LudumData

Apothecary's Piggy Bank by MayChant

[raw]
made by MayChant for LD 44 (COMPO)

An apothecary with a piggy bank that saves lives instead of money is here to save the world from the plague.Instructions: Move with mouse.

Touch the infected (green) patients to spend 1 life and heal them. When a healthy patient gets in touch with an infected one, the healthy patient will be infected, too.

You save the lives in the areas that are no longer infected. The game ends when you end a level with 0 life left.​

The virus might mutate by chance in the following ways:

  1. Insanity: Infected patients will lose their mind and run around incrementally faster.
  2. Air transmission: The plague can be transmitted to healthy patients from a distance.
  3. Corpse transmission: When a patient dies, it explodes and creates an area, and patients who go to that area will be infected.

Make sure you purchase essential upgrades with the lives you've saved. screenshot.PNG ingame.PNG

May 1st:

Added HTML5 version

May 3rd:

Fixed bugs: 1. Life count display will no longer be truncated when exceeding 100 2. Insane patients' speed capped so that they will not break through the wall colliders 3. Patients now will bounce off walls properly.

Source code https://github.com/MayChant/apothecary
Windows https://maychant.itch.io/apothecarys-piggy-bank
HTML5 (web) https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/730699
Original URL https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/apothecarys-piggy-bank

Ratings

Given 11🗳️ 9🗨️

Feedback

02. May 2019 · 20:55 UTC
Interesting.
Trusty
03. May 2019 · 01:04 UTC
Mom, dad, I'm finally the doctor you always wanted me to be! Fun game, could use some music and some more variation on the core gameplay loop but I liked it overall.
SoarenDev
03. May 2019 · 01:06 UTC
Loved the gameplay, really.
It took me some runs to understand that healing infected costed me "money", but I really like the fact that you have to chose to take upgrades or just stack money to heal infected in subsequent levels.

GG to you anyway!
rsim
03. May 2019 · 05:39 UTC
I liked the graphics and core gameplay. In later levels I found the only way to survive was to push one little guy into a corner and protect them until the end of the level. :)
hypp
03. May 2019 · 20:12 UTC
Nice game. It was hard to find a good strategy to winning.
J0ye
03. May 2019 · 20:19 UTC
I really love your concept. Simple but fun and effective. I could play this for hours. It looks like it is supposed to be a mobile app. You should think about polishing the game and releasing for smart phones. I would play that.
🎤 MayChant
04. May 2019 · 04:03 UTC
@hypp In fact, when I was doing further testing I discovered that you should upgrade the value once in the very beginning, and then focus on aura and immunization. Especially immunization, since you'll need to buy it at least once before air transmission breaks out, which is the deadliest mutation by my experience (and kind of designed as such)
Baby Dino Herd
05. May 2019 · 02:43 UTC
Really interesting setting and aesthetic! Your mechanic is an excellent balance of risk-reward in determining who you heal, who you immunize, and who you leave be. It turned out to be a lot more difficult to balance than I thought!

I did end up in a state with almost no savings and a lot of infected in the next area, meaning I couldn't avoid touching an infected (losing all my savings), so the best I could do was immunize one person, giving me back one savings for the next area. Any way to get around this (maybe upgrades I hadn't prioritized)?

Well done!
Pincushion
05. May 2019 · 17:28 UTC
I like the mechanics of this game. It's different. The upgrades work really well.

I found that later in the game I can always keep one guy healthy every level. It might be good to prevent that, since it gets old really fast, and I won't just quit because I still want to win :)

A good entry.
GenTel
06. May 2019 · 07:55 UTC
Very cool unique concept. It's like a live-time Plague Inc. The upgrades seem pretty well-balanced, and the gameplay in general is engaging. There's some strategy of who to go for and how to cordon off areas and so forth.

Eventually there are just so many enemies compared to healthy patients it seems impossible so that's my only complaint.