Earth Is Dying! by Attrition
The Earth is not big enough for everyone. Population growth combined with resource decline will drain what we have very shortly, we must expand! You must send as many refuges away from Earth as you can, before the planet is dead and humankind with it. Oh, and you have, like, 3 minutes.
How to play:
As soon as you pop into the game, Earth is quickly becoming a wasteland.
A/D/Left/Right: Move left/right along the solar system.
Space: Launch a rocketship with colonists from Earth
S: Launch a seed ship with resources from Earth
(debug) P: Restart game, so you don't have to close/reopen
The Point:
Save as many people from Earth as possible, the game ends when Earth dies. Your score is the number (in Millions) of people who are not on Earth at that time. People in ships don't count (to prevent cheating by launching to nowhere at the last moment). Have it planned. The game is meant to be played in about 2-3 minute attempts.
Sadly, I did not finish what I set out to do. I did not have the time on Sunday I had planned, so now I am releasing what I have. It is "gameplay complete", it plays, and there is a start and finish.
What isn't included:
Sound
Music
High score keeping
Help instructions
Aesthetics (proper graphics, backgrounds)
Better UI
I (luckily) had prototyped out my game on Saturday, so the gameplay is actually there.
What is included:
Windows executable and source code, of course. The source is a Unity project, it will generate an OSX app without issue, though I haven't included one here.
Tips:
Ships take time to reach their destinations, and also cost resources. With Earths resources already dwindling, you must balance out population growth on multiple planets to save as many people as possible.
If a planet hits 0 resources, all colonists die. Do not allow this!
How to play:
As soon as you pop into the game, Earth is quickly becoming a wasteland.
A/D/Left/Right: Move left/right along the solar system.
Space: Launch a rocketship with colonists from Earth
S: Launch a seed ship with resources from Earth
(debug) P: Restart game, so you don't have to close/reopen
The Point:
Save as many people from Earth as possible, the game ends when Earth dies. Your score is the number (in Millions) of people who are not on Earth at that time. People in ships don't count (to prevent cheating by launching to nowhere at the last moment). Have it planned. The game is meant to be played in about 2-3 minute attempts.
Sadly, I did not finish what I set out to do. I did not have the time on Sunday I had planned, so now I am releasing what I have. It is "gameplay complete", it plays, and there is a start and finish.
What isn't included:
Sound
Music
High score keeping
Help instructions
Aesthetics (proper graphics, backgrounds)
Better UI
I (luckily) had prototyped out my game on Saturday, so the gameplay is actually there.
What is included:
Windows executable and source code, of course. The source is a Unity project, it will generate an OSX app without issue, though I haven't included one here.
Tips:
Ships take time to reach their destinations, and also cost resources. With Earths resources already dwindling, you must balance out population growth on multiple planets to save as many people as possible.
If a planet hits 0 resources, all colonists die. Do not allow this!
Ratings
| Coolness | 71% | 3 |
| Overall | 2.75 | 571 |
| Audio | 1.30 | 742 |
| Fun | 2.90 | 390 |
| Graphics | 3.25 | 265 |
| Humor | 2.00 | 539 |
| Innovation | 3.77 | 84 |
| Mood | 2.96 | 279 |
| Theme | 3.21 | 336 |
It looks suitable for expansion into a game with more strategy, types of levels, etc. Polish and sound would help, but the game is already good :)
Anyway, I like the concept and really wish to see it developed further. It'd be interesting to have to deal with not only Earth Politics, but Venus/Mars/etc Politics at the same time and prevent complete and total anarchy from occurring as a result. Good luck!
This is a good idea, but could do with a few tweaks. I'd like to see all the planets in one view - it would make managing stuff easier. I'd also like some sort of global indication of how much time I have left before the end of the world - maybe a huge bar that stays glued to the bottom of the screen, to incite panic. :-)
Cool idea!
...although you'd think they'd send some of their 22-digit (and counting) resources back to feed Earth's 2-10M people. Greedy colonists! What did I ever do to them?
I've played maybe 10 times so far and I think it's pretty fun, but it sucks we can't make more resources. I guess that's the point of the game though :P
Here are a few suggestions to make your game more awesome
1- Show some sort of preset high score, so we can have some idea of how well we did
2- Decouple the death of the earth from the number of resources -- have the earth obey similar resource growth/reduction rules as the other planets, but also add a fixed timer for earth death
3- make the game a little slower paced (also reducing the rate of growth of other planets) - I think if the game lasted about 5-6 minutes instead of the current 2/3, it would allow us to try different tactics.
Cheers, and thanks for the unique game!
(PS: my highest score was around 24.000 btw)
(PPS: Also what jjwolf said!)
To address some common criticisms, I did want the game to last about 5 minutes, but tweaking my formulas for growth/reduction was time consuming, I never got it where I wanted it, thus the game ends very quickly. If I do a post-compo version (pretty likely), I'll have much more time to tweak these numbers.
A (local) highscore was planned but never implemented, which is too bad as it was likely just a 5 minute addition. I should have forced that time.
Originally I thought colonies would never be able to send back resources, but now I think the game could be extended simply by throwing resources (but not people) back at Earth. It may give you a couple minutes extra even if I don't tweak the rates. I'll have to play around.
I'm not in favour of Earth gaining resources -- in testing it proved that if you sent enough people away, the Earth would never die. But a fixed timer on Earth-death doesn't seem as interesting. I suppose you could have an asteroid hit at the 5 minute mark, but it feels a bit cheap.
Thanks again :)