Ludum Dare #52compo

Social Mediæty

by const-arch

Overall★★★★★★★★★★3.47

Fun★★★★★★★★★★3.23

Innovation★★★★★★★★★★3.43

Theme★★★★★★★★★★3.75

Graphics★★★★★★★★★★3.12

Humor★★★★★★★★★★4.00

Mood★★★★★★★★★★3.17

You are an otherworldly horror who can entrance lesser beings with just the knowledge of your existence. Use social media to spread the word, and harvest the souls of your followers to pay for it!

Everything can be controlled by clicking. This game features autosaving, so if something goes terribly wrong try just opening it again and loading the autosave.

Don't be too discouraged if you get off to a slow start! Ideas can proliferate quickly with the right tools...

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Post jam changes:
- Changed leaderboard server to be run a less commonly used port (picking 80 was some real 3 AM brain stuff), as it was getting spammed with unrelated requests.
- Fixed a division by zero error that caused crashes in two events.

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If the game doesn't start, please try the OpenGL-Fallback versions in the downloads instead.

Comments31

TomatoOmelet9 Jan 2023, 05:45

Reading the description already made me laugh. The writing for this game is so good super funny. The art is also super cute and yes eyes > tentacles.

cagibi9 Jan 2023, 11:38

Very good humor! I just felt the need to be able to pause the game sometimes (although quitting and loading an autosave *technically* does that).

Zuwu10 Jan 2023, 01:36

The dialog and the jokes are great! There's a ton of little fun things, I do wish you started with more followers though, it takes a while before you can really interact with all the systems

togo sepultraut10 Jan 2023, 01:52

maybe im just very bad at it, but i cant seem to catch up on followers, behind by many zeros.
fun narrative nevertheless

LDJam user 14250310 Jan 2023, 05:16

Cool game,i like just seeing the number grow~

ManchmalScott10 Jan 2023, 05:42

This game is so hard! Brother got to 1 billion and I was still at 170K lol

const_archauthor10 Jan 2023, 05:57

Thanks for the feedback so far everyone! I'm glad you're enjoying the writing.

Yeah, I probably should've put the current Normal difficulty behind a third Hard option. It's doable (oh god how is there 200 day run on the leaderboard), but requires quite a bit of advertising combined with the other boosts. Easy is more flexibly balanced if you'd like a chiller time.

The initial ramp up period was meant to be a time for players to toy with edicts and acolytes to figure out their basics, but it kinda just feels like dead time in hindsight. I think lowering the minimum ad price to 100 would've probably made this time period feel less bad, although yeah just starting you off with 500 followers could've also bypassed some of the problem.

Unentokku10 Jan 2023, 08:59

Can't run it getting a "Your video card driver does not support the selected Vulkan version.
Please try updating your GPU driver or try using the OpenGL 3 driver.
You can enable the OpenGL 3 driver by starting the engine from the

command line with the command:
'./Social Mediaety.exe --rendering-driver opengl3'.
If you have updated your graphics drivers recently, try rebooting."

const_archauthor10 Jan 2023, 09:20

@unentokku Sorry about that! Looks like the renderer I exported with isn't supported by your GPU. I just uploaded a couple "-OpenGL-Fallback" versions that use a fallback OpenGL renderer instead. Hopefully that will work!

Unentokku10 Jan 2023, 10:22

@const-arch It works! The game seems interesting.

LDJam user 010 Jan 2023, 13:40

I dont like the graphics,I will feel uncomfortable.

Horda10 Jan 2023, 18:51

Very fun game, I'd like to play more, unfortunately the game crashed 2 times on new event. (can't click on event, windows turns white, processing smthg? )
The game is very well written its humour is a nice take !

const_archauthor10 Jan 2023, 21:46

@horda Uh oh, sorry about that. What OS are you on?

const_archauthor10 Jan 2023, 22:30

@horda Thanks for mentioning that it was on an event! I tracked down a division by zero in two events and put up new builds with that fixed.

bentglasstube11 Jan 2023, 02:51

This game was fun and the concept was quite entertaining. Overall the pacing dragged a little bit and the news flashes were pretty disruptive, but I enjoyed playing.

Horda11 Jan 2023, 04:42

@const_arch You're welcome! I played the game on windows 11.

streq12 Jan 2023, 02:15

Awesome game! really fun to play and strategize, funny dialogues and overall setting. Also appreciated the leaderboards, those are always a plus. The newsflashes get a bit annoying after a bit, but that's bound to happen to every game with a text heavy event system. Overall a really enjoyable and unique game!

givit-game-studios12 Jan 2023, 07:31

Not really sure how to play this game. It took me a couple of tries on where to click and what to click. I think a bit of feedback during the game would have been nice. Also is harvesting souls a bad thing? Becuase my score went down, I thought when you harvest souls your score would go up and start winning? But neither less I like the idea congratulation.

KekkoDude12 Jan 2023, 08:21

Søsiål Mediæty... Click Like and Share, dont forget to upvote, follow and subscribe, And for the extra devoted here's a link to my patreon page!

Liked it a lot, my only wish is that the shop would stay open after i did a purchase, other than that, pretty neat! Kudos to everyone who made it on the leaderboard!

KekkoDude12 Jan 2023, 08:21

I'm sorry, dont know what happened here

KekkoDude12 Jan 2023, 08:21

Or here for that matter....

adam-gould12 Jan 2023, 10:03

A very interesting take on the Plague Inc-style genre! Took me a bit of time to figure out what everything was for, but discovering that was part of the fun (for me anyway). The balancing act of "I need to harvest but leave enough people behind to not destroy my recruitment" seems to be the core of the decision making process and worked pretty well. Well done!

LDJam user 31517012 Jan 2023, 15:21

Hey this game is pretty good, the biggest killer for me is the lack of sound effects and how long the game dragged on. I also seemed to be playing the game wrong and accumulated a huge disadvantage against the tentacle guy. The story and presentation is quite funny though, good job overall! I'd recommend possibly making the game shorter or otherwise improving the pacing. It becomes quite tedious after a while.

Tiseno12 Jan 2023, 17:34

Pretty awesome, I spent way too much time trying to optimize the ramp haha. I was a little confused at what the ultimate goal was (obviously getting as many followers/souls, and more than the tentacle, but the actual win-condition)
Then I was a little confused at first at what the currency was.
All in all, would be a writhing mass of eyes and flesh again 5/5 humor.

caeonosphere12 Jan 2023, 22:38

I've often asked myself: what if Hellstar Remina had a social media presence? Now I know. Adding a rival was a good way to differentiate from the typical sim. I'm a little ashamed that it took me over 500 days to win!

Pincushion13 Jan 2023, 00:00

This is a pretty unique game. Hilarious premise and dialogue. Nice combinations of things to do. I appreciate the scale of it, it really ramps up and starts going quick. It looked pretty good. The souls rising from the planet were a nice touch. The speed setting was really nice too. The core gameplay was fun.

The news popups were really funny at first, but they were annoying after a while.

I wasn't clear on the effects on the soul purchases. I got the gist that they either helped me or hurt my dear brother, but nothing beyond that. It would have been nice to see their effects, and in general more clarity on why the numbers were what they were.

island-jam-2-group-313 Jan 2023, 22:59

I am not really into "clickers" but nice entry! and Godot FTW! :-P

Orhu14 Jan 2023, 00:11

Fun game! After a few minutes of blindly playing around, I figured out what was going on and started doing really well. Really nice work on this. It was a lot of fun!

Chase of Bass15 Jan 2023, 23:02

This was really fun and addictive -liked the humor too -awesome job on this! :D

Itskdog15 Jan 2023, 23:12

Nice job with this clicker game. It's the second one I've played so far. I like the speed controls and the random events, although I thought they occurred too often.

Mephistase23 Jan 2023, 18:42

This is the best game I tried so far!

It is witty, funny, working, pleasant!

Lovecraft/10, would it a planet again!

(spoiler, focus on asia)