Darwin said the fittest survives, show those wolves that the strongest doesn't mean the fittest !
Lead your army of smart and beautiful cows and vanquish those silly wolves !
The goal is, at each level, to gather every part of DNA on the map. Each part of DNA allow you to improve your species and to make your cows stronger and gorgeous !
You first chose where to use your first 10 points of dna to start your species, then the game begin. There's also bonus stars that you can collect. When you've gathered 10 of them, you gain a bonus DNA point !
You can't attack wolves but you can defend yourselves. Put some DNA points in defenses to grow powerful horns and outnumber them by breeding new cows.
Each turn (press ENTER to end the turn) all your cows regain there Action Points and can move again, and they produce food, in proportion of their remaining action points. Staying in grass allow them to build strong food ressources and to go on expedition in the dirt, when there's no food and where they can starve and die quickly ! Also a well fed cow is a more resillient cow against wolves.
- Put points in Speed to have move Action Point per turn. - Put points in Food Production to eat the grass faster and make more personnal food supply quickly. - Put points in Food Consomation to have more starving resistant cows, that consume less food per turn. - Put points in Defense to get bigger and bigger horn that retaliate damages to wolves when they attack your cows. - Put points in Evade to lower the distances where wolves can see your cows.
Important - the remaining stats are not currently implemented and therefore are useless : Food cap, Temperature tolerance (also IMPORTANT : this one gives your cows a santa hat when 10 points are reached :-), Breed time, Starting specimens (I fixed it to 2 for this "release".
HOW TO PLAY At the begining of the level you've 2 cows to place on the map. Press space then click. The rest of the manipulation is pretty intuitive. Still :
Cows produce food each turn, in function of the soil and in function of their own eating skill. They store this food in their stomach but meanwhile they consume a part of it each turn. The more they are evolved in food consomation, the less they consume. A starving cow that has no remaining food ressource dies sadly. A male and a female can breed a calf when they're both full of food. It consumes half of their ressources and put them out of action point until the end of the turn. Calf are cute and also defensless, wolves eat them instantly. Calves grow after 10 turns. You can't attack wolves but you can eventually defeat them with a high defense skill. You can also blowk them with braves cow that will sacrifice to help the other ones to continue further on the map.
Notes : All made in XNA C# with visual studio 10. All sprites made by me with paint.net. The whole stuff is terribly incomplete, still I'm a bit proud of it : some parts are finished and there's 'something playable'. I hope I'm going to continue this : real levels, more ressources, more rules, component (temperature etc.), more enemies, a MENU and a decent interface, etc. I started with a WAY wider idea about stuff evolving in environement, I quicky had to reduce the stuff to 1/2 main actors and I think I lost a lot about "Evolution", but there's still some part of it.
This damn horny cows! I had those two who were unable to move for quite some rounds because they were making love aaaaaall the time! Fresh love ... the game whatever is quite nice. It is a bit tedious to always click all the cows individually to move each of them. Always It would be nice if they would also move into the right direction if you click a tile further away than their current ap allow them to move. Unfortunatly somewhere at the middle of level 2 I realised a bug that wouldn't allow me to move the camera to the left or upwards. Only possible right and down. This made most of my cows unreachable for me. I restarted the game hoping that it was just a rare exception but it persisted. So I tried to play as long as I can with that restriction but had to give up at level 2 again. Other than that: Good job!
the controls are really strange, I figured that I have to press enter after I've run out of action points, but why do I have to click every tile I want to move :/
Thank you for your feedback ! I'm aware of the annoying problem of gamespeed (looong turn when having a lot of units) and ergonomy (tile per tile movement, multi-selection, etc.). Ergnomy problem comes from the time restriction. I didn't wanted to spend a lot of time on ergonomic stuff, so as far as an action was "possible", it was ok. This is of course a mistake : ergnomy is very important ! I just wanted to have a "whole", functionning at minimal requirements. I also agree about the slow gameplay. I think that's an inherent problem of turn based game. As example I love Civilization but I hate its lategame, where turns last more than 5' each. Here there's this turn/turn problem PLUS the hudge lack of a well balanced system : I need to add more choices, more stuff to do, more bonuses, more challenging stuff.
Hmm... too slow for my tastes, but I liked the execution. I didn't see how evolution played in to it, but I'm assuming you'd get to modify your cows if you got far enough or something.
Cool! Controls took a bit of time to pick up. As others have said, cool concept, slow gameplay. But if you were to continue working on this I think there are some simple things that could really help with the pace. Being able to move multiple tiles in one click (ala most tactics game) would speed things up enormously, for instance.
Anyway, this is a good idea for sure. A TBS game where you create units not through 'factories' or resources, but through the interaction of existing units. Just needs polish.
The good: Graphics are simple but layers and animation are effective. Certain controls like WASD to scroll "just work" as you'd expect (at least for me). Concept is complex enough to be interesting. The not-so-good: Controlling multiple cows gets very tedious, as others have mentioned. I wanted some kind of group selection and the ability to set paths for multiple turns. Also, the game crashed for me when I minimized and restored the window. All in all it's a good entry, with a lot of potential for future development.
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I'm aware of the annoying problem of gamespeed (looong turn when having a lot of units) and ergonomy (tile per tile movement, multi-selection, etc.). Ergnomy problem comes from the time restriction. I didn't wanted to spend a lot of time on ergonomic stuff, so as far as an action was "possible", it was ok. This is of course a mistake : ergnomy is very important ! I just wanted to have a "whole", functionning at minimal requirements.
I also agree about the slow gameplay. I think that's an inherent problem of turn based game. As example I love Civilization but I hate its lategame, where turns last more than 5' each. Here there's this turn/turn problem PLUS the hudge lack of a well balanced system : I need to add more choices, more stuff to do, more bonuses, more challenging stuff.
But, as others have already said, the controls could be better... =X
Also, I found a funny bug (I think)... Whenever you've got 2 calves next to each other, you can make then breed infinite calves... .-.
Anyway, this is a good idea for sure. A TBS game where you create units not through 'factories' or resources, but through the interaction of existing units. Just needs polish.
The not-so-good: Controlling multiple cows gets very tedious, as others have mentioned. I wanted some kind of group selection and the ability to set paths for multiple turns. Also, the game crashed for me when I minimized and restored the window.
All in all it's a good entry, with a lot of potential for future development.