The Genesis Loop

by jsmars

co-authored: @dr-ostfralla, @erik-jans, @nakiwarai, @darran, @svdvorak

Overall★★★★★★★★★★4.15

Fun★★★★★★★★★★4.22

Innovation★★★★★★★★★★3.78

Theme★★★★★★★★★★3.78

Graphics★★★★★★★★★★3.72

Audio★★★★★★★★★★4.12

Humor★★★★★★★★★★3.28

Mood★★★★★★★★★★4.15

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Take control of an expedition to keep the human race alive and find a new place to call home.

Explore supernovas. Contract illnesses. Handle conflicts. Analyze planets. But above all, keep your crew alive.

Download and get immersed in this text adventure with both visuals and music.

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Linux & Mac builds soon!

Controls ###

*Interact:* Mouse left OR Gamepad face buttons

*Quit:* Escape

*Mute:* M

*Toggle Fullscreen:* Alt Enter

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Make your own adventure! ###

This was quite an interesting project to make for us. We made an entire little scripting system from scratch to let our writers be able to create the entire story directly from json files with simple yet powerful logic. This made our project actually be almost more of a game maker in itself than a game for us coders! We even created a complete documentation and script validation for this so that anyone can make their own adventure or add events - for a gamejam! Has anyone done that before?

You can easily make your own events, planets and ending conditions by just creating simple json files and put them in the Data/Story/ directory and they will be loaded automatically. If there are any parsing errors you will get an error message with the details of the error when you start the game. If the game boots up fine, you are good to go and your story content will appear.

If you do manage to build any events, we would happily add them to the game, just post them here after testing them! :)

Check out the docmentation here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rwSUWFH9EhmjcISgoDi3gOAAHQiNgUf8NRvmuxqw50Q

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Credits: ###

Jonathan Smars @jsmars - Code, Design, Graphics, Writing

Andreas Wilcox @svdvorak - Code, Design, Graphics, Writing

Kim Nolemo - Writing

Daniel Stavdal - Writing

Björn Majholm - Writing

Erik Jans - Music, Sound Effects

Johan Westring - Music, Sound Effects, Design

Patch Log ###

* 1.01
* You can use arrows up/down and enter to control the dialogs
* Planet limitation bug fixed (so certain special planets will generate correctly)
* example.json is not overwritten on startup so you can now make your own translations and changes
* Some typo and story value errors fixed

Tools: GameMaker

Comments26

tarfield21 Apr 2020, 12:10

This game feels so alive! The music when you colonize a planet fits perfectly, it's like the track "In Motion" from the Mark Zuckerberg movie :blush:

The fact that you added the option to expand on the game is also amazing. It's astonishing what you have accomplished in 72 hours.

dun dun dun

Epic reference!

mitsu.artemius21 Apr 2020, 12:25

Publishable.

devilskeyStudio21 Apr 2020, 12:25

the game has great music. and its fun to play. the fact that there are differences between the planets is amazing. the game makes you think about what you are gone do in the story and keeps it interesting. overall the game is fun to play.

TimeTravelHamster21 Apr 2020, 12:31

Its actually engaging game and kept my interest. The mood and feel of the game is excellent. Good Job. and yes the music when i colonize the planet hype me. Great game.

noirdrive21 Apr 2020, 12:53

I love this kind of gameplay and graphics is getting well with the immersion. Established my colony in a classy planet but lost most of my crew to get a good score :P Make your own adventure engine thing is very interesting. I'd love to play if there will be new versions.

AdrianKrawczyk22 Apr 2020, 09:23

im impressed

AnaHandley22 Apr 2020, 09:40

Not exactly teh type of games I enjoy, however this one I liked very much. Great job!

tsombi10022 Apr 2020, 09:45

I like the "going fast" effect with the starts. And this is just an amazing game

n.feofentov22 Apr 2020, 10:48

Very good game! I love humor and aesthetic. A lot of interesting choices and decisions. Would love sometime check the scripting to make my own story) Good luck!

JasonD22 Apr 2020, 14:00

Kind of crazy that you implemented and documented a custom scripting engine for this!

The content itself is great, and the presentation is simple, but feels cohesive and complete. Overall it's very immersive. I think you picked exactly the right number of things to focus on: the event writing, warp effects and planets are just enough, and they're all polished up nicely. Great work!

svdvorak22 Apr 2020, 14:24

Thank you all for the kind comments! We're very happy that you like the game!

@jasond Yeah, it was ambitious to add the custom scripting engine but as we had several friends who aren't game developers but happy to help with the writing it actually was a net positive!

