Epic Galactic Conquest by madk

[raw]
made by madk for LD30 (COMPO)
Epic Galactic Conquest was written in about 5 hours on the 24th of August because I'm a forgetful idiot, didn't remember there was a competition going on until Saturday night and didn't have a workable idea until Sunday afternoon. It's more proof-of-concept than a complete game but hopefully you'll still be able to get some enjoyment out of it.

In Epic Galactic Conquest your objective is to connect all the worlds in the galaxy by conquering them via extreme military force. Every world's native population can contribute one of three resources to your sovereign empire when enslaved and requires expenditure of that same resource to conquer. Red worlds are associated with Radium, green worlds Germanium, and blue worlds Blutonium. Every conquered world contributes two units of its associated resource per second; the amount needed to conquer a world is displayed in white when you can afford it and gray when you can't. You can only see the conquering cost of worlds adjacent to worlds you already own.

You can pan the interface view by right-clicking and dragging, you can zoom the view using the mouse wheel. Click on worlds with numbers displayed in white to direct your forces to conquer them.

Your resource stores are calculated longhand by domesticated android bookkeepers and their results are displayed in the top-left corner of your interface, as is how long you've spent so far conquering the galaxy. Worlds you control are indicated by a thick white outline. All worlds have three adjacent neighbors, and these potential connections are indicated by white lines. You can only conquer worlds where you control at least one of their neighbors. Worlds where you control all three neighbors are automatically conquered by locally-brainwashed militias. You can press the escape key at any time to generate a new galaxy for conquering. Compete with your friends to see who can conquer identically-seeded galaxies the fastest!

Ratings

Coolness 56% 3
Overall 2.66 1036
Fun 2.71 840
Graphics 2.45 957
Humor 1.50 931
Innovation 3.06 634
Mood 2.23 1047
Theme 3.29 534

Feedback

Fanatrick
25. Aug 2014 · 03:35 UTC
Getting a "not commonly downloaded and could be dangerous" on chrome. It's a false positive, the game works fine.
Tosic
25. Aug 2014 · 16:04 UTC
Me too, looks nice, although :)
Gaeel
26. Aug 2014 · 21:23 UTC
Interesting idea, shame you didn't get the time to flesh it out a little more...
Moosefly
26. Aug 2014 · 21:26 UTC
If you want to fix the false-positive with Chrome upload the game somewhere else than Dropbox. Seems like Google doesn't trust Dropbox :P.

Clicked this because it looked like an almost 1:1 copy of our game, but they proved to be quite different. It is indeed really barebones though, so sadly not too much fun at the moment.

Anssi@MooseflyGames
Mekuri
26. Aug 2014 · 21:27 UTC
I loved this game. I played it a few times, and it's really addicting. I did encounter one slightly annoying thing- I ended up in a game where I couldn't do anything until after 40 seconds had passed as all the planets around me required quite a lot of resources- The seed was 0000 I think, but that really is a minor issue. I loved the idea, and I might end up playing it again sometime, as I really enjoyed it! Good work!
MintArcade
26. Aug 2014 · 21:28 UTC
Looks interesting, considering 5 hours of work. Nice gameplay.
Lvyn
26. Aug 2014 · 22:10 UTC
Good concept, but resources should grow faster. You should not let the player inactive ;)
little-burrito
26. Aug 2014 · 22:19 UTC
Impressive considering how fast you made it! I think it's a fun game even in this state. It's definitely something that could get me hooked.
OFF
26. Aug 2014 · 22:19 UTC
Get back work on this right now : obvious, classic, strategic, simple, addicting, suitable for a mobile device. Do you hear me?

I love this game.

I said GET BACK TO WORK! :)
granut100
26. Aug 2014 · 22:22 UTC
Good concept, although wish the galaxies were larger :)
X-0r
26. Aug 2014 · 22:22 UTC
The game starts out really slowly... I wish there were some enemies, or anything trying to stop you. But for the (very) short time - good job!
🎤 madk
26. Aug 2014 · 23:20 UTC
Good to hear from all of you! If I could do it over I'd definitely want to start the player off with some resources. I also wanted initially to make it a game where you fought another player for control but ain't nobody got time for AI like that. Would've had options for galaxy size and such too but, again, not much one can do in five hours.
Lord bobyness
26. Aug 2014 · 23:40 UTC
Yeah, I forgot about the last few LD's. Nice to see you still entered and put something out even with only a few hours to spare.

Considering the time you had it's really not bad at all.
HoboMechanistic
26. Aug 2014 · 23:41 UTC
This is a very fun game :) gameplay is pretty addictive. I like the three-neighbours design mechanic, since it felt rewarding conquering an expensive world by capturing all the cheaper neighbours :D good game, sir
Lord bobyness
26. Aug 2014 · 23:41 UTC
Yeah, I forgot about the last few LD's. Nice to see you still entered and put something out even with only a few hours to spare.

Considering the time you had it's really not bad at all.
ZoneOne2
26. Aug 2014 · 23:42 UTC
Not bad, I can see some potential here.
CoolIron
27. Aug 2014 · 03:58 UTC
Nice results for 5 hours! I would like to see post-compo version because this one is already fun and addictive. I like when simple concept gives so much fun :)
AlucardX60
28. Aug 2014 · 01:10 UTC
Not bad for 5 hours honestly. But without something that can negatively effect you the only challenge is seeing how fast you can clear a seed. Even then you just zoom out and click numbers as the turn white. But with just a few easy changed you could make something good from this. I'd be interested if you made a postmortem version.
Lasty
28. Aug 2014 · 02:29 UTC
Cool idea. The graph/nodes and RGB really appealed to my computer scientist side :)

Was not immediately obvious what to do though. Maybe some tutorial popup text "click here to attack" could have worked. And maybe scale the inner nodes down a bit to speed up the initial game. (Or maybe I just rolled a bad seed)
Marcellus
28. Aug 2014 · 03:50 UTC
too bad you had only 5 hours. the description was cool tho.
whilefun
28. Aug 2014 · 04:12 UTC
105.89s...is that good? :) This is visually interesting, reminds me of chemistry and molecules and things. I hope you flesh out the idea some more.
Amvere
28. Aug 2014 · 04:16 UTC
Interesting concept! It feels like a cool start to a game, but for now it is kind of "wait to win".
RodRoy1
28. Aug 2014 · 17:03 UTC
I cant get this to work, it doesn't seem to be generating resources at all. I like the idea though at it looks like a lot of fun.
Norgg
01. Sep 2014 · 09:55 UTC
Since the aim is to try and win as quickly as possible, it really needs to save a high score (or list of). The surrounding mechanic is cool, but the resources being completely isolated from each other seems odd, how about splitting it up so that things don't always only produce what they're captured with?
🎤 madk
04. Sep 2014 · 02:24 UTC
I agree! I would've loved to do more with it had I more time. I've been working slowly on a post-compo version, hopefully it'll be a big improvement.
HuvaaKoodia
04. Sep 2014 · 21:46 UTC
It sure is simple. I like it!

Few ideas for the PostLD version:

-Turn based gamemode. Points for using as few moves as possible.

-AI Opponent(s). Quite obvious, but even a dumb (random) one could make a big difference.

-Victory conditions. Even more obvious. You can get clever with these.

Also the world generator seems quite similar to mine. Hmm. Simplicity for the win!
Tex Killer
06. Sep 2014 · 04:02 UTC
Very impressive for just 5 hours of work! Never heard of this BlitzMax before.

By the way, I see that you tried to run my game last week, but couldn't. I've detected and fixed some memory errors that were being ignored on debugging, so you're welcome to try it again if you like! :)