The Eternal Cold

by roka-josh

co-authored: @thomu

Overall★★★★★★★★★★3.70

Fun★★★★★★★★★★3.50

Innovation★★★★★★★★★★3.37

Theme★★★★★★★★★★3.54

Graphics★★★★★★★★★★3.96

Audio★★★★★★★★★★3.71

Humor★★★★★★★★★★2.67

Mood★★★★★★★★★★3.98

IMPORTANT NOTE

Please read the how to play section before playing, as this game is fairly complicated and there is no ingame tutorial or help section.

The Game

The world has been hit by a flash freeze, and in an attempt to avoid crazy looters and mobs you fled to the country. Patrolling the icy wastes you come across a camp of people, and due to your natural charisma, you soon become the leader. Take charge in this life or death situation, utilising special individuals skills in order to survive. But you'll have to sacrifice others in order for the whole colony to survive, who will you pick? Will this freeze ever end, and if it does will you and your colonists be there to see it?

This is our 5th entry into Ludum Dare, and we may have been a bit over ambitious with the scope of the game and what we wanted to achieve. What we have now is a great base to build off, and to make an actual game from, but we hope you enjoy what we managed to make in the 3 days! Things like the build menu and scavenging we would of built more on if we had the time, however this is definitely something we want to work on more in the future so things like that will be hopefully be built up then. It would be greatly appreciated if you commented about bugs you found so we can improve them in the future!

How to play (VERY IMPORTANT)

This is the general camp overview. On here you will find the happiness of the camp on the left, the food, water and total people in the camp, as well as the current day number along the bottom. The next day button in the bottom right to progress the day, the actions button on the right hand side of the screen, and the quit button in the top right. As well as this information, you can hover your cursor over the firepit in order to see how many days of fire you have left. Finally for this screen, you can click on any colonist or specialist to find out more about them.

This is a colonist who can be assigned to do simple tasks like gathering resources and scavenging for food.

This is a specialist who has a unique ability, which can be found out by clicking on them. All specialists look the same, whereas colonists have different coloured shirts usually. You can also only have a max number of specialists, which unlike the colonist max number cannot be changed, meaning you have to balance their abilities and sacrifice those you don't want to the cold. If you let a specialist go you will never see them again!

Example of a specialist window.

If you click the arrow on the right hand side of the main page, you will be took to this, the actions menu. From here you can assign colonists to do a variety of tasks, including gathering resources, getting firewood to keep the fire alive, relaxing to increase happiness and so on. If you use the top tabs to navigate this menu, as well as the colony tab, you have the scavenge tab where you can assign colonists to a party to send out to try and find supplies. The more colonists you assign the higher chance you have of succeeding, however interesting events may occur. Finally, the build tab is where you can select tents to be build to increase the max amount of colonists you are allowed in the camp.

Left click to select the build and right click to place! Notice: After feedback it should be made obvious that scavenging is a lot better than hunting for food, hunting is for leftover colonists if you have already sent a scavenge.

The final thing to note is this, which is an event. Events can occur randomly at the beginning of the day, and you have to choose between different options to respond to the event. Each option will end up with a different outcome some better than others, and a 4th option is available if you have a suitable specialist to perform it.

Screenshots:

Credit

- RokaJosh: Programming & UI Art
- Thomu: Art & Music
- momeG: The base for the colonists and specialists, can be found under links.

Links

- Our Company Website: http://www.jagtekgames.co.uk/
- Our Company Twitter: https://twitter.com/JaGTeK_Games
- RokaJosh Twitter: https://twitter.com/RokaJosh
- Thomu Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/thomuofficial
- momeG's free to use micro human: https://mome-g.itch.io/micro-human

Tools

- Unity 2018.2.18f
- Photoshop CC
- Piskel
- Ableton 9.5

Change Log

- Had to fix 2 bugs regarding event probability and maximum working colonists.

Genres: strategy

Tools: Ableton Live, Adobe Photoshop, Piskel, Unity

Comments33

JCPD4 Dec 2018, 17:32

Really cool Pixel Art ! I love the story ;) nice game.

JohnnyGinard4 Dec 2018, 17:35

Very cool idea! Hadn't thought about that! hehe :P :top:

Roka Joshauthor4 Dec 2018, 17:36

@jcpd Thanks for playing our game, we're glad you liked it!

Roka Joshauthor4 Dec 2018, 17:37

@johnnyginard Thank you!

foxxy4 Dec 2018, 17:42

Looks and sounds great (on Linux, which is nice). Like the bleak atmosphere. Played for about ~15mins found the best strat was to have at least one person on everything. Good work.

Roka Joshauthor4 Dec 2018, 17:50

@foxxy Thank you for playing the game, we're glad you liked it and we found that to be a good strat as well!

Quickstudy4 Dec 2018, 17:51

Wasn't too bad, my biggest complaint was that it really wasn't clear if the assigned tasks had any effect, for example when I started getting low on supplies I assigned 3/4th of my survivors to hunt for food and water. However I only ever saw the number go down.

Roka Joshauthor4 Dec 2018, 18:21

@quickstudy Thanks for playing our game, I understand this point as we originally had an indication for gaining food and water, it just cluttered the screen so we decided to leave it out. Also the scavenge option gets a lot more food as the hunt option was only meant for if you had any left over colonists not doing anything for a low chance to get supplies so that is why you likely didn't see any gain, as the positives from hunting don't outweigh the camp hunger alone. Once again thanks for your feedback, going into the future this is something we will consider, and will balance when we work on the game more!

owl and jackalope5 Dec 2018, 04:14

I love the idea of a resource management style game where you delegate to your "tribe" of people. I think that it would have felt more connected to the UI selections if the game actually reflected the actions. Your people seemed to just walk around. It might have been nice to have a few standing guard, pulling food off of nearby bushes, sending a search party made a pack of them walk off screen, etc... Having some awareness of your surroundings would also help with decision making. Like knowing there are wolves nearby would make me cautious about sending people out, but I know that there are lots of berry bushes that don't stay alive long so I have to do the math to figure out if the sacrifice of people is worth it.

Roka Joshauthor5 Dec 2018, 08:27

@owl-and-jackalope Thank you for playing, the party walkig off when you sent the scavenge party out was something we wanted, but sadly we didn’t have enough time to implement it. Your points of more visual feedback have been noted and we will look to implement into the post LD version, thanks.

Haustgeirr5 Dec 2018, 18:53

I liked the idea of delegating tasks to your tribe of brave survivors. I found it difficult to understand what was going on or what the different tasks did. I was doing great until I got bandit attack 4 nights in a row and lost everybody -- not so well after that. The concept is great though. Would love to see this fully executed. :grin:

Roka Joshauthor5 Dec 2018, 19:11

@haustgeirr thanks for playing! Development is planned to continue after the jam is over.

pelicanodepico7 Dec 2018, 09:25

As a huge fan of pixel art I must say this is some professional stuff, loved it!

Roka Joshauthor7 Dec 2018, 16:28

@pelicanodepico Thanks, its all on @thomu

Thomu7 Dec 2018, 16:29

@pelicanodepico Thank you for the comment

Moski8 Dec 2018, 00:20

It's a cold hell out there.

While RNG seems to be too strong in this game, I'd say this project succeeds at what it tries to do. The cold setting of a hopeless settlement does a good job as making the player sacrifice things for survivavility. Heck, I'm impressed at how micromanaging-y this can gets, with specialists and what not. I had 3 on my first playthrough, despite not truly understanding the game then.

It's a bit finnicky to comprehend and see the impact, but the simulation elements, the random events and the different settlers, paired with stunning visuals and a cold, gloomy soundtrack, make up for a very impressive and lasting experience. Incredible work.

My team applauds your hard work, and would like to see where else your team can go. Keep up the good work! :whale:

Roka Joshauthor8 Dec 2018, 01:19

@moski My goodness, thank you so much for your feedback, it means so much! It is our intentions to continue with this game after the jam is over, so this is of great help, we need to balance a lot on terms of the random side of it. Once again thanks a lot this means so much!

Megalink9 Dec 2018, 22:43

This game is fantastic! The music and background ambience is beautiful, and builds a great atmosphere. The art is also really great. Gameplay is a bit confusing, but is fun once you get the hang of things! Great job!

Roka Joshauthor9 Dec 2018, 23:13

@megalink Thank you for playing the game, all the art and music is on @thomu

justalocalhero10 Dec 2018, 01:00

This game is absolutely gorgeous and has a great atmospheric feel. Struggling to survive is a lot of fun and the events that I encountered all seemed interesting and meaningful. I do wish the screen transition was a little bit quicker, especially since you need to trigger it every time you want to take an action. Really great work overall, I had a lot of fun with this one.

Sthor72610 Dec 2018, 02:57

I really loved this game! I just wish there was more visual feedback and at the beginning of each day there is a new problem to solve. Nice Work!

Roka Joshauthor10 Dec 2018, 10:56

@justalocalhero Thanks for playing our game, I think we will increase the speed of the screen transition in a future version, especially as we will likely make a full UI redo.

Roka Joshauthor10 Dec 2018, 10:58

@sthor726 Thanks for playing, we have had a few comments mentioning this, so it is definitely something we will be looking into for the post jam version!

goudagames13 Dec 2018, 21:58

"Oh, this is cool. It feels a bit easy though, like there aren't really any threats." *Clicks next day* "Your camp was attacked by bandits. They killed all your colonists."

:)

Very nice, I like it a lot.

ToonTeamJ14 Dec 2018, 01:58

Awesome game!

I pretty quick to catch on, so I didn't do too badly. My only complaint was that I wasn't sure how to build structures. I'd click on the tent-thingy, but I wasn't sure if it did anything.

Roka Joshauthor14 Dec 2018, 16:12

@goudagames Thanks for playing the game, we're glad you liked it!

Roka Joshauthor14 Dec 2018, 16:13

@toonteamj Thanks for playing, I don't blame you for this as it isn't well mentioned but in the how to play on this page it does say to left click to purchase and right click to place with the tents, but again I don't blame you for missing it. It was a last minute feature and I couldn't get both actions onto left click in time so left then right was a work around!

Harksa22 Dec 2018, 12:21

It is an intersting game, I really liked the art and found it cute. I think it needs a little more balancing because I got bullied by bandies 3 nights in a row and lost everything quickly, and I also wish they were a recap of all the stuff I gathered during the day/night.
Other than that, it's really well made and I hope you're gonna update it !

Roka Joshauthor22 Dec 2018, 15:19

@harksa Thanks for playing, the lack of information for overnight gains has been a comment a lot of people have picked up on and will therefore be something we will be focusing on for a post jam version, and yes we will continue working on this!

andre-60622 Dec 2018, 21:07

I really like the whole idea, and music and graphics make it really atmospheric.

But it looks like negative numbers are kind of an issue:

Roka Joshauthor22 Dec 2018, 21:15

@andre-606 Thank you for bringing this to our attention, we hadn't encountered this because we never tried, so thank you! This will be fixed for a later version and we are glad you liked the game.