Copulus by zapaman

[raw]
made by zapaman for LD30 (COMPO)
Copulus - the love making and weight lifting simulator / god game is a 2D tile-based game, designed around the limitations of a NDS screen, in which the player assumes the role of a God. He must train and provide food for his warriors, in order to make them stronger, and more attractive. The goal of the game is to raise the tribe's population to the maximum (50), in order to send them to connect and populate other worlds.

Mini Tutorial:
Hunt: You summon a pack of wolves (4 + nrOfSummons) that can be devoured by your followers. Note that wolves will attack and engage them. Killing a wolf fills the individual's hunger bar and awards XP.
Train: Your followers begin lifting weights to gain XP and increase their level (and damage / defense). While training the hunger bar depletes faster.
Idle: Your followers roam around the island and engage in social activity, in search of a mate. If a mate has been found visual indication (in the form of a heart) will appear above their heads. While in the idle mode, hunger depletes slowly and Health is regenerated.

Goal: reach 50 individuals in your tribe.
Loose: if you have less then 2 individuals (since you know, 0 or 1 cannot pro-create).

The hunger bar is the yellow one on the left side of a follower. Health bar is the red one over their head. The number to the right represents the level.

The game requires you to manage and switch between summoning wolves, training (to defeat stronger wolves) and "copulating" to increase your tribe's population.

Currently (24-08-2014) only the windows build is available (it includes the source code). I will submit a Linux and Mac OSX (and maybe android) tomorrow (been up for 43h, and I gotta go to work in the morning). The source code and assets are made available under the MIT license. Feel free to use them how ever you see fit.

The game features "random generated islands", asexual weight lifters, wolves, portals, hearts and gore.

I will write a post-mortem on my experience with building a bare-minimum god-game tomorrow evening, including how helpful it was to have a WIKI as a notebook. If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment or poke me on twitter (@Zapakitul)

--------------------
If you are wondering why the game has that art style or (upscaled) low resolution graphics, here are the limitations I set for myself at the beginning of this challenge:
Self-Imposed Limitations:

Must involve some kind of an AI
256 / 384 resolution (Nintendo DS style)
32 color palette
Mouse only (touch applies)
32x32 sprites ( 8 / 6 tiles) or 16x16 (16 / 12 tiles)


Edit: Copulus comes from: Populous (a great god game) and Copulation :)

Edit2: Android version up. I only tested it on a Nexus 4 and a High-end 'droid tablet. No idea how it runs on less-powerful devices.

Ratings

Coolness 67% 3
Overall 3.21 555
Audio 2.25 775
Fun 2.89 689
Graphics 3.50 301
Humor 2.50 436
Innovation 3.00 677
Mood 2.76 755
Theme 2.16 1111

Feedback

datacr4sh
25. Aug 2014 路 00:06 UTC
fun game, great art!
Kedume Bits
25. Aug 2014 路 07:42 UTC
I like the graphic stuff.
gwa
25. Aug 2014 路 09:16 UTC
i like it but i am a bad god :)
Kuupu
25. Aug 2014 路 10:24 UTC
Nice concept!
I couldn't manage to win yet :(
What kind of algorithm did you use to generate the world?
馃帳 zapaman
25. Aug 2014 路 10:40 UTC
@Kuupu: it's a simple 'algorithm'. Create a map that's all water. Then, take 3 passes over it.

First Pass:
- select a random tile on the map
- move around the tile in a clock wise rotation (spiral) and mark random tiles in your path as grass tiles
- the more grass neighbors a tile has, the more chances to become a grass tile
- repeat this process <mapWidth/2> times

Second Pass:
- loop through the entire map again and check for single grass tiles (separated from the land-mass)
- remove all (or mostly all) stray grass tiles

Third Pass:
- loop through the map and place trees and mountains on grass regions that have grass neighbors. Bonus points if you can center the trees/bushes around the center of an island
- finally, check to see if a grass tile has a water tile beneath it. If so, replace the water tile with a transition tile between grass and water.

There are a few more in-depth articles that cover a similar usage if you search for island procedural generation on google.
LostTrainDude
25. Aug 2014 路 11:57 UTC
Being a fan of the genre, I really loved to see a game like this between the entries.

You did a great job in the short span we had to develop. It's maybe still unbalanced (or maybe I just suck at it :P) but I hope to see an enhanced version sooner or later!

Congratulations!
Flyinpig5
25. Aug 2014 路 12:05 UTC
Fun little game! Really liked the art style of it! Not too sure how it is linked in with the theme, though...
tigerbyte
25. Aug 2014 路 12:43 UTC
Fun little game. I managed to kill all my guys in record time!
Jesper Oskarsson
25. Aug 2014 路 12:54 UTC
The idle mode was sort of uninteresting for me, it just seemed like a lot of waiting and my population seemed to increase anyway although maybe not quickly? At least I think it would help being able to see some progress in the idle state?

I found a bug where a member would get stuck in hunt mode and not being able to attack. Might happen just on the portals?

Also when a new member was born they would always be too weak and get eaten as soon as I hunt. No matter how much I trained.

Otherwise, was fun to play! :D
JaJ
25. Aug 2014 路 15:11 UTC
I didn't get past 6, died of hunger hunting for food each time. Other than that, the game is really charming.
capsizedmoose
25. Aug 2014 路 17:13 UTC
it's a little buggy but it's pretty fun :D i like the easy controlls :)
From Smiling
25. Aug 2014 路 17:41 UTC
Enjoyable! I like the idea, and the graphics suit it well! I feel like the game is sort of arbitrary / random though, sometimes they would just never mate, and some ai would just run away and starve
royvanrijn
26. Aug 2014 路 09:51 UTC
Loved it!
robbiehunt
26. Aug 2014 路 13:00 UTC
This seemed like the sort of game I wouldn't enjoy.

But it totally changed my mind, I played more than twice. Nice job, now I'm curious about more games like this. I hope you develop this further!
DrPrettyPatty
27. Aug 2014 路 04:54 UTC
That was unbelievably hard! I did better when I started off training them half to death then hunting, but I never managed to beat it. Great job though, I'm really impressed that you managed this in 48 hours!
bogdanmaier49
27. Aug 2014 路 13:50 UTC
Interesant :)
KevinZuhn
27. Aug 2014 路 20:02 UTC
Boy, I cannot get these goblins to live, even when it spawns a bunch of them for me. I can't seem to see any health indicators on wolves, so I can't tell whether my people are hitting them or not, and sometimes I get goblins that just don't fight or wander off into the corner of the map and starve. It makes me wish I had some kind of rally point to send them all to, and/or gather and share food so that one strong goblin doesn't keep killing and eating all the wolves before the others can get there.
Noah Ratcliff
01. Sep 2014 路 00:14 UTC
Interesting concept. It seemed like at times my subjects would not feed, and that resulted in them inevitably dying off :(
damrem
01. Sep 2014 路 12:15 UTC
Couldn't get more than 6 warriors at once, but loved the concept.
runvs
10. Sep 2014 路 18:36 UTC
Nice Idea, though i did not really manage to create a tribe with enough people. I think this could work great as a tamagotchi for grown ups.
Sound would have been nice.