Dean's World by Laguna
Downloads
- Gamejolt (windows, mac): http://gamejolt.com/games/DeansWorldS/252017
- Itch.io (windows, mac): https://runvs.itch.io/deans-world
- Source code: https://github.com/runvs/2017-04-21_LD38
Screenshots


Description
You crashed down on a foreign planet and have to survive in a friendly environment. You need to watch on your fatigue, hunger and warmth levels. If they go down to zero, you die!
To improve your chance of survival, you can gather resources and use them to craft useful items. Luckily you coulda salvage a few spare parts from your escape pod and build a small workbench. Finally you can craft your own spaceship and leave the planet.
Controls
- Arrows or WASD to move
- X to interact
- F to open Inventory
- In the inventory there is one special slot. The item in there can be used.
- Put your pickaxe or something to eat there!
- Craft at the Escape Pod (interact close to Escape Pod)
Guide (Spoiler Alert)
- At first equip the pickaxe.
- You want to look for some shrubs or bushes. They can drop either berries or fiber.
- You can eat the berries if Dean is hungry.
- Four berries can create a pie, which restores more hunger.
- The fiber can be made to cloth, which is used for a tent. (together with 2 woodensticks)
- Create a Fire from stone and Woodensticks.
- Pick some Stones to create an oven
- Pick more stones, to get some ores and coal.
- Melt the ores in the oven
- Melt the ores to an alloy
- Use the alloy to produce a spaceship.






| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/deans-world |
Ratings
| Overall | 228th | 3.636⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 351th | 3.227⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 548th | 2.818⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 325th | 3.545⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 247th | 3.864⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 291th | 2.85⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 161th | 3.714⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 34🗳️ | 35🗨️ |
Graphics is nice, discovering effect, fog of war. And it's nice to see your source code.
I would change that crafting requires specific position for ingredients. But game is really nice!
But all in all a very solid entry!
The game makes no attempt to teach the player, and the only way to progress is to follow the guide step by step, at which point it's less of a game and more of an exercise in following instructions. Even just adding tooltips to the items would do a lot to improve this. Some items are easy to discern (logs, pickaxe), but others are completely baffling (a green lowercase cursive letter 'b'? oh, that's used to make cloth) and impossible to guess what they're used for without reading the guide. Additionally, I think the difficulty curve of the game is too steep, and bad RNG in the world generation (i.e. not finding fiber right away, because bushes don't visually indicate what they drop) can make it virtually impossible to survive past the first minute or so, leaving you in a position where you're essentially standing around waiting to die so you can generate another world and try again. It's a race to craft the first few items in time, but after you have a tent and campfire, there's no more challenge, and the rest of the game essentially turns into a fetch quest.
I noticed a few things that seem like bugs. First, the character's center seems to be slightly to the east, meaning they can only interact with things to the right. Not a big deal but kind of weird. Two rocks generated in the same square in one of my worlds. And it's possible to use the stone pickaxe from anywhere in the inventory without degrading its durability.
The game overall is very hard. You have to be lucky to manage health, warmth and fatigue at the same time at the beginning. A very big plus for playability would be if you could interact with the environment from every side instead of only standing left from it.
Overall a very good game, which I like a lot!
My big complaints revolved around not really understanding the interface, which I think could stand to be a tad more intuitive. I think some time spent in Minecraft studying how their crafting system unfolds might be a good thing for your game. I also had some trouble getting the character to mine and gather resources from any direction other than from immediately to the left.
Love the survival aspect with the crafting system. Somehow reminds me of this super-unknown indie-game.. I think it's called Mindcraft ;) Implemented really well!
Well done in making a procedurally generated world! (However I must say, that sometimes the fruit/fiber bushes are a bit too spread-out, making surviving the first day impossible)
Did I mention that I love the crafting system? :D Really love the minecraft-like blueprints. Thanks for posting the recepices in the description! One thing I dont like: left click places the entire stack, while right click places half the stack. How do I place only one item? I would really need that to craft. In minecraft it's right click.
Sometimes it's not quite clear which tile I will be interacting with. Especially with the bushes and the trees. Somehow I can only interact with the bushes from the top (?). And if there is a tree near by (even if it's two blocks away) it gets priority? I had two ocasions where I just could not interact with a bush. It would be nice if there was some kind of preview showing which tile you will be interacting with.
The animations when the world is uncovered are gorgeous!!! Really well done! :P
I hope these votes help you!
I would also appreciate it if you take a look at my game!
This can be fine, in a way, if the player is given room to explore and experiment, but because the fatigue, hunger and warmth timers continue to tick down while you're crafting, the player will likely die before they discover a single crafting recipe.
My recommendation would be to take one of two routes. Either:
* *Horadric Cube Route* - Make positioning irrelevant, so that only quantity and item type matters; you already need to discover that 4 berries makes a pie, no need to exacerbate it by having it matter how you arrange the berries.
* *MasterMind Route* - Have the game _inform_ you when you're partway to completing a recipe; the correct item in the correct spot should highlight in one color, while the correct item in the wrong spot highlights a different color (and an incorrect item doesn't highlight at all). Of course, unlike the game MasterMind, there's more than one possible recipe, so you'd need some way of deciding which one to display the highlighting for.
Either way, time should pause while at the crafting table
Beyond that, there's really nothing to complain about; as I said, the game looks and sounds nice, and the controls are mostly fine. But the crafting system is frustrating instead of engaging, because it doesn't reward experimentation.