Ludum Dare #54compo
Memory
Choose which memories to save on each milestone of your life, and try to live positively overall.
- Procedural music
- Skills and Knowledge (yellow and cyan memories) only provide skill points for the Subject/Sphere they are in
- Memories will fade over time and provide less skill points; they will fade slower if they are next to a memory of the same Subject or Sphere
- All slots must be filled before you can advance to the next milestone (unslotted memories are lost)
- You can also pull out and replace memories with different ones, good to do with faded memories that are not providing the stat bonuses they once did
- Experiences (green memories) are either positive or negative, and the chances of it being positive increase the higher your total skill is for whatever Subject and Sphere it is
- Slotting a positive Experience gives you +! Outlook at the end of the game; slotting a negative Experience gives you -1 Outlook
- Experiences provide stat points like Skills and Knowledge, and negative Experiences generally provide higher levels of them, so it may be worth taking a negative hit briefly in order to improve the odds of positive Experiences later
- Experiences have a chance of being Important (white memory) or Traumatic (black memory), which will fade slower than usual
- All Traumatic memories MUST be slotted before you can advance
- If you ever have more Traumatic memories than you can slot, the game immediately ends; otherwise, it will end after age 80
- At the end, you will be given your final Outlook, as well as which Subject and Sphere you had gotten the highest during the game
- Graphics: Gimp 2.10.20
- Music: Reaper v5.983/x64
- If a memory fades enough, it will go back to being strong again instead of staying faded
- Advance button sometimes doesn't go away at end of game
- Probably a lot of tuning that still needs to be done
- The game needed to have a way to see your total stats, or to more easily tell what each memory contained without having to hover over it, but time ran out before I could implement these features
Features
- In-game tutorial- Procedural music
Detailed Gameplay Rules
- Memories have one of three Subjects (Science, Art, or Physical), and one of three Spheres (Family, Self, or Community)- Skills and Knowledge (yellow and cyan memories) only provide skill points for the Subject/Sphere they are in
- Memories will fade over time and provide less skill points; they will fade slower if they are next to a memory of the same Subject or Sphere
- All slots must be filled before you can advance to the next milestone (unslotted memories are lost)
- You can also pull out and replace memories with different ones, good to do with faded memories that are not providing the stat bonuses they once did
- Experiences (green memories) are either positive or negative, and the chances of it being positive increase the higher your total skill is for whatever Subject and Sphere it is
- Slotting a positive Experience gives you +! Outlook at the end of the game; slotting a negative Experience gives you -1 Outlook
- Experiences provide stat points like Skills and Knowledge, and negative Experiences generally provide higher levels of them, so it may be worth taking a negative hit briefly in order to improve the odds of positive Experiences later
- Experiences have a chance of being Important (white memory) or Traumatic (black memory), which will fade slower than usual
- All Traumatic memories MUST be slotted before you can advance
- If you ever have more Traumatic memories than you can slot, the game immediately ends; otherwise, it will end after age 80
- At the end, you will be given your final Outlook, as well as which Subject and Sphere you had gotten the highest during the game
Tools Used:
- Engine: Unity 2021.3.0f1 (Did not have enough time to learn Godot well enough)- Graphics: Gimp 2.10.20
- Music: Reaper v5.983/x64
Known Issues
- Can't fullscreen the HTML5 version, and for some reason it will ONLY run here on the LD page; it would not work on itch.io- If a memory fades enough, it will go back to being strong again instead of staying faded
- Advance button sometimes doesn't go away at end of game
- Probably a lot of tuning that still needs to be done
- The game needed to have a way to see your total stats, or to more easily tell what each memory contained without having to hover over it, but time ran out before I could implement these features
Comments21
Always like a sound control.
I'm not sure if I did well or not, I lived until 80, but I think I became a bitter old man, with a negative outlook. But I still cared about family, so maybe it's not all bad?
Very unique take on the theme that made me go "of course, that's genius" with the limited memory capacity. I loved the setup, how you can first hold more, and then almost kinda depressingly, lose more and more. The music also set this transcendental tone and mood that fit really well I thought. Very cool game, loved it, great job!
I was able to get an ending outlook of -228 by always filling the grid with bad experiences (does that make me a terrible person?)
What an adventure! Had one adventure where I just kept adding "bad" memories until it was pretty much the whole mind...
I guess I didn't have a very good outlook on life. I think that might have been due to the number of negative versus positive experiences? Overall, I really enjoyed that this game did not have win/lose stakes. It was all about the experience. Thank you for sharing that.
The game explained that some memories can be negative at the time that yellow appeared so I thought that yellow were negative, and it explained traumatic memories at the time that green appeared, so I thought that green was traumatic, But then later I saw black traumatic memories and I realized that blue/yellow/green were categorized into experience/skill/knowledge. There were also sparkles and other visual effects on the green nodes that I think indicated good or bad things but I don't entirely know what each one means.
It would have been nice to have some visual indication of which attributes each memory contains, like physical family and art so that I can group them more effectively.
The area shrinking when you get old was pretty dramatic.