Flat Line To Happiness by Dillon
You are a self-made rich man, whose just found out he has a year left to live. But all that money has failed to make you happy. Now with nothing left to lose, you aim to buy your way into happiness, whatever the cost. Surely buying your way into happiness can't be that hard, right?


Try to reach 1000 happiness by the end of your time on earth. You have plenty of cash to help you.
Click the computer to invest your money. Click behind the door to pick an activity. Play a sport by clicking the shelf.
| HTML5 (web) | https://ea.vodbox.io/LD40/ |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/flat-line-to-happiness |
Ratings
| Overall | 468th | 3.132⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 613th | 2.579⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 285th | 3.289⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 455th | 3.158⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 183th | 3.711⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 109th | 3.605⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 56th | 3.75⭐ | 20🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 20🗳️ | 5🗨️ |
I understand that this was made in two days but there would be a couple things that i would've added. These things are just small details though, things such as sounds for the mouse (when hovering over buttons and selecting buttons, a clicking sound might've really worked). Another thing would be mouse hover information. Personally, i think that there should be a panel that pops up when you hover over the computer, shelf or door. Because honestly, i forgot that the shelf was an option until i started clicking all over the place. One last things was that i did feel that the game got a little repetitive after a little while, i got to a happiness of 250 then i felt like the same thing over and over again. Not sure what you could've add, as you said in your stream adding more things would have made the game much more complicated, which is true. Oooh, maybe when you click on the activity, you actually do the activity. but once again, only 2 days.
All in all, this is a great entry! Would love to see a built and evolved version of the game! Congrats!:smile:
It took a bit to figure out I need to click the ground below the computer to open the screen, or the ground behind the door to do an activity, and that directly clicking the computer/door doesn't do anything.
It's easy to spam cheaper options like going to a fancy restaurant and renting a racecar and you can get enough happiness daily to reach the goal before you die. Also, is it random how much happiness you get from an activity? I couldn't tell if there was a mechanic in place that makes you derive less happiness by day if you keep doing the same one over and over.
If you plan to expand this into a full game I would suggest putting transition screens showing the activity when you choose something. Also, adding intermediate goals would be great, e.g. 'make some friends' 'get abs' or something. Right now, just aiming for 1000 is very slow and I ended up quitting at around 300.
Overall, I think you have a good foundation for a fun game here, and you did a great job creating a proof-of-concept in the short time you had to make this.
don't forget to check out my game too :)
I was playing with a friend and when we had 100 days left we were 562 happy! But soon after, everything we did was not making us happy. In the end, I miss-clicked and spent too much money, with 8 days to go. Instant kill. Noooo, we wanted to see what would happen at 0 days. ;)
The game is very slow-paced, I wanted to give up quite soon, but we persevered! (All the months seem to have the same number of days, starting on the same day of the week. :P ) The stocks only seemed to go down. When buying stocks, it was a bit annoying that I couldn't see how much money I had.
We enjoyed making up reasons why we increased or decreased our happiness. It is funny how the mind tries to make sense of it. ^^ I think with some adaptations you could make a nice game out of this!

