Membrum by Rongo Matane
Control the small world that is your body and become 100 years old! Decide which parts of your beautiful body to expand, while managing your energy and poison levels.
Please let us know how you find it. This is our first Ludum Dare entry. As is tradition, we ran quite late and had little time to tweak and balance. Also, please tell if you have any other problems, for example with the resolution.

The controls are not very intuitive: - yellow bar = poison - green bar = energy - blue bar = age - Move, Heal and expand your organs. Just click them, a small description is below. - Click your head to expand different body parts - some illnesses and habits are clickable. For example by clicking lung cancer you can start chemo therapy
Stuff used: * libgdx * Piskel * Audacity
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/membrum |
Ratings
| Overall | 422th | 3.313⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 398th | 3.125⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 11th | 4.25⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 377th | 3.452⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 569th | 2.903⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 422th | 2.69⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 105th | 3.581⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 497th | 3.036⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 39🗳️ | 54🗨️ |
Unfortunately UI is really confusing at the moment - when starting, it's unclear which gauge represents what, and how to expand the body - or even what's actually clickable. An expanded howto would be welcome, and the interactive elements should really communicate the affordance to a player more. Indicators, effects and pointers would really help with that.
Mechanic is comprehensible, but complex, and that's a good thing. And I like how surrealistic the body looks :)
I'm leaving my rating for you. Cheers!
@takusan @sararycow You are right, the game does a bad job communicating what can be done and how. I'll try to improve this in the future.
@sararycow I do have an android build ready. As you said, its still a confusing - with android even more so, since "hover over a thing to learn about it" is not an option. So i'll have to first find a way for the game to be easier to learn with better feedback, then adapt it for mobile (or even better, do both in one step).
Your suggestion is also very good, i'm planning on making a little tutorial where you start as a fetus and only slowly get your abilities and organs, so you can get to know it all.
Both to you and @failedstarfish - i'm very grateful that you "fight" through the initial confusion. To me, the tolerance for a game is rather low and if i don't know what to do, i'll most likely leave (i have to wonder how many players i lost along the way). So i really appreciate that you still went through and played the game! :)
The graphics do their job, but I wouldn't call them outstanding. The same goes for the sounds.
The game concept was really innovative and fun, though, so I think you can be proud of what you have managed to create.
It's hard to understand all the things that are happening, but once you get it, it seems to work well.
Good job!
Also, the download on itch.io is marked Windows-only. You might want to change that.
A very interesting game, good job!
Just feel like the randomness might be playing too much role. At one game I well controlled the poison in the body but still lose because of too much illness accumulated, which is really hard to control.
To take into account so many organs and random events in calculating poison and energy generation must require a good and complex math model.
SFX is hilarious.
The graphics are not very good, but I liked how the guy looks, it kind of charismatic :)
The art sometimes dances on the edge between full-of-character and sloppy, but gets away on the good side most of the time. The UI is fairly plain. The organs look pretty good.
The sine wave synth in the music hit some umpleasant frequencies here and there, but I generally like most of the sound effects.
All in all, a pretty fun entry!
I also wasn't able to grow any of my body parts except for my spine, it was like I never had enough energy, but I maxed out at 50!
Don't know if its me
:skull_crossbones:
Love the weird graphics!
Maybe the start is too hard, things come fast and I don't have time to read all descriptions...
But after loosing twice and read all, it was fun.
The feeling of growing is cool and the baby part is a good surprise!
(the end feels too easy for an old person, but you know that if I understand right what you write at the end screen...)
There are some issues that could have improved the flow of the game. I would probably still be playing if it weren't for these constant pop-up messages that I had to click away, thus losing focus of what I was just looking at. The other thing (which may have been deliberate) was that I would have preferred to see the life bar of all my organs all the time. The color coding wasn't very clear, as in some cases black meant near death, while for others brown was already close to organ failure.
I think I would have been motivated to stick to it til the end if it weren't for these flaws, as I liked the idea a lot and it spoke to my inner optimizer to find a stable solution to my character's ailments.
Overall a great game that I would probably pick up again if you made a post-LD version.
@cerno-b i feel you, it was kind of painful to watch the few play testers i could find getting distrubed by the popups constantly. I feel like this is the major design flaw of the game and i'm not sure about a solution. The other big issue is the inverse difficulty: it starts difficult, fast and overwhelming, getting easier over time. Anyway, i'm working on a proper version with a tutorial to begin with. I'll make sure to address the pop up issue properly! :)
On the inverse difficulty, I don't think this necessarily has to be a bad thing. In your game particularly, I would love to have a challenge in the beginning and at one point realize that I'm in the clear with smooth sailing ahead, if the remaining game does not drag out too long. If you don't like that idea, an option would be to chop the game into age intervals (childhood, adolescence, midlife, old age), each with new and tougher problems coming up, like organs being less effective, psychological problems, a shrinking body, and so on.
Anyway, I'd love to see what you can come up with. Please drop me a line when you have a new iteration, I'd like to give it another go.
On the difficulty: I hadn't considered this might be something interesting. I can see the "i played well in the first years, no i've got some relaxing times" being kind of rewarding. The staging you mentioned is exactly what i'll go for and what i'd liked to have in the first place. In example, as you get older, your body decays faster. The visuals and and (ideally) the music should also change for each stage. Currently, being old already has some severe events that can take place (heart attack, stroke), but it isn't balanced to the rest (energy, poison reduction).
I'll make sure to ping you when i've come up with something more refinded. Thank you so much, that's really motivating :)
But quite many players didn't notice they could do this, i guess around 25%. Will be better when the tutorial is part of the game :D