Sockyman22 Apr 2020, 15:07

This game is amazing! I think that by just expanding the amount of content in this game you could make a product. It would be nice to be able to use keys on the keyboard the pick options and advance the story.

Brachistosauro22 Apr 2020, 15:10

Wow, this is definitely my favorite one so far! It's incredibly well made and complete, and I enjoyed it immensely (I'm a bit of a fan of these types of games). Thank you so much for creating this game :D

Airola22 Apr 2020, 16:02

Maybe the best game I've bumped into here so far :O The best mood for sure!

Paulzz22 Apr 2020, 21:32

Amazing! Solid gameplay, great writing, very immersive! Also enjoyed the visual details such as the stars becoming lines as you go into warp speed and how the text appear onscreen one by one. Lovely game!

rubentipparach22 Apr 2020, 21:38

Awesome game! I loved the aesthetics, very immersive story telling!

Paul Nadan25 Apr 2020, 01:53

I really enjoyed playing this! The storyline was really fun, and I appreciated that the same choices didn't always lead to the same results. The interface is also so nicely polished! The text writing, the colonizing music, the hyperspace effect - there were just nice little touches everywhere. The one thing I might suggest if you keep building on this would be to add keyboard controls to select with arrows + enter key instead of having to locate the buttons with the mouse each time. This was an awesome entry, great work!

adhesion25 Apr 2020, 18:21

Really great atmosphere, the visual design works really well for the setting and the music is great too. Fun writing too, I enjoyed all the different situations and decision making. I ended up establishing a colony but had half of the crew go on and eventually got a game over. I liked the variety of things you had to deal with - think I only saw one duplicate. The planets seemed pretty random, and I had no idea what conditions would have been safe to establish a colony in, but I guess that's the point :P Not to be too nitpicky but the various typos and grammatical errors did detract from the mood a bit. Still it was a really cool experience. Great work!

LudumDareDevil25 Apr 2020, 18:32

Awesome game! I loved the mood the music created.

Madbarron27 Apr 2020, 00:42

Very cool! Sometimes the words didn't match the planet I was shown. One planet was described as being in the goldilock's zone but was at -271*C. The one I settled on had a high pressure atmosphere and low gravity, but the descriptions of living there were the opposite (no atmosphere and high gravity).

Overall I think the interface and graphics are very nice, and it's cool that you built an expandable engine for the jam!

damdoshi27 Apr 2020, 14:28

The greatest game I've played on this jam. I'll certainly play again today, and I'm already making some publicity :p I don't know how big your game is behind, but it feels wide and complete. The atmosphere is great, the music is good, the way you tell the story makes me want to go on and try again.

Maybe this way of telling stories should revive a full video game genre, bringing computer novels strongly and detach them from only being the point'n click ancester.

I'm gonna spent some time translating it to french so my friends could play it - as your engine is fully json based \o/ a great thing ;)

Edit: nakiwarai.json is pretty different from other files. Its seems to be from another story. x')

Edit2: example.json contains a lot of events and the description of gauges and seems to be rewritten by force at each game startup, it prevents me to do a full translation. What can I do?

jsmarsauthor29 Apr 2020, 05:10

Thanks for all the wonderful comments everyone! I definitely understand some people would like to use arrows to control the game, and this is something we can add for an update.

@madbarron Yeah sorry about that goldilock zone planet, there was a late bug that caused the planet limitations to not work properly so that the more specific planets could become different, will have this fixed in an update soon!

@damdoshi Wow that's amazing you want to translate it! Yeah we tried to plan out the stories to fit together but some of them are a bit different style because of different writers and we worked remotely this time because of the virus, we would edit them quite a bit in a future version to fit together a bit more. And yeah the example.json is written at startup to always be a latest correct version in case anything changed in the code, but I can have this fixed in the next update so that we can support translations, so feel free to work on the translations until then.

Y-alexandrov7 May 2020, 18:39

Funnest game I've played today. It feels finished and the soundtrack is really nice. It's a keeper.

ShaubbyPlayz10 May 2020, 00:57

Cool game, I liked the style of the game and I imagine it would be very hard to make this in 72 hours. I also really liked the soudtrack. Nice work.

jsmarsauthor12 May 2020, 22:04

Sorry for the extreme delay in this, but better late than never! Several requested fixes have now been made in version 1.01! Thanks for the feedback!
* You can use arrows up/down and enter to control the dialogs @sockyman @paul-nadan
* Planet limitation bug fixed (so certain special planets will generate correctly) @madbarron
* example.json is not overwritten on startup so you can now make your own translations and changes @damdoshi
* Some typo and story value errors fixed