Ludum Dare #40compo

Conservation Island

by kix334

Overall★★★★★★★★★★3.32

Fun★★★★★★★★★★3.18

Innovation★★★★★★★★★★3.24

Theme★★★★★★★★★★3.79

Graphics★★★★★★★★★★3.16

Audio★★★★★★★★★★3.27

Humor★★★★★★★★★★3.42

Mood★★★★★★★★★★3.13

Controls

- move the mouse to the edge of the window to rotate
- click for regular sledge hammer(The precision tool)
- Shift-click for burning sledge hammer(caution fire spreads fast).
- click detection is roughly where point of hammer is, not underneath the swing

Conservationing is hard.Especially when your only scientific tool is a sledgehammer. The goal of this game is to keep the island at a sustainable population for as long as possible. How do you know whats un-sustainable you ask? Well, your computer should make it very clear. Also if you 'accidentally' kill all of the bunnies, thats not sustainable( surprising right). Bunnies also die of old age, so you will need to keep a few breeding pairs around.

Post you best island conservation time in the comments!

I highly recommend Running from command line to see the fps printed to console(Its amusing) simply run the jar file using "java -jar Conservasionist.jar"

So I finished my game in around about 15 hours, starting from scratch, using only the native java libraries. There are a few 'quirks' in the system, specifically the some of the tress glitching out after a massive fps drop. I have no idea why it was happening( sometimes it didn't ) so i ignored it :smile: Music was generated in this great website
https://pernyblom.github.io/abundant-music/index.html If you want fast and dirty music this is the place!!

FINAL NOTE: No bunnies were harmed in the making of this game :wink:

Tags: #animals, #management, #nature

Genres: simulation, strategy

Comments20

nysten3 Dec 2017, 13:59

I love the mood, but hitting a bunny is very difficult. Maybe make a larger hitbox for them?

kix334author4 Dec 2017, 06:34

@nysten Thanks for playing and giving feed-back! The hit box on the mouse(where the click is detected) is roughly where the point of the hammer is, not under where it swings( I forgot to offset it :scream: )

Tomáš Selmeci4 Dec 2017, 09:19

Great challenge. I love the rotation component!

kix334author4 Dec 2017, 09:23

@tomas-selmeci Thanks man, i spent way to long trying to make it work right! Im glad you appreciate it :upside_down:

CreativeWhisper4 Dec 2017, 09:39

The best i could manage 75s. It's veeeeeeery difficult to smash the bunnies seems that the hitbox is so tiny that the hammer couldn't hit them, even knowing that is the point what smash them not the other zone. Cool concept tho.

The_BM4 Dec 2017, 09:41

hitboxes are to tiny and it would help if you could hold the mouse button down for like 3 or 5 seconds, so you don´t break your mouse

kix334author4 Dec 2017, 10:43

@creativewhisper @the-bm Thanks for playing, yeah it does sound like the hit boxes could of been bigger. I thought a bigger hit box would have made 'managing' the population to easy. Guess thats the problem with testing your own game!

tinyworlds5 Dec 2017, 00:26

Fun game! Ended up placing my hammer in the middle once there were too many bunnies and clicked frantically :D Would be nice to have some variation in the gameplay, i.e. bombs that spawn with whom you can kill many poor bun buns. Also +1 for the ecology idea.

kix334author5 Dec 2017, 07:08

@tinyworlds Thanks for the kind words! Did you try the fire hammer??? It's easily the most hilarious feature of the game!

koemeterion5 Dec 2017, 10:01

102seconds on the third run. First I forget about the burning hammer, then I used it. I liked it ... a lot. hihi. On run 3 I killed (accidently) the blue population, so there was 15 pink bunnies left. They died by age. Would think they hated each other :( The music getting a bit to loud / high frequency on some point. Fun little game!

kix334author5 Dec 2017, 11:30

@kometerion Haha thanks! Im glad someone finally mentioned the fire hammer, I was beginning to worry it was overlooked! Yes the breeding is totally random(the seed comes from SystemTime in milliseconds), sometimes they go nuts, sometimes they go frigid. And yeah, I found that the fire seems prone to spreading mainly between the boy rabbits??? I honestly couldn't tell you why :thinking:

tthe5 Dec 2017, 12:39

I had a hard time figuring out where to click with the sledge hammer, it seemed random whether I did hit a bunny, or I didn't.

Anyway, the absurdity of this idea is a plus! :)

ACamara6 Dec 2017, 13:41

Fits really well the theme! Some times I found it hard to know if clicking would hit a rabbit or not. managed 450s on my second run (I didn't notice the fire hammer on the first run)

edmond009 Dec 2017, 05:46

Excellent game ! I managed the population during 286 seconds killing more than 1000 innocent rabbits, unfortunately, I ended with only female rabbit. The simple graphics are cute and it is nice to be able to rotate the island. the hammer is a little imprecise and the effect of the burning hammer a little confuse but the game is fun to play anyway.

IllaBom12 Dec 2017, 01:48

Nice game you have here. SUPER WELL DONE!

Come check out my game if you like!
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/virus-detected

Tuomo18 Dec 2017, 08:51

I loved the visual style and music. Gameplay felt bit random. Either I had to madly click through huge amount of bunnies or burn them and leave random ones alive. Clicking became extremely difficult as number of bunnies goes constantly up, quicker I squish them. And burning seemed to end in random result likes all female colony. This is fun to play couple times but doesn’t offer much to keep playing.

Remco22 Dec 2017, 21:46

On my second try I managed to hold on slightly more than 293 seconds ('only' around 500 bunny-kills tho') by:
- Clicking in the middle of the island (almost always the most populous region of the island) when the pop-count got over 25 or so. This way I didn't need to care about hitboxes (or even the position of the hammer, really.)
- Burning everything if it got up to 60.
After a number of burns I ended up with 32 bunnies of the same gender. I'm sure someone could do better if they're more adamant about not getting to 60 and/or having better luck with burning stuff down.

Love the rotation-effect here, really seems to suit the music somehow?

Speaking of:
For something you say is auto-gen music, this is really amazing. I'll check out that site for certain! :notes:

Great use of theme to make something conceptually simple and easy to grasp, but very creative :slight_smile:

Oh, and cheers on making this within less than 1/3 of the time allotted!

ETA: Forgot to mention: A timer in view during play (instead of after) would've been a nice (but not _really_ necesary) addition.

TerraCottaFrog23 Dec 2017, 16:38

155.67 seconds of island conservation :)

Great game, I only wish that there was a timer displayed in game. It was also difficult to hit the bunnies. I feel like the hitbox for the sledgehammer should be a little bigger since it feels a little random right now.

PixelFormedStudios24 Dec 2017, 14:55

I really liked the perspective when you could rotate the camera! Also, the mechanic was simple but really fun. Obviously, with that many bunnies, the game dropped a lot of frames, but overall a pretty great game!

MrPhil26 Dec 2017, 03:42

It's extra hard on a laptop trackpad lol The hammer seemed misconfigured on some hits, those pink bunnies would skip away happy as can be.