Ranch of the Gods by Vodish

Story
The gods are furious and demand tribute! Appease the gods by sacrificing animals from your ranch! But gods are greedy, and will always want you to bring more offerings to them, will you be able to sustain their demands? Show them your loyalty and earn divine favor!
Don’t you dare disappoint them, their anger is legendary!
Gameplay
Go to the temples and see what sacrifices the gods desire from lowly peasants. Fulfill your obligations and bring them animals from your ranch.
If a god’s happiness drops too low, they’ll get angry and hinder your progress! However, if you earn enough favor, they’ll bless you with divine boons!
Animals reproduce as long as they have a mate to reproduce with, so make sure not to sacrifice the last two of a kind, or fear the gods’ wrath!
Controls
- Movement : WASD
- Lift / Drop : E
- Sacrifice animal : E next to an altar (the god need to want the animal)

Changelog
- Fix the double-cow bug
| HTML5 (web) | https://theogros.itch.io/ranch-of-the-gods |
| Windows | https://www.cyrillefrouin.fr/RanchOfTheGodsWindows.zip |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/ranch-of-the-gods |
Ratings
| Overall | 379th | 3.582⭐ | 94🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 434th | 3.356⭐ | 92🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 654th | 2.983⭐ | 91🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 125th | 4.089⭐ | 92🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 393th | 3.742⭐ | 93🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 167th | 3.705⭐ | 90🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 151th | 3.663⭐ | 88🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 383th | 3.478⭐ | 91🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 88🗳️ | 87🗨️ |
It would be nice to have the controls visible in a corner of the UI. On my first run I went in, picked up some animals and moved them around. I couldn't sacrifice an animal (it was the wrong type) but I thought there might be another button to sacrifice. With the controls visible I wouldn't have had to exit out to check.
Sometimes the RNG depopulates a species. Otherwise, great.
I’m happy to know that you enjoyed our game and hope you had a great game jam :)
funny game, i like how he picks up the cows
movement speed was a bit too slow, a run button would have been nice
i like how each god dos something different when they get mad
The gameplay is pretty much straightforward too, but it's efficient. I can't really see any bad points that have not been reported here. Good job !
I'm not sure if I can please the gods or if I'm doomed to fail every time. Am I just trying to get a high score?
The idea of having to keep two of each kind so they can reproduce is cool. As I mentioned though, it's impossible to even pay attention to it when you're scrambling to grab animals before your meters are depleted.
I'm not sure the music fit, but I understand you had to make something quick and simple for the jam. Something a bit more silly would have paired better with the game.
It might be fun to implement some small skill-based elements that allow the player to do things faster, like being able to throw the animals.
The game ends when all the gods are completely unhappy (three depleted meters), you will lose when you only have one animal of a type too, it's only a question of time before a god wants this animal.
You also don't have a victory condition, the goal is to have a high score right now. We plan to continue the game, so in the future there will probably be a win condition.
We will try to add more UI, to make it easier to know what's going on around when you don't have time to check on your animals.
We sadly didn't have time to create another music and had to go for something simple, it will probably be improved in later versions of the game too.
And lastly, the throwing part was one of the things that were planned and also didn't have time to implement (the list of things planned that we didn't have time to implement is long!).
We will continue to improve the game, and we hope if you play again our game one day when we did, you'll enjoy it more :)
Would it be possible to see the altars from the pen? There's already a lot to think about so having to remember which animal is which symbol each round is a little overwhelming.
About seeing the altars, it's kinda the point. You have to move between the altars and the pen, and part of the challenge is to remember what you need to bring back to sacrifice. :)
I had an issue where all alters wanted a sheep and there were no more sheep.
That said, the gameplay is kinda repetitive in its cycle, but is cool to observe the different actions took by the gods while you disappoint one or another.
Nice entry.
For the post-jam version of the game, we're going to add some tutorial, more UI to know what's going on and more!
I can understand the "busy work" part for the gameplay. For the sfx, was it the style that you didn't like or you had any problem?
We value every comments, positive and negative as they will allow us to improve for future games.
My only suggestion is to make it more obvious in the UI when a divide boon is active and what it's doing. The first time I saw Zeus' cloud delivering cows to Poseidon I got very confused about what was going on! :laughing:
We will definitely work again on the UI to give more feedback to the player about what’s going on. Adding a tutorial at the very beginning should also avoid these kinds of in-game confusions :D
Additional "plus" for weather feedback (rain, lightning) when gods are unhappy. It's a very cool for player's immersion.
Good luck with voting and future development!

It would have been nice personally if there was some kind of goal to the game aside from just trying to get a high score. Maybe as an example, have a happy ending to the story when you reach a certain score? It could just be simple text and a camera shot of the guy being happy, but this would really go a long way to give the game a sense of accomplishment for goal-seekers like myself as I tend to prefer having something to work toward to aside from endless repetition. (Edit: It appears you may have plans for that, so good job!)
Nevertheless, the weather effects and 'debuffs' help to occasionally spice the gameplay. I wish I could see more of them or trigger them more often as I didn't get to play long enough to get to see all the debuffs. Their impact wasn't very visible in the game either and I had to read the text description of your game to see what they did. Perhaps having a popup when they are triggered, and some simple text like "-50% birth rate for 10s" would again go a long way to describe what is happening and eliminate confusion. I initially thought the weather didn't actually do anything and it was wasted because the buffs/debuffs are actually a pretty cool concept!
Otherwise, maybe the buffs/debuffs should have a greater visible impact - such as improving the character's speed, or temporarily appeasing the gods. Those are effects that I am able to feel without the need for text explanation, which would be pretty obvious to the player too.
With all that said, it is a great game so keep it up! :)
Oh and nice job having music to set the mood too.
@yyz Thanks for the in-depths review, we're planning to expand the game, and use this as a base for the game. So there might be a win condition, we're still thinking about ideas of what we could create from this jam.
We will also improve all the interface part to make it easier to understand, as it's impossible to really know what's happening right now without the description.