You have to control nuclear power plant. Calculation corresponds to real physics!
You choose configuration - number of control and fuel rods. The more fuel rods you have, the faster nuclear reaction will be. After start you can operate control rods, inserting rods will slow down reaction - better not to have lack of them.
Do not exceed critical tepmerature - there is no way back, if you do!
You have three days (three minutes of game time), weather is changing and have influence to amount of water (which is necessary for cooling). Your task is to generate power (and in the first place, not to expolode), will you make it to top ten score?
Have fun playing!
#### Executables information & Requirements:
There are two different versions - first of them are executables (Windows - which should be preferred, Linux and OS X - I built Linux and OS X version using Unity on Windows - so no guarantees about them), second is WebGL build.
Downloadable ones are better quality, with full resolution textures, more complex shader effects and post processing, and generally the gameplay will be more smooth. WebGL build is optimized, yet still somewhat a lot slower compared to downloadable ones.
So, if you can - please try downloadable version. If not, please give us feedback about WebGL version.
High scores are saved when you win the game (that means if you don't blow up), although only from executable versions. WebGL version has some problems in communication with our server. This may be fixed in following day or two (depending on whether the fix doesn't mean changing security options we have on our server).
Dude what is up with that high sound when it crashes?! You nearly made me deaf. But apart from that. Really amazing that you pulled this off in a weekend. Well done! Really amazing graphics and I always like sciency games.
Cool game! The gameplay is fairly simple, which makes it easy and enjoyable. I really loved the graphics, but I will say that adding some calming background music would've made it better.
Your entry is really impressive ! I must say though that it was a bit complicated for the noob in science that I am :D I really like the explosion ! not the sound that followed though :/
Small hint: You can use different rod configuration - number of control and fuel rods have influence on reactor behavior. I think more than six fuel rods is insane (you may not manage to cool it down). Also watch generated power, try to keep more than 1000MW all the time.
Very nice looking graphics. The models are excellent. Shadows is nice plus for that. It was kinda dark at the beginning, but get better once day break. So nice daytime rendering too. Looks overall good. The action was kinda slow though.
Day 1: reactor exploded instantly. Day 2: reactor exploded instantly. Day 3: reactor exploded instantly. Day 4: decided filling the whole reactor matrix was not a good idea. 9MW generated. Reactor exploded.
Well skimming the other reviews, apparently the game isn't broken, just my brain. Lol. I'm an artist, not a scientist, so I had no idea what I was doing, plus the trackpad on my laptop is stuck, so dragging dials isn't exactly easy. Pretty original as far as the science goes, but the theme could have been used a bit more creatively in my opinion. Either way, nice entry. The art is pretty nice for such a simple game. I would have expected some basic vector art for something like this. Nice touch.
Nice game. I remember playing a nuclear reactor text-based game on my Commodore 64 years ago. This game was much better, and I really liked that game. Made the high score list on my first try! I really liked the graphics and the sounds were well done. The one thing that I was missing was music.
Thank you for all comments and of course for playing the game. I will also try to play yours and give you a comment and a rating!
@everbrave The game isn't broken, the idea was brought to me on Friday and I've started with putting up game logic together. The actual calculation simulates (simplified) reactor chamber (and energy generating machinery - e.g. turbine, generator and condensator). The reaction speed is of course increased.
Actual simulation works with probabilities and free neutrons in reactor core. It even goes as far as simulating simplified nuclear science (rods are composed of 4% U235 and 96% U238 ... during reaction Uranium isotopes undergoes some action and change into other elements (generating power - either through fission reaction or gamma wave). It is not accurate (simulation would be too complex to control), but at least there was some physical basis that was simplified (and I guess I got myself on CIA list by going through various documents I've read about nuclear science in past time and last weekend too...).
In the end all I output to user is core output temperature and generated energy.
@james-dunlap Congratulations. Yes, music is sadly missing (we had no time nor skills to create some - but I hope we will manage for next Ludum Dare). I will most likely put some high score result and statistics into post mortem which I'm planning in a week or so.
For Mac, could you zip the `NuclearEngineer_osx64.app` folder? That's actually the executable. But since it appears as a folder on non-mac systems, I have to download each file separately right now, which is a pain.
TIL I am not a very good nuclear engineer. My main gripe is just at the camera zipping around while i'm trying to modify the control rods. The rest of the game was decently educational.
Not sure what else I could do more besides changing the matrix in the beginning. And having to play it out till the dragged out lose screen to start over was bothersome. Interesting idea for a game tho!
Thanks for playing and trying. You can actually win (when the timer on the top goes to 0) - although it tends to be hard when matrix is not set up properly and you don't think in advance.
Note, it actually simulates nuclear reaction (as I described earlier), so it needs a bit of trying to "get it into hand".
Click and drag control in left bottom corner - you can insert control rods that way and so speed-up or speed-down reaction, accordind to temperature and energy, which you see on the right.
Found the instructions a little confusing at first, but then I think I got the idea. Generated some power, was a good time. Most fun was definitely accidentally making a nuclear disaster, the explosion was nice.
It took a little while to figure things out but the game is relatively simple once you get the concept. I guess the real fine tuning comes in the placement of the rods in the matrix. After a couple of attempts, my best score was 51 MWh.
I did blow it up once which was pretty fun! The graphics are also really good, all the models and textures look great. I always like the addition of high scores in jam games so well done for including that. I think some idea about how the fuel rod placement affects the reactor would be nice, but I guess that could be left for the player to figure out. Maybe an extra controllable slider or two would help for later levels.
Really enjoyed it, nice job!
Edit: It also took me a couple of tries to get the game to work properly. It got stuck on a screen with the default unity skybox. Might have been my antivirus deleting things but something to watch for.
I am very impressed with what you achieved over the weekend. The mechanics you have in there are great, but I found myself kind of confused on how to play? I managed to win on my first go despite not knowing what I was doing :P Still though, had a ball playing :D Excellent work!
The Mac version works perfectly, and I've even managed to be first! :sunglasses: Well, I first exploded my nuclear plant and my ears instantly the first time (too much uranium!) but I ended understanding (or I guess so?) what was happening.
It's also very nice to have written a complete tutorial in this time frame! There wasn't a lot of explanations for the matrix but it didn't trouble me. I liked experimenting with various configurations.
Really nice graphics and audio! Loved to see some realistic gameplay for once. It was quite hard to wrap my head around the controlls and what to do the first time but I got in to it after a few tries. Really funny to have an actual highscores list to battle against, couldnt stop before I reached top 10! Great job!
It looks good and it's cleverly on-theme, a creative idea, but there's very little real game here in terms of interaction or achievement. There's also some under-explained mechanics, like the matrix setup at the start - there's no explanation on how to set it up to maximize yield, and with no clear measure of success it's also hard to feel motivated to optimize it. Maybe if we had some sort of enrichment goal to work toward? A good starting point, but needs to go into more detail on actual nuclear procedures, ideally drawn from real-world source.
Sincerely yours, the North Korean Center For 100% Totally Peaceful Applications of Nuclear Technology.
More words. I'm a physics student. So i've had enough of numbers and formulars. Add some visual feedback of plant's status, please. Since it is a game, You can exaggerate it. such as let the buildings become red when too hot.
Secondary, WHERE IS THE MUSHROOM CLOUD?!
- should have a reset button. - the sfx is very good - your game used 2G of memory. is it a bug??
Sweet! I was hoping for some cool power simulation games like this! Almost decided to make a power grid sim ourselves, so glad there's some stuff like this I can play :D
Some suggestions if you're planning to do more on it: * I would have loved some more things to tweak and balance, * Maybe an iterative level system where you can tweak the control rods after surviving a day? * The effect the weather had could have been more noticable, although maybe that goes against the realism :P
@fangzhangmnm Original idea (on early Saturday) was to have more effects in there (and yes, making some parts like pipes glow red was an idea), including mushroom cloud. Yet due to time constraints I had to give up on them.
