Ludum Dare #45compo

Population

by solwllms

Overall★★★★★★★★★★4.00

Fun★★★★★★★★★★3.56

Innovation★★★★★★★★★★2.88

Theme★★★★★★★★★★3.69

Graphics★★★★★★★★★★3.50

Audio★★★★★★★★★★2.75

Humor★★★★★★★★★★2.14

Mood★★★★★★★★★★3.75

What a populus city! #

POPULATION is a city-builder that focuses on the production of homes and (some) of what your people need! Use your available tools to create a sprawling hyper-suburban city that truely looks and feels like a dystopian council estate.

Love this part of town #

Construct roads, bridges, powerlines, solar farms, houses and plant trees. Demolish till your ~~heart's content~~ wallet's empty!

Save and load your city to come back to it at some other time, or just pretend you will - imagine that!

A true sim - witty! #

Experience immersive terrain, with fully dynamic roadways and impressively blue water and oceans. Connect homes to power-sources with powerlines and keep that wattage up, or risk losing all power! Tragic!

In all seriousness, this was my first Ludum Dare after being a simple spectator for many years. I did find it much harder than I thought and I'm sure I spent many hours laying on my bed and staring trying to come up with enough energy or ideas to push forward. Regardless, I think Population is a fun and hopefully different interpretation of the theme. I realised mid way through that a city builder is a very ambitious thing to try and produce in such a small time so I had to strip out some features from my original idea, but I hope this game still remains fun enough for you to enjoy. I didn't start till mid-day Saturday as I wasn't prepared to give up my Friday night, it's still freshers fortnight you know, so with that I hope you can appreciate this all a little more.

Population was written in C# with a custom engine written for this project. The whole game was written in the time from noon-midnight on Saturday and noon-midnight on Sunday, so I think that means it was written in 24 hours (weird flex, but okay).

I hope you like what I've made here, and you can follow me on twitter github at @solwllms, visit my website or support me via PayPal if you really want.

Thank you, and have a good halloween :jack_o_lantern:. Sol Williams.

*Please extract the game (and everything wtih it) rather than running it straight from the zip archive. *

*This game requires OpenAL for audio. If the above doesn't work, please download the very very small redist here it will take literally 0 seconds to install and means u can listen to all the sweet sounds I put in. (you may need to restart!) *

Comments13

nightcrawler90016 Oct 2019, 22:03

The link doesn't work

solwllmsauthor6 Oct 2019, 22:30

@nightcrawler9001 Thank you for this! I thought I was being smart by keeping everything private till submission hour, but not smart enough to set it public lol. It's been fixed now though! I hope you enjoy the game and good luck with your ratings. :smile:

The Blue Hatted6 Oct 2019, 22:35

I can't open it. I downloaded it, exported it, and lauched the exe. Am I missing a step here?

Travis Carlen6 Oct 2019, 22:43

That was really fun. Around the 20 minute mark I did start to notice some performance issues, but that makes sense for how many houses I built. Overall I really enjoyed it and I'm sad I wasn't able to continue much farther

solwllmsauthor6 Oct 2019, 23:40

@the-blue-hatted Thank you for trying to play my game lol! I've been trying to sort this out since I saw your comment and I believe it is because I didn't ship with openal32.dll, and this just straight up crashes out. If you can please install OpenAL (for audio) here you may need to restart. Otherwise I'll be publishing a fix very soon to let you play without audio :(. Many thanks.

The Blue Hatted7 Oct 2019, 01:29

Thanks @solwllms! That worked!
That aside, the game is amazing!, i like that you have to make powerlines and solar panels to make your houses have power but, sometimes i find myself not knowing why my houses aren't happy or powered. Also it gets laggy when you put a lot of houses, but that aside, it's an amazing game!

Syrapt0r9 Oct 2019, 15:18

I was super impressed with how intuitive this game is, how well everything works, how much fun it is to build a city and how nice and clean it looks. Then I saw that this is a compo entry and I don't even know what to say.

Extremely polished and really fun. Actually spent way too much time with this game :smile:

KrisDev9 Oct 2019, 16:10

Fun game overall but after 2-3 minutes I got so much money that the challenge was practically gone. Good job, I maybe miss some more audio.

Raphiell9 Oct 2019, 17:42

Very cool, I love city builders in the style of the old sim city games.

One thing I noticed was that I could place solar farms in the water.

Well done!

solwllmsauthor9 Oct 2019, 18:05

@syrapt0r Thank you so much for your very, very kind words. I am very proud of this project, and am glad you had fun.

solwllmsauthor9 Oct 2019, 18:07

@raphiell Thank you. I can't believe things like this get thru testing lol, I've added a fix (a single-line fix) to the repo for a post-compo version if that ever comes to fruition. Also, haha very much :eyes:.

el_fideo_rubio9 Oct 2019, 18:54

Great game I felt I could relax and build a city, I'm missing the inhabitants going around their routine and maybe a drag and drop functionality for building roads would awesome

hbocao12 Oct 2019, 20:50

First off, the game looks pretty good. I did not enjoy that much though :(. I did not feel challenged as I just had to wait to get money and spam the map with buildings. Trying to do city sim, especially in a jam, is really hard and you should be proud of your accomplishments. I think you should keep improving it. :)