THIRST by Togis

THIRST, a Ludum Dare 39 game where you search your way back on a dry beach that drains your power, you have to find water and avoid to be the dinner of hungry creatures that crawl on the sand.
Play the game
- ITCH.IO: https://togis.itch.io/thirst (Browser & Download for windows)
- GameJolt: http://gamejolt.com/games/Thirst/273998 (Browser & Download for windows)
- Newgrounds: http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/697361 (Browser)
Story
On a hot summer day a mermaid got lost in the city sewers and found yourself on the land, dehydrated, dying of thirst. Searching your way back on a dry beach that drains your power, you have to find water and avoid to be the dinner of hungry creatures that crawl on the sand.
- Include endless levels with increasing difficulty
- 5 different types of Monsters
- 16 different type of Tiles
- 4 different type of Weapon
- 5 different type of Items
- 1 Scanner for direction
Modding the game
- The game is fully modifiable, check out the streaming asset folder, it contains all the data for everything. You can create your own enemies, weapons and own level as you like!
Screenshots & Video



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55j0srkxEmY
Program used
- Unity 2017.1 Pro & Free
- Visual Studio 2015 Ultimate & Comunity
- Illustrator CS6
- Paint.Net
- Piskel
- Bfxr
- CGMusic
- Audacity
- Chronolapse
Script Language
- C# (Unity Mono)
Data Format
- PNG
- XML
| HTML5 (web) | https://togis.itch.io/thirst |
| Windows | https://togis.itch.io/thirst |
| HTML5 (web) | http://gamejolt.com/games/Thirst/273998 |
| HTML5 (web) | http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/697361 |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/thirst |
Ratings
| Overall | 105th | 3.891⭐ | 158🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 213th | 3.51⭐ | 157🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 85th | 3.794⭐ | 157🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 345th | 3.61⭐ | 156🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 140th | 4.219⭐ | 157🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 256th | 3.39⭐ | 156🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 203th | 3.049⭐ | 146🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 328th | 3.392⭐ | 150🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 109🗳️ | 112🗨️ |
Overall really well done and creative, particularly for a jam!
I just felt a little bit lost, like it was pure luck. Maybe if you could find hidden objects indicating the direction of the sewer...
Great entry!
@eric-florio and @nordtraveller, I am feeling like you didn't