@Dolash Yes, in the end you control only 1 parameter - which is simple enough to understand and play with. Adding more complexity would indeed make this closer to simulation (yet from past Ludum Dares I have experience that more complex game means less players who understand it = less feedback). Although as you stated, it is good starting point - yet I think I will pursue some different game in following month(s).
@duzzondrums More things to tweak could indeed make the game last longer (although would introduce additional complexity, which scares me since Ludum Dare 37 - where we got quite harshly criticized for making complex game). Weather effect was quite hard to balance (in the end I decided to go the way that makes it easier to win).
The first time I played I put one rod of each, because I was was confused by the tutorial. they next time I won. It didn't seem like a whole lot was going on there.so I put a bunch a fuel rods in and it blew up again. I thought the explosion was weak. I lived right be a nuke plant for a while and your pretty far off on what they look like. The cooling towers looked nice, but they looked distressed and not in good condition to be cooling a plant. Looks like Chernobyl, which is cool looking but not much of a plant these days. My father is a safety inspector manager at a nuke plant so I was interested to see what you've done here. I think you over simplified it a bit. a better game might be managing outages. That's when the turbines need maintenance and the power company gets all stressed out because millions are on the line. speaking of which where is the money? you cant sell the waste as a weapon?
Don't do this! This sounds when the plant explodes are fucking annoying, too loud and destroy your ears.
I find the idea interesting but it is kinda boring if you can only control one slider. I'm not even sure how exactly this slider works: are the control rods down (i.e. they slow down the reaction) when the slider is up? While the weather is nice to look at, does it have any game play mechanic other than refill the water? Also I didn't really figure out, how the matrix setup influences the simulation. If I put in too much uranium, everything goes boom, but does the positions influence anything? But I found the graphics quite nice.
Interesting concept and quite fun to play with. Seems like it all about getting the matrix setup correct, then the plant can pretty much run itself. Would be nice to have a few more things to tweak to add a bit more variety, and maybe a gameplay mode where instead of just trying to maximize output you have to hit a daily target with points based on how close to the target you get. Anyway, cool game and nice graphics, good job! :)
Not sure what I was doing. I managed to finish once, with just a single Uranium, and a bunch of lead around it. Everything else I tried, I just blew up no matter what I did with the one slider that I had control over.
The graphics were nice, though the shadows were pretty rough. It seems like a lot went into the physics of it that I just didn't get.
Not a bad game at all. I also played through your game from last Jam. The running one. I really liked that one.
That was educational. I was very careful in how I balanced my reactor and got through on the first try, but I only got 28MWh. Perhaps I should have played for the explosion!
I did 50/50 Uranium and Lead on the first try and exploded immediately. 10/10. I would have liked a little more instruction on how to set up the reactor grid. I eventually got to 1 Uranium and everything else Lead and that seemed to work, but I wasn't sure if or how the positions of each element were a factor. The overall experience was very polished and educational, though.
An interesting interactive simulation. At first I thought this would be way too passive an experience to be enjoyable, but the one slider controls really work. Trying to maximize output by keeping the core temperature at optimal 280-290 degrees.
*I sure hope real life nuclear engineers don't optimize core temperatures manually!*
About the only issue I have is the lack of optimization. Runs pretty bad on my (granted, old) computer. The WebGL version especially suffers from bad performance. It doesn't quite look the part so you probably just have needlessly high poly counts in the 3D models or the terrain.
Comments45
You should be glad you survived. You let explode nuclear reactor, this will hurt, sorry :-) We made our best to make it real.
I really like the explosion ! not the sound that followed though :/
You can find small tutorial in menu.
Small hint: You can use different rod configuration - number of control and fuel rods have influence on reactor behavior. I think more than six fuel rods is insane (you may not manage to cool it down). Also watch generated power, try to keep more than 1000MW all the time.
Also you made me deaf
Day 2: reactor exploded instantly.
Day 3: reactor exploded instantly.
Day 4: decided filling the whole reactor matrix was not a good idea. 9MW generated. Reactor exploded.
Success.
@everbrave The game isn't broken, the idea was brought to me on Friday and I've started with putting up game logic together. The actual calculation simulates (simplified) reactor chamber (and energy generating machinery - e.g. turbine, generator and condensator). The reaction speed is of course increased.
Actual simulation works with probabilities and free neutrons in reactor core. It even goes as far as simulating simplified nuclear science (rods are composed of 4% U235 and 96% U238 ... during reaction Uranium isotopes undergoes some action and change into other elements (generating power - either through fission reaction or gamma wave). It is not accurate (simulation would be too complex to control), but at least there was some physical basis that was simplified (and I guess I got myself on CIA list by going through various documents I've read about nuclear science in past time and last weekend too...).
In the end all I output to user is core output temperature and generated energy.
@james-dunlap Congratulations. Yes, music is sadly missing (we had no time nor skills to create some - but I hope we will manage for next Ludum Dare). I will most likely put some high score result and statistics into post mortem which I'm planning in a week or so.
Thanks!
Note, it actually simulates nuclear reaction (as I described earlier), so it needs a bit of trying to "get it into hand".
I did blow it up once which was pretty fun! The graphics are also really good, all the models and textures look great. I always like the addition of high scores in jam games so well done for including that. I think some idea about how the fuel rod placement affects the reactor would be nice, but I guess that could be left for the player to figure out. Maybe an extra controllable slider or two would help for later levels.
Really enjoyed it, nice job!
Edit: It also took me a couple of tries to get the game to work properly. It got stuck on a screen with the default unity skybox. Might have been my antivirus deleting things but something to watch for.
All i see is the default unity skybox before it turned black.
It's also very nice to have written a complete tutorial in this time frame! There wasn't a lot of explanations for the matrix but it didn't trouble me. I liked experimenting with various configurations.
By the way, great graphics!
Sincerely yours, the North Korean Center For 100% Totally Peaceful Applications of Nuclear Technology.
Secondary, WHERE IS THE MUSHROOM CLOUD?!
- should have a reset button.
- the sfx is very good
- your game used 2G of memory. is it a bug??
Some suggestions if you're planning to do more on it:
* I would have loved some more things to tweak and balance,
* Maybe an iterative level system where you can tweak the control rods after surviving a day?
* The effect the weather had could have been more noticable, although maybe that goes against the realism :P
@fangzhangmnm Original idea (on early Saturday) was to have more effects in there (and yes, making some parts like pipes glow red was an idea), including mushroom cloud. Yet due to time constraints I had to give up on them.
@Dolash Yes, in the end you control only 1 parameter - which is simple enough to understand and play with. Adding more complexity would indeed make this closer to simulation (yet from past Ludum Dares I have experience that more complex game means less players who understand it = less feedback). Although as you stated, it is good starting point - yet I think I will pursue some different game in following month(s).
@duzzondrums More things to tweak could indeed make the game last longer (although would introduce additional complexity, which scares me since Ludum Dare 37 - where we got quite harshly criticized for making complex game). Weather effect was quite hard to balance (in the end I decided to go the way that makes it easier to win).
I find the idea interesting but it is kinda boring if you can only control one slider. I'm not even sure how exactly this slider works: are the control rods down (i.e. they slow down the reaction) when the slider is up? While the weather is nice to look at, does it have any game play mechanic other than refill the water? Also I didn't really figure out, how the matrix setup influences the simulation. If I put in too much uranium, everything goes boom, but does the positions influence anything? But I found the graphics quite nice.
The graphics were nice, though the shadows were pretty rough. It seems like a lot went into the physics of it that I just didn't get.
Not a bad game at all. I also played through your game from last Jam. The running one. I really liked that one.
Overall, nice job.
*I sure hope real life nuclear engineers don't optimize core temperatures manually!*
About the only issue I have is the lack of optimization. Runs pretty bad on my (granted, old) computer. The WebGL version especially suffers from bad performance. It doesn't quite look the part so you probably just have needlessly high poly counts in the 3D models or the terrain.
Good work!