I loved the idea of this game. The art and writing was fantastic. My major complaint is that early on in the game I didn't have enough resources to make any choices when an event happened. I think starting out with enough resources to at least have options I could take would go a long way in making me feel like I at least had some control over what was happening early. There were a few games where I just got unlucky and lost to attacks before I even had the option of doing anything. Overall I really enjoyed it!

Oops! Accidentally clicked publish twice, I don't see a way to delete this...

Nice world building game. I like some of the story flourishes.

The game feels a bit like it's playing itself, though. The vast, vast majority of the time in the early game, when an option comes up, there's only one possible option available. It would be nice if there were some way to have some agency over what happens, even if the other options are not currently available.

Also, the enemy fighters make the game a bit tedious. They come SO frequently that there's no point in acceding to their demands, because even if you do, another pirate will just show up the next time you hit the advance time button. If pirate attacks were infrequent, you might consider paying when they show up, but when it's pirate after pirate after pirate after pirate, you basically have no choice but to accept the attrition.

This brings up another point - it feels like you just sit there as ruler and let the enemy hammer you. There should be some way of taking charge of the situation. We should be able to recruit more colonists electively (rather than just waiting for someone to offer). We should be able to spend money to beef up our defenses (I think one time I got a "build planetary defenses", but it didn't appear to do anything, since pirates still came fairly often and killed by colonists). As it stands, you don't really get the sense of being a ruler because you just sit back and let things happen to you.

I liked the worker placement element you had going, but it almost never came into play. I managed to win the game on the first try, but never once did I come close to filling up my planet. The maximum number of colonists I ever had was five, I think, and even that was short lived. I would have liked to see more colonists coming in, more options for placing them, and more interesting choices as to what to do with them. Most of the time during play, I only had two workers, and it's pretty obvious what the distribution should be of those two workers across two potential jobs.

This game is interesting. I like the world, the UI mechanics, and the main gameplay loop. I think all it needs is some minor tweaks and a few more expansions to the core content, and it would be really slick.

Agree with @benbennett, its a great idea!

The story is well written and I am prepared to build up my little world and beat up my older brother!

Alas, it starts off without much to do and I can't help but piss off the empire and they come and murder my poor peasants... :-(

It reminds me of some game I played back in the early 90s... "A Second Universe" or something like that...

This game has the potential for me to sink hours (days) of my life into it!

Thank you all for the comments so far!

My thoughts about the progression through the game, were there are three distinctive "phases": In the beginning of your exile, you are struggling to survive, and have neither the resources or the influence to take advantage of the opportunities coming your way. Then, as you accumulate resources and colonists, you can gradually start to upgrade your colony, at which point you will start to be able to out-produce the pirate raids. Finally, in the late stages of the game, you are able to start aiming for the "economic" victory condition.

Alternatively, you can beeline for the "violent" ending, which is riskier, but can be undertaken earlier in the game.

Hence, the feeling of being the "underdog", especially in the beginning, was the intention. But I agree that sometimes this might not feel very fun, especially if you get a lot of bad events in the beginning (the chance of an event being a pirate raid is actually only about 30%, with the remaining going to the varying positive/opportunity events). Some more things to do in the beginning might alleviate this feeling somewhat, which I will definitely consider for my post-LD version.

The current planetary defense upgrade boosts the defense rate of your colony with a fixed percentage, so there is still a chance of losing, especially for the most dangerous enemies. There is some strategy involved in when to bribe the pirates vs. when to fight them, as weak pirates are relatively easy to fight off (and hence might not be worth the bribe).

An element I wanted to include, but did not have time for, was the addition of a "defense" facility. This would allow you to assign colonists to improve defense against pirates, as an alternative to assigning them to resource extraction.

Also, the visual feedback on what your max population is, could be clearer as well. This is determined by the size of the living quarters, hence the max population of the colony is 6, and the starting population cap is 3. It is therefore easy to reach the starting maximum (after which, colonist events no longer appears until you upgrade the living quarters, which can make it seem as if the colonist events are more rare than they actually are.

I liked this game, it remains me a lot of "reigns".
The frustrating part is that you can have a large amount of resources, but no way to spend it if engineers or merchants don't show up.
I'd like to be able to construct minor facilities on my own, to give more strategic option to player.

Also, if we could see the probability too lose against an attacker it would be great (and maybe sacrifice resources to increase the winning probability for this fight ?).

I had fun finishing the game as Duke.

Yeah, I agree with the previous commenters. I think the writing is very good and the core idea is superb, but in my opinion there needs to be a bit more to do for the player to feel engaged, cause in this version it feels like there's a lot of downtime. Regardless of that I enjoyed this a lot! :)

This game is fantastic for a jam. Well written + well explained mechanics, very easy to pick up the game. Too difficult for me to beat, but a good source of escapism.

I love this kind of games, so I enjoyed this one as well, it's one of my favorites of this LD. Now to the nitpicks: I had to agree with the comments saying that the pirate attacks were too frequent. I really don't like that in the beginning my poor little planet was attacked everytime a event would show up. As my workers died defending the planet there was a point I didn't defend myself anymore as paying the pirates with whatever was a safer choice than letting my workers die. Now I don't know if my game was bugged or not because I had like 6 workers total, I think that I misunderstood what it meant to upgrade the amount of workers in each category, so It's kind of pointless having 6 workers total working on one place as with 3/3 is enough to beat the game (as long as you just skip to the events)

Now for the event system... I thought that is kind of pointless advancing day by day as just using the skip to next event button. If you were to keep working in this game you could give some reasons to do so, like a working morale system or something that appears in a day by day basis and that would be skipable (causing to decrease worker's morale) or something like that.

And I would have liked if the event system wouldn't show the events that are related to upgrades if you have every one of them, (As I had to keep just closing the window when the tech guys asked me to upgrade something) like you did with the new worker's spawns when you have all workers' slots used.

The writing was nice and the UI was good enough, but I would have liked to see something else as a background instead of the pure white.

Sorry for the wall of text, I just really like this kind of games, Hope this is useful. Great game,

i really like although i am not a big fan of strategy games, i didn't understand how to make "improvements" or uses to "minerals", nice entrey Good Job!

I love it! It's very addictive. However, the pirates did seem to attack a bit excessively - almost twice a week for me.

Very entertaining game, certainly a lot of room for improvement, but even as it stands is a good way to kill time. I do hope you plan to continue developing this post-jam, add a bit of sound, touch up the graphics and you'll be well away.

Great idea - I liked the simplicity of it, but the events got a little repetitive. Amazing work for 48 hours though!

I'm very impressed by the amount of text and content you put into this!

Interesting game! As others have said the writing is excellent and the game has a lot of potential. Well done!

The game was very fun to play. The graphics are simple, but they match the game. Your writing is awesome and I am astonished of all the texts in this game. After some time the game became a little repetitive, but it was still fun to play. Some music and sound effects would have added value to the game, I think.

Very nice story! I did not have time to get the "good" ending, so I just blew everything up. Text are a bit too small and repetitive, maybe you can add some variation into it :)

After a few games I found that you either get an early +money event, or you just get mauled to death by pirates. Seems really random at times and very difficult.

I ran into two issues... beginning had lots of 'no choice' choices then when I finally had $$, I stopped getting colony ships, so I couldn't populate my colony any more :( I eventually figure it out... having a 'workers slots' indicator that would be part of the the colony arrival limits, would make it more clear.

would also be nice to have some indication of what upgrades you have purchased.

Nice idea, I love a good turn-based resource management game and this is a great example! I would love to see it expanded on more, with more small-cost events at the beginning to keep things interesting but overall a great entry and I do hope you continue to work on it! Well done :smiley:

Great idea and execution! Was very satisfying to kill my brother with a huge missile :p. Only improvement I would suggest is to not show prompts where you dont have any choices due to lack of money

Fun and surprisingly addictive game. I think the chances of recruiting a new colonist might be a bit low, I finished my game with every upgrade applied but only 4 workers alive.

Interesting game, but becomes quite repetitive after while. I didn’t feel my choices made much difference, apart from gambling with pirate attacks. Maybe if you could build and upgrade your colony at any time instead of waiting for right event to happen.

I finished but it was a bit repetitive; I took about 1000 days for the promotion win. I liked the resource management but I could only buy three colonists maximum because they would never show up... some things should probably be mostly available. I thought it might be a good idea to have a checkbox or something to choose the prompts you would prefer to see... for example I might only check the colonist ship if I am in need of them, and I won't get bothered by hundreds of merchants. Of course the pirates are exempt from this skipping idea. Overall, great turn based resource game!

This reminds me a lot of FTL in a great way! :) It may have been a little text heavy for my tastes (particularly in the beginning), but once I was able to fiddle around with the mechanics I had a pretty good time!

I get the feeling that the events are randomly generated, because for the first dozen or so I wasn't able to do anything other than choose the default option, as I hadn't had nearly enough resources to make any other choice. I would recommend either saving these events for later when the player is able to get their bearings and build up their resources, OR lowering the amount of resources needed to make other decisions so the player actually has some choice when presented with the options.

Other than that, I liked the polish that came with this game. The tool tips were especially a nice touch to explain what each resource/icon represented. It's also not often you see so much in-depth writing in a game jam game. Well done!

I find this game quite nice, no major complains, the story complements the gameplay and viceversa. very well scoped, very well done, Very well jammed!

Goddamn pirates! How can an honest man live like that? Seeing fellow workers being slaughtered or paying an unbelievable amount of ransom... Some additional military capabilities to defend would be great.
Really engaging game. The plot resembles Dune.

I enjoyed the game, but got bored around a 1000 days, not sure how close to winning I was. I too feel the pirates were just too random. I think they would have been easier to deal. I think more a formula like

defense rating (higher difference between my defense and their offense ) +

colony size (bigger colony more difficult for them - or more tempting target) +

influence (the more influence, the less likely) +

treasury (more coin, more likely attack) +

stock amounts (the more stocks they want, the greater chance they hit) +

propensity to pay bribe (the more likely to pay a bribe, the more likely they may hit) +

Ratio of failed attacks to successful attacks (the more failed attacks, why bother unless something else just screams to the pirate) +

random or AI influenced fudge factor and maybe AI weights for different pirate bands (one likes more a small
colony size to stock ratio and maybe The pirate known only as RockMuncher loves him a ton of minerals)


Those added together would equal the chance they would show up would have made it easier to deal with. Fight them or pay wasn't always clear, and once I had defenses, I had NO clue if I would win or not. I didn't feel that I could directly align the flavor text to the chances I had to survive. And if I had no choice, giving me the illusion of choice was a bit of a pain - I would say we were just attacked and they weren't open to bribes that we could afford. Same with no options, option pages - skip them to me.

There was a time I felt like I had a bug, because I was producing exactly the amount of biomass I needed for the colony - should be 100 -2 + 2 = 100 would made more clear it was being eatten. :)

If I knew what my Brother's influence was or what I needed to get near, it would help, so I could figure out if I wanted to trade with those slavers or keep my nose clean a few more days. ;)

I liked it and see a lot of potential in this game.

There is potential here for something realy fun. You just need to communicate your goals better to the player and increase the kind of random events. I enjoyed the rogue like structure of the events, but not being able to upgrade or buy more workers when i needed became frustrating... just felt like i was running out the clock until i could get another worker. Giving the player the option to always buy/upgrade would make the resource management more meaningful. Right now you have to wait for a random event to make any decisions, as a result it feel arbitrary what you choice to do.
That being said i played all the way through to the end, something satisfying about wanting to see what happens next... even if there are relatively few events. Good job on the game play!

This game reminds me of some games I played as a kid, but it needs to be flushed out and balanced a little bit more. I spent a bunch of time just trying to get enough money to do anything, I'd often get attacked by pirates 3 times in one week.

I did enjoy it though, it just feels a little bit lacking, the base is there though and it could be quite fun.

The game has potential, but in its current state it is rather frustrating. I tried several times and all I was able to do was waiting to get slaughtered. Not sure if it was just bad luck or if I missed something (where are the upgrades?), but I never had enough resources to really do anything. It seems like it could be more fun later on, but I just couldn't manage to get there. I would like to see a more devloped version of this game, because I'm sure I'd really enjoy it.