I (tried) made a simulation game, where you decide what creatures will roam a planet. If there is symbiosis (for a couple of in game years) between all species and the planet, they all survive and you win!
Hello there young apprentice!
Today your skills as a Planet custodian will be teseted!
You have (almost) all the tools needed to have this planet survive as long as the cosmos will exist! Remember not to run out of the planets energy and dont let all the creatures die!
Energy is restored to the planet from dead creatures. Plants consume the energy of the planet to live. Animals eat plants and eachother.
If you dont like a certain species you can eliminate them or change its behaviour, but remember, everything comes at a cost!
Controls:
Most things are done by clicking the left mouse button.
You can zoom with the scrool wheel od +/- on your keyboard.
To move around press the right mouse button and move the mouse or use WASD/Arrow keys.
Have fun :)!
Didnt have time for graphics :< spent too much time on simple bugs. Didnt playtest enough and there is probably a lot more to balance and tweak with some setting there. There were supposed to be more options in the GUI, like modifications for creatures, not only kill and re-roll. Either way hope you like it :)
really cool idea to turn the them into the game. i think it just need more variations of creatures.. it seem quick enough for them to extinct (or maybe because i played on smaller level?) and.. do some creatures breeding? you could make a new breed from them.. ah it just my opinion, anyway good job on making this :thumbsup_tone2:
@amazura yes, plants breed alone when certain conditions are made, animals also breed but they need to be healthy and find a mate (see how many males/females there are) and every offspring can mutate a bit to have different traits, as for variation every creature generated is different i just didnt have time to make more that 3 sprites or add anything to identify them better :(
Nice idea, for me it was really hard to find a balance. As soon as I removed or added a species, my planet died in like 10 seconds :slight_frown: But I really like the concept itself, with a bit more work (more than is available in the compo (oof)), this could be really fun. Thanks for your game! :smiley:
Love the idea and the simulation aspects, but it could really use some ways to make incremental progress.
Most game states seem doomed from the start (maybe not the case on a larger planet size with enough knowledge, I couldn't say). I tried dozens of restarts without any configurations that seemed close to stable. If I did find a winning state, it would just feel like luck more than anything I did.
A good first step might be to invalidate spawns that are impossible, like a planet with only plants or only carnivores.
Maybe if there was an option to tweak stats for an energy cost instead of only randomly re-rolling and hoping things work, or to add species in addition to replacing the ones you have.
It could be a lot of fun to work your way up from plant life to herbivores to carnivores if there was a little more player input in the process.
I love that you went for a whole ecosystem simulator for a jam.
Feels like the start of something good, but not quite there ^_^. Had some UI issues - every time I re-rolled a species it seemed to re-select the first one in the list again, and it was really awkward to re-select things in that list, so was a pain to find the kind of species I was looking for. Even with what seemed like a good balance of species, I couldn't get anything near stable on a tint planet. On a larger one, I had more luck, but didn't managed to win the game :(.
Simulating a society or economy is intrinsically hard, so I applaud your efforts! I wasn't able to last long, but I could tell there was A LOT happening in the background under the hood. Cool "living world" system.
I liked it! I found it very difficult to get any even remotely stable planet going! I feel it could use a little balancing as such and maybe some hand holding on basic starting strategies for the game. However, what I'd love to see is challenges outside of just making sure your planet has a good ecosystem balance. It would be really interesting if that balance is fairly easy in and of itself but achieving the challenges tends to require throwing off your ecological balance and then you have to regain it.
Very original concept, I can dig it. It was pretty hard to tell exactly what was going on, and to see what effects your actions had, but it was still fun to try to balance the planet. I think it could be improved by adding more UI to show the state of the world (creature count per species for instance), and to add more control to the game by letting you change specific species parameters. Still, great entry, props for coming up with something completely original.
Wow, a very ambitious game for a jam (might have been a bit too ambitious). Could become a great game with a lot more work, love playing these types of games.
This project is huuuge ! It's very hard to make a complete simulation game during 3 days. But it's really good start, with more work you can build an amazing game.
You said you didn't have time for graphics but I actually kinda like the style you have going. The animals look very cure and the style would definitely work for this game :)
A very interesting game! It was fun watching each planet slowly evolve and see if it manages to survive.
My only problem was the game speed. It seems that the gameplay is linked to its framerate, so the more things the game has to calculate, the slower it goes. This means that depending on your choice of planet size the game will run differently.
The game said that a large planet could be heavy on my PC, but I actually found it run the best out of the four (maybe a little bit too slow). Medium planet seemed alright, but small one run way too fast for me to be able to influence anything, and the tiny one just flew past me and within a few seconds the game was over.
When it comes to gameplay, I guess giving the player more ways to influence the world would work wonders. I also wish there was a way to simply add a new species to the world without replacing an existing one. Maybe it'd be nice to be able to click a specific specimen to see its stats, like age and health.
All in all, it's a really great entry. I enjoyed it very much! ;)
While not very interactive, this is a really cool concept with lots of potential for emergent mechanics. It might be easier to get a successful planet going if energy were provided to the planet passively, via sunlight or something. I was only able to win once, and it was on a tiny planet where at the end there was just one bush.
I really like what you did here, but as is it feels pretty lacking. The issue is mostly, I think, in presentation. You're modelling a bunch of animals, their reproduction, feeding, decomposing, and same for all the plants, but as a viewer I can't see that. I think if you added a lot more sprites, indications of the ages of plants and animals, showed what actions had just happened (feeding, growing, death, birth), and had tooltips show up when you hovered over a plant or animal with fun information, the game would be way more engaging. All the information, from what I can tell, is already in the model. All that needs to happen is a nice way to tell the player what the game is already doing. Nice work, regardless, I had fun toying around with it.
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Most game states seem doomed from the start (maybe not the case on a larger planet size with enough knowledge, I couldn't say). I tried dozens of restarts without any configurations that seemed close to stable. If I did find a winning state, it would just feel like luck more than anything I did.
A good first step might be to invalidate spawns that are impossible, like a planet with only plants or only carnivores.
Maybe if there was an option to tweak stats for an energy cost instead of only randomly re-rolling and hoping things work, or to add species in addition to replacing the ones you have.
It could be a lot of fun to work your way up from plant life to herbivores to carnivores if there was a little more player input in the process.
I love that you went for a whole ecosystem simulator for a jam.
But it's really good start, with more work you can build an amazing game.
Keep going !
Well done!
My only problem was the game speed. It seems that the gameplay is linked to its framerate, so the more things the game has to calculate, the slower it goes. This means that depending on your choice of planet size the game will run differently.
The game said that a large planet could be heavy on my PC, but I actually found it run the best out of the four (maybe a little bit too slow). Medium planet seemed alright, but small one run way too fast for me to be able to influence anything, and the tiny one just flew past me and within a few seconds the game was over.
When it comes to gameplay, I guess giving the player more ways to influence the world would work wonders. I also wish there was a way to simply add a new species to the world without replacing an existing one. Maybe it'd be nice to be able to click a specific specimen to see its stats, like age and health.
All in all, it's a really great entry. I enjoyed it very much! ;)
I think if you added a lot more sprites, indications of the ages of plants and animals, showed what actions had just happened (feeding, growing, death, birth), and had tooltips show up when you hovered over a plant or animal with fun information, the game would be way more engaging. All the information, from what I can tell, is already in the model. All that needs to happen is a nice way to tell the player what the game is already doing.
Nice work, regardless, I had fun toying around with it.