Ludum Dare 23
April 20th-23rd 2012 :: 10 Year Anniversary! :: Theme: Tiny World
Minor Deities - maranas - 48 Hour Compo Entry
My first LD48 game! It's called Minor Deities. This is a simple text strategy game. You are a minor deity, in charge of you own tiny corner of the universe. The goal is to make your people survive just by controlling the elements.
Created with Basic4GL, sources included in the archive. The built binary runs on Windows XP and newer.
Sounds were made with sfxr, graphics with SpriteSomething on the iPad and edited on the PC with Gimp and Paint :). I know my art skills need a lot of work :))))
View maranas's journal. | View all entries by maranas
Ratings
![]() | Coolness | 81% |
| #245 | Humor | 2.64 |
| #485 | Innovation | 2.81 |
| #572 | Fun | 2.57 |
| #595 | Theme | 2.68 |
| #618 | Mood | 2.38 |
| #670 | Audio | 1.78 |
| #726 | Overall | 2.49 |
| #802 | Graphics | 2.10 |
Comments
Nice little text game. It's kinda fun to experiment all the game-over's :)
1st attempt:
"Send a Prophet" - "Civilization has ended because of war". On the first turn. That's not cool, guys...
2nd attempt:
"Rain" - "The land is fertile"
"Send a Prophet" - "Civilization has ended because of war". Damn! What's this prophet of yours telling people?? Also, they go from "don't know how to travel" to "learned space travel" in 1 turn. Smart guys! Except for the fact that they had already destroyed their civilization through war.
Don't know. I like the concept, but having to learn the "right" order to do things (as using a command eliminates it from the list) through trial and error, instead of letting me, a deity, choose my path, turns me off.
Sorry.
@tentontoon: no prob, thanks for rating. the goal really is to keep a good balance between intelligence (scientific knowledge) and belief, so people won't be too greedy to wage war, or too faithful to have conflicting beliefs. You also have to make sure your people survive natural disasters by making them learn from experience. E.g. If you send a tornade before they have learned to built stone houses, they die.
Interesting and very compelling game. I like that you can only use each option once -- it reminds me of the "EyeMaze" games, have you ever seen them?
Here are some constructive criticisms:
1- The game exits when you lose. Since it is so easy to lose the game, there should be a way to quickly restart it. As it is right now, if you lose, you also lose a lot of time launching the game again.
2- Can you make it not use fullscreen? On bigger monitors, the fonts start to get blurry. Also, windowed is always nicer.
3- There doesn't seem to be a lot of indication of what winning/losing intelligence and faith means, and I couldn't see a clear indicator of when the world would survive the various catastrophes.
Because of 1, I didn't make it to the end of the game, but gratz on the effort!
At the end I just was choosing randomly and people survived everything.
Reminds me of a certain other God game, Sandbox of God. Funny. Bit buggy and short though.
This is awesome. Love the way a single prophet destroyed an entire civilization, lol.
Admittedly, I am a sucker for choice text-based games, but it would be nice if there was more internal 'logic' to the consequences of your choices. Also, the text was very blurry on fullscreen on my computer. I do really like the concept though - as someone mentioned, it reminded me very much of Sandbox of God.
I was able to get my score up 120! It was interesting I couldn't always choose a good option or what i thought would be good. Sort of sad how the civilization would always die. After fire and rain I wasn't sure how the people were doing... maybe more text hinting at what the people might possibly need (or want and we need to figure out what the need)?
Was fun to try all the different choices. Was annoying that the game exited when I lost. I was also confused about how the technology was learned. I had all the choices done besides tornado, but when I selected tornado I still lost.
It was kinda fun trying out different combinations of things (although I could never get them to survive the tornado). But I agree with others that the outcome of your actions felt random and so it was just trial and error.
It crashed when I used Volcanic Eruption first.
It was fun going through all the options, although my main criticism would be that many options seemed to have no direct effect.
Would've been nice to have an option for windowed mode!
Really great concept, though.
Reminds me somewhat of old C-64 games... But it seems that I just have to guess the correct order of options. :(
Awesome concept ! I loved how you really had to be aware of what your population learned before sending shit on them. The war idea was brilliant too. Lots of different paths, its very rewarding to experiment.
Only once I got my people to learn how to make castle but they died at the same time.
Final score 170.
Nice game. It would have been nice to have a windowed mode option. It was pretty interesting though :)
I found some of the interactions hilarious. Interesting concept!
Nice concept. Everything I tried just resulted in a Game Over.
Nice little game, excellent concept, wish it was more logical and predictable.
Happy game. Could do with some explanation of what each option might do. The game rarely lasts longer than 3 or 4 turns because you have little direction even with the hints shown on the left.
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Hmm, the 'correct' order of the actions seems arbritrary. There seems to be no skill involved inchoosing the right option, just using meta gaming knowledge from previous attempts.