Erect 4 monuments while taking care of your peasants and fending off any fiends!
Every time a new building is built its price increases. The same is with soldiers and peasants. The more excess food you hold the more likely traitors are to attack you
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Basically a more chaotic version of Stronghold with Downwell's aesthetic look.
--- But... ...how the hell do you even play this? ---
BASICS * Click your soldiers and the king to move them around * Placing your mouse over the castle shows you the amount of coins, excess food, peasants and the king's health * Click a building to access its upgrade/build menu (try it out on the castle first) * Orchards (trees) provide 3 units of food per day to your castle * Each house summons 2 peasants and provides a way of buying more * Mines can only be built on rocks * Miners can be employed in the mines * Soldiers can be recruited in the barracks * Walls stop enemies from walking through * Walls can be upgraded to monuments. Building 4 of them wins the game. * The cave on the bottom periodically spawns enemies
CASH & FOOD (i.e. the confusing part) * Each peasant and soldier needs 1 piece of food per day to sustain themselves * Each peasant pays 1 coin every day * Miners require 1 extra piece of food for a total of 2 per day to sustain themselves, but they pay out with 2 coins * Each soldier needs to be paid 1 coin per day * If there's not enough food to sustain your village the first ones to go hostile are the miners. Then the peasants will follow, and lastly the soldiers. * Excess food from the previous day gets deleted, meaning that waiting will not get you any extra apples. * The more excess food you have the more often traitors will spawn
TIPS * DON'T place 2 orchards at the beginning of your game. Just don't do it man. * Keep an eye out for prices of crucial items. You don't want to be caught with your pants down or overpay for your troops, now do you? * Quickly place all 4 walls. You may try to block the traitors' cave with them. When you succeed just remember that traitors can't see 2 feet ahead of themselves. * Look out for your food supply. Too much excess food will lure in the traitors while too little will make your peasants riot.
--- TOOLS USED
* Game Maker: Studio (code, sprites) * LMMS (music) * SFXR (sound effects) * My hands (keyboard input)
--- CHANGELOG ---
1.0 --- * initial release
1.1 --- * fixed the cave spawning too low on the map and preventing traitors from moving * made yellow and teal text a bit more readable * added some additional sound effects * made monuments a bit more sparkly * made peasants more talkative
Update: Uploaded a .zip to Gamejolt; I can't figure out how to port it to Mac through GM:S, I'll try making a HTML5 port though. Might consider making a tutorial or at least an instruction manual booklet-thingy because it seems as though it's a bit too confusing for new players
It's a great compo entry for your first time! The graphics, sound, and design are good, but you don't explain what the point of the game is or how to win. I personally find the font quite hard to read, but I'm just as guilty of inflicting bad bitmap fonts on people.
The classic game design solution for teaching some of this stuff would be to force the player to perform a basic action before introducing it to them fully; maybe the first thing you'd do is place your castle, then create a king with it so the player knows how to do that for the other buildings later.
Yeah, the font is especially hard to read when combined with the king's yellow or the peasants' teal. That's a huge mess-up on my behalf.
As for the instructions part I figured the "how to play" button would be enough but maybe I was too faithful in people thinking they'd actually click the thing. I also think that my absolute lack of skill in explaining things in-game was the final nail in the coffin for the game's understandability.
Wow, this is really complex game for game jam, and it's actually working. Good job! Of course I downloaded it, said myself that I'm not an idiot so I can play without reading instructions (who have time for those, anyway?), failed miserably, spent few minutes by reading all stuff in manual (side note: used font is fancy but bit hard to read) and in the end I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised. Obviously this took lot of work, so again, good job. And don't worry (or at least not much) about people who says it's too complicated/difficult or anything along those lines. Maybe I'm just too nostalgic, but sometimes I simply daydream about times when I was about 8 years old, knew literally about 20 english words, and been trying to figure out how to play some game for days...
I love it! :) Music and art are great. I was at first baffled on how to play it, but it turned out to be really rewarding as well as challenging. Keep it up!
This is impressive. Really, really good-looking. You've got style! The music's a little overwhelming but it's a nice track. Took me a minute to figure out how things worked - I think there's just so much you can do that it's hard to find a place to start - but it's well-paced and I feel like I'm getting the hang of it with each playthrough. Nice work!
Nice work. One big problem is that you can simultaneously lose and win - your king dies, but then you upgrade the fourth wall and it goes to the win screen.
*First thing I do is plant two orchard at the beginning of the game* Me:'Uhhhhhh i think I just stuffed up' Hahahah This game was real fun! The music really grew on me and I found it to be the best part, I'm still humming it even after playing. The sound effects were great too. Congrats on a solid game!
like a very very old game :DDDD oh congratulation! Nice art! Can I follow it also on indiexpo? Do you have also a page there? This looks great! I looked for the games that used the #LDJAM but I don't find yours. So good luck!! I will hope to make a video about it!
I love the presentation. The zx-spectrum vibe to the visuals and the simple music and I'm a huge fan of old games with black backdrops. The little guys bobbing up and down... So I'm definitely sucked into the game! I also dig the minimal UI, it works well. Though I was a bit confused at first when it said "build a x first". I thought that meant that's what I was going to do when I clicked it. Nothing major though. I did the two orchard thing at the start too and was very confused. But I got it the second time through! Very enjoyable. Good work.
Very nice game! Really digging the visual style especially. It's also probably the most different concept I've seen at this jam so far. It's a bit difficult to get started, though. Should probably mention somewhere that you should start with both a house AND an orchard, so you don't get people like me stocking up on apples before realizing they couldn't afford a house. Though once you're into it, it's a blast!
Oh no, they got my king again, damn you bloody traitoooorrs!
Wow. I try to play each game for 5min so I can play a few but I spend way to long on this one :D Fantastic polish and I love the art style. Hope you make this a full game one day mate!
Comments27
And thanks :)
The classic game design solution for teaching some of this stuff would be to force the player to perform a basic action before introducing it to them fully; maybe the first thing you'd do is place your castle, then create a king with it so the player knows how to do that for the other buildings later.
As for the instructions part I figured the "how to play" button would be enough but maybe I was too faithful in people thinking they'd actually click the thing. I also think that my absolute lack of skill in explaining things in-game was the final nail in the coffin for the game's understandability.
Huge thanks for the feedback, man! Cheers!
Let's just say once your village ASCENDS the king gets ressurected.
There. Now it's all intended behaviour. Thanks for the feedback man!
But what you achieved is great...
Well done
This game was real fun! The music really grew on me and I found it to be the best part, I'm still humming it even after playing. The sound effects were great too. Congrats on a solid game!
Wow. I try to play each game for 5min so I can play a few but I spend way to long on this one :D Fantastic polish and I love the art style. Hope you make this a full game one day mate!