Ark Initiative by Teslov
2D side-scroller on a planet, where players goal is to maintain ecosystem, care for alien animals and gain enough funds from space safari to continue his quest.

Story synopsis:
Human expansion left many ecosystems destroyed. You are selected as a new zookeeper with quest to use one of tiny, inhabited planets as a shelter for endangered species. Will you succeed in creating the ark?
Play it here!
Ratings
| Overall | 461th | 3.25⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 668th | 2.536⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 247th | 3.393⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 84th | 4.036⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 288th | 3.786⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 445th | 2.409⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 528th | 2.958⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 20🗳️ | 22🗨️ |
Downsides: UI doesn't support my current resolution (1366x768), even after going fullscreen in browser (f11) I can't see or click the lowest animal or food icon (the lowest I see is the fox and the carrot, which I discovered only after carefully viewing the screenshots), so I can't play it properly.
A shame cos I was looking forward to playing this one.
@spinaljack Added itch.io link.
(btw on finnish keyboard ö opens the command prompt)
There's not much actual gameplay, though. It's fun to deploy animals and watch them frolic for sume time, yes. But checking their hunger levels is hard because of how they jump around and how fast the world spins. It seems that the animals don't breed, act according to their presumed place in the food chain (why don't herbivores graze on the grass? Why can't I feed bores with meat? Why aren't tigers feeding on other animals?) or stick to their biomes (why do all the animals go for lengthy swims?) - without that, there's not much of an ecosystem to maintain. Then again, I don't think so many features could have been added in 72 hours!
While at it's current state, the game is a zoo simulator or a tamagochi and not an ecosystem sim, I hope it will be one someday! It's a good foundation.
You can feed carnivores with meat. And if there's not enough food, the animals will attack each other. And eat they prey. Boars should eat meat and attack when hungry. I know it worked before, I have to check it again. Last time I've checked was before I've added food items.
You can use "spawn greenBoar" command. It spawn a test animal which is an always hungry carnivore. He'll attack all of your animals without mercy.
Nice!
Please come back and rate [Llama's World](https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/llamas-world) ;) you left a comment a while ago
I left you a rating. Good luck!
Joking aside, I like this game a lot, even though it's unfinished.
You asked for improvement/future advice, so here goes:
- Make terrain larger (not by a large margin, but with 20+ animals it already feels a little cramped)
- Make behaviors. For example, the boar never ran from tigers. This felt unnatural. Yeah, I know that steaks fall from the sky and that all the tigers are full, but I supposed tiger's teeth are still tiger's teeth :) So, make them fear one another.
- Make them reproduce (maybe this is already implemented with a large enough population, but I haven't noticed) if they encounter eachother while not hungry or something.
I guess that's something I'd like to see in a game like this.
Other than that I'm impressed with games made in Javascript :)
It would be interesting to look at the code :)
Good luck.
@kaisean-games I want to rewrite the game using my own engine in the future ( it's using Construct 2 now ) to render the world properly. I'll then be able to add more planets the player is able to manage at once and make them bigger.
I'll have to make animals act a lot more intelligent. For example, hungry foxes will now attack boars. Chance for a fox to kill a boar is near 0% ( I think it's possible if the boar rolls smallest possible attack and fox highest for every attack but I would have to look into config to be sure ).
Reproduction was supposed to be implemented as "Happy animal #1 and happy animal #2 ( not hungry and not thirsty ) collide with each other and boom pregnacy". It's completely configured, amount of babies for each animal, time they need to produce offspring and time between pregnacies but I hadn't got enough time.
The game would look totally different if I had time on Sunday :/
- background music would be nice if you put it .
- secondly Start of the game is very slow (i think if you speed up the amount then it would be great )
- i have played like half an hour know and enjoying it
**What you did well**
Really nice visuals, the sprites were good and I actually quite liked the space background.
Gameplay wise, the animals didn't have any clipping issues and moved around freely. The new game, save and load buttons were nice additions to the game as well.
**What you could improve on**
Some music could have really made this game better. I would've also liked to see a shorter waiting time for cash. I felt like I was waiting forever to afford an animal. Lower waiting times and music paired together could make this game very engaging.
Sometimes when I purchased an animal, the game would mistake that for a click to place an item and will throw meat onto the ground. It didn't majorly affect gameplay but it is just something to watch out for.
Overall, nice game and really nice concept.
(Btw, I took some time writing this review and would really appreciate it if you could review mine [here](https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/planet-dominion))
They're all over the place!
I would have liked to see some audio in there, and a time speed button or something to speed up the process. Certainly a great start to a game.
Good job!
Speaking of curves, the one presentational thing I really missed was the ability to rotate the camera. I realize it doesn't matter much with the zoom options available, but it would have been nice none-the-less.
I also discovered an undocumented feature: if you use the arrow keys, for some reason you can make the food items run and jump around the map as if they were platformer characters. Which I can't imagine being useful, but it was pretty amusing anyway :-p
I've already changed money-making and it'll go live in 0.3.
As for speed-changing, I'll think about it, it's not hard to implement.
If you want to test the game now ( check all animals, see carnivores hunting etc. feel free to use cheat codes! Just press " ` " and type "addmoney 1000000". Have fun!
Unfortunatly, a game like that need lot of work (UI -- damn, this animals go fast, how to see there stats, and I would like a fast button to make money faster! -- , graphics -- camera is weird -- and content -- more interaction with the fields type...). But it's an impossible type of game to perfect for a jam...
Anyway, that is a really good and impressive job for a ludum dare, and a good start for a fun game!
(and the space ships with smileys are a great feedback, love them!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMCwacAGwrA