, maybe more audio feedback on production could have been great, and also reminders of resources icons inside the menu for clarity, but well done!
vidarn
07. Oct 2023 · 19:25 UTC
Super fun game, I really enjoyed it. It was well balanced and I loved the progression of the systems getting more and more complex as the upgrades went on. The voice over was great and really added to the atmosphere of the game. Together with the audio and the art you created a very nice mood, relaxing yet exiting.

Good take on the theme and great job explaining the mechanics of the game, I had no problem jumping right in and understanding how to play.
LDJam user 285972
07. Oct 2023 · 20:26 UTC
Really nice idle game! It sure has a mood it was going for, and that alone made this game rather enjoyable to play!

I couldn't really understand out what i was supposed to do, so I figured that I would just upgrade the base and turned out it was a correct way of approaching it - i wish it was stated way clearer from the start! Narration is very nice and really plays on this cosmic feeling, but learning a loooot of information only from sound might be a really bad idea, at least some subtitles could have been appreciated. Also hearing the narration every half second repeating the same thing over and over might be somewhat annoying, so maybe there's something that could be done about that...?

I also wish it had a little better UI. Base has names and amount of resources it needs in order to upgrade the base, which is good, but I wish it also had little icons near them - it would have made it so much easier to figure out which resource is which. It also took me a long time to realise that when you reconstruct something for other resources the input you made is a one time thing in order to create a building, not resource; and in order to learn which resources you need to produce another one you'll have to open the menu after reconstruction and learn this information from there. I wish it was stated clearer? For example before reconstruction menu would say: 'To build facility: ___ x150, ____ x250. To produce the resource: ____ x60" (with icons) or something like that. It would have improved the whole experience a lot!

I also didn't understand what humans and buildings were for. I've build some but couldn't get, why. Maybe it's also something that could have been stated clearer.

Sorry for writing such long comment in probably extremely broken english, but i tried my best to give a feedback cause I liked this game and really want it to improve even further! It has really nice mood going on and you obviously have an understanding of game designing, since you've presented lots of new resources gradually, which is great! I hope you all best as well get your game the recognition it deserves! I hope you had fun making this game, too, so please continue on making games!

good luck!!
Skel3ton
08. Oct 2023 · 10:00 UTC
nice game... I got to level 3 and there I was already completely lost... mainly because when I built something and mined for a while, I soon lost all the raw materials. which was a bit frustrating and I couldn't place the buildings to be effective. I would love it if the game helped me better understand how to build

but hey, I'm not a fan of building games, and there's definitely a lot of work to be done on this project. In the final, I played the game longer than I wanted to and enjoyed it in my own way.

good job :)
🎤 Heremeus
08. Oct 2023 · 13:57 UTC
Thanks a lot for all the lovely and constructive feedback! We hear you folks and a lot of the points mentioned were on our todo list but sadly didn't make it into the jam game due to time constraints. Also learned about struggles that we didn't even think off which is a great learning and will help us for future jams.

@ottos the extensive feedback is very much appreciated! We planned to make the task of upgrading the hub more clearer but ran out of time to add a proper text introduction. Same for the building UI. We planned on redoing the basic design at some point (including resource icons, input/output infos before building, how many workers are needed - the confusion people icon, etc.) but in the end we barely got the core game done in time. All the best to you too!
Nathaniel Kaplan
18. Oct 2023 · 18:50 UTC
Great, simple automation game!
Vodzik
20. Oct 2023 · 20:09 UTC
Great progression!
Voice is adding much to this game.