Quiet Life by VDZ
(Updated on December 18th, 2014 (version 4); for the original version, see the second and third links. For just playing for fun, the new version is STRONGLY recommended due to many, many improvements being made.)
ANY POTENTIAL FUTURE UPDATES WILL BE POSTED TO THIS PAGE.
The world is calm and peaceful. There are no enemies around,
nothing around you poses a threat to your life...and you're
starving to death, rapidly.
Starting from nothing, try to build and craft to maintain a
(somewhat resembling) stable food supply to survive for as
long as possible. Then try to do the same as winter takes
away most of your options of getting food. And if you somehow
manage to survive even that, every new year will make you get
hungry faster. How long can you survive?
(Note: Everything except the sound and base rules* (sorry, ran
out of time) is fully moddable; you can replace all graphics,
rewrite all item and tile scripts and even add your own (and
change the map generation script to spawn them).)
* UPDATE: In the post-LD version these are now moddable as well.
This game is Windows-only.
Controls: (different in post-LD version: see the readme)
Numpad - Move (8-directional)
Z - Use held item or interact with object under you
X - Pick up item from ground/swap held item with ground/drop held item
(Alternatively, movement can be done with arrow keys or WASD, with Home/End/PgUp/PgDown for diagonals. Enter and space can be used instead of Z and X.)
F or Alt-Enter - Toggle fullscreen mode
Escape - Quit the game
The sound is kind of bad and there's no music; both problems are remedied in the post-LD version.
Some tips:
- Interact with a tree trunk to get 'Branch'. Combine it with 'Stone' to
get the 'Stone Axe', a very important item. Many interactions will work
like this.
- There are three ways to get food: Fishing, planting crops and butchering
sheep. Sheep can be killed with any tool except for the Stone Axe. To
craft a fishing net, you need a Crafting Table and something to craft it
from.
- Many items, among which all kinds of food, decay if left on the ground.
They will not decay when held, and in fact the decay timer is reset when
you pick up the item.
- It's possible to craft wooden floors (and walls). Stuff left on wooden
floors decays four times as slowly as it would normally decay.
- Don't kill the sheep immediately. After some time, the sheep will
reproduce (somehow, despite no other sheep being in the area). If there
are no sheep left, no new ones will be born!
- Fire destroys everything except raw food items, which will be roasted.
Roasted items will be destroyed by fire, though!
This game is public domain. Feel free to do whatever you want with it.
ANY POTENTIAL FUTURE UPDATES WILL BE POSTED TO THIS PAGE.
The world is calm and peaceful. There are no enemies around,
nothing around you poses a threat to your life...and you're
starving to death, rapidly.
Starting from nothing, try to build and craft to maintain a
(somewhat resembling) stable food supply to survive for as
long as possible. Then try to do the same as winter takes
away most of your options of getting food. And if you somehow
manage to survive even that, every new year will make you get
hungry faster. How long can you survive?
(Note: Everything except the sound and base rules* (sorry, ran
out of time) is fully moddable; you can replace all graphics,
rewrite all item and tile scripts and even add your own (and
change the map generation script to spawn them).)
* UPDATE: In the post-LD version these are now moddable as well.
This game is Windows-only.
Controls: (different in post-LD version: see the readme)
Numpad - Move (8-directional)
Z - Use held item or interact with object under you
X - Pick up item from ground/swap held item with ground/drop held item
(Alternatively, movement can be done with arrow keys or WASD, with Home/End/PgUp/PgDown for diagonals. Enter and space can be used instead of Z and X.)
F or Alt-Enter - Toggle fullscreen mode
Escape - Quit the game
The sound is kind of bad and there's no music; both problems are remedied in the post-LD version.
Some tips:
- Interact with a tree trunk to get 'Branch'. Combine it with 'Stone' to
get the 'Stone Axe', a very important item. Many interactions will work
like this.
- There are three ways to get food: Fishing, planting crops and butchering
sheep. Sheep can be killed with any tool except for the Stone Axe. To
craft a fishing net, you need a Crafting Table and something to craft it
from.
- Many items, among which all kinds of food, decay if left on the ground.
They will not decay when held, and in fact the decay timer is reset when
you pick up the item.
- It's possible to craft wooden floors (and walls). Stuff left on wooden
floors decays four times as slowly as it would normally decay.
- Don't kill the sheep immediately. After some time, the sheep will
reproduce (somehow, despite no other sheep being in the area). If there
are no sheep left, no new ones will be born!
- Fire destroys everything except raw food items, which will be roasted.
Roasted items will be destroyed by fire, though!
This game is public domain. Feel free to do whatever you want with it.
| Download (post-LD version (v4)) - Download this if you want to PLAY | http://www.stack.nl/~vdz/misc/QuietLifelatest.zip |
| Download + .NET/XNA installers (v1) - This version was JUDGED | http://www.stack.nl/~vdz/misc/QuietLifePlusXNANET.zip |
| Download (v1) - This version was JUDGED | http://www.stack.nl/~vdz/misc/QuietLife.zip |
| Item Chart (recommended viewing) (LD version) | http://i.xomf.com/zjjqn.png |
| Source (SVN; Visual Studio 2010, C#/XNA) | http://www.vdzserver.org/ld31/ |
| Original URL | https://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=7284 |
Ratings
| Coolness | 41% | 1659 |
| Overall | 3.20 | 546 |
| Audio | 2.22 | 801 |
| Fun | 3.00 | 636 |
| Graphics | 2.56 | 905 |
| Humor | 2.17 | 780 |
| Innovation | 2.88 | 744 |
| Mood | 2.96 | 523 |
| Theme | 3.44 | 769 |
- Be less verbose in your game description. Try to stick to a short description.
- In the tips section your are mentioning many very things that confuse me as a new player.
- When I use an axe next to a tree (or any object next to anything) if there is only one thing it can be used on then don't require the user to manually select the direction.
- Ultimately you need to streamline your player's controls, try to put yourself in a new player's shoes.
- After dying once from starvation I am starting to figure out what to do.
- I think having the relevant info on the right inst helping because I keep having to look over.
- Make Holding and Under You items more prominent. Like bottom middle of screen
- I am starving and trying to kill a sheep with an axe to make food and it won't let me.
- I would kill a sheep or light something on fire if I knew how, but I can't seem to figure it out.
- I bashed a sheep's brains out with a stone from desperate starvation, but can't seem to eat it and died.
- I managed to make a wooden wall before starving for a 4th time.
- I made a shovel. Made clay, I keep making kilns while starving.
- After way too much time I was able to chop up sheep meat with an axe to recover a tiny fraction of hunger. I will take that as a small victory.
I lost myself at: "Under you: Dead sheep"
Excellent game!
Some of the sounds were a bit confusing, though - given that there aren't any animations, and there's a BIG set of tiles to assess every turn, I didn't always know what some of the beeps were for.
Also, I had a bit of a sheepaggedon by late winter... maybe put a cap on the number of sheep that can exist at any given point?
Fully agreed on all points, that's why in the post-LD version (as of version 3) they're all fixed (balancing makes sure you keep struggling to survive, complete sound overhaul, sheep eat grass and die if they can't eat).
I managed to survive through the winter on tomatoes. Are the tomatoes supposed to be an option here? The game description implied my food options would be reduced, so I assumed the plants would stop growing but they kept producing food for me all winter.
That is indeed a bug, though one I was aware of and didn't bother fixing as it doesn't really matter much balance-wise (with the explosive sheep growth you could also just eat sheep all winter, that'll also delay the inevitable sheep apocalypse). Death by sheep is indeed inevitable in the compo version; such are the limits of compo playtesting.
In the post-compo version, sheep will starve if there are too many in a certain area, while completed crops will wither if you don't harvest them in winter (and non-completed crops just won't grow until summer). On the other hand, the post-compo version does allow you to permanently store cooked food and tomatoes.
The concept is used but it works here. I like the crafting system, even if it take me some time to learn it.
It could be great to improve the graphics assets and add some music, right? Also, increasing the map, more environments, adding dangerous creatures and more crafting options could be awesome.
Overall, I like it :)
I think the game's strongest point is the general idea behind the mechanics and how motivating it is/can be. Finding out all the tools and figure out ways to survive really is quite appealing and rewarding.
Well, it's rather obvious that the visuals could need some work - simple item icons are OK, but gras/sand/water make it almost painful to look at for longer periods of time (but then again, my game has a similar, if not worse problem :D). Even just replacing the black background of each tile with an appropriate color makes quite a difference.
Either way, I even went as far as downloading and playing the post-LD version and am rather proud of growing and eating my first tomato, so there's that!
I had fun learning the game as an iterative process driven by the joy of discovery. I feel a game like this should not necessarily have even the most basic tutorial because the fun lies the discovery process. As I came to find; as soon as I had figured out how to survive the winter and live til the sheepocalypse stagnation set in and it wasn't that fun anymore. This is where "more stuff" comes in, but asking for more from a compo entry would be ludicrous and its not the the point. What you have here works and is fun to figure out.
The amount of stuff you've managed to implement in a compo entry is impressive to say the least. Great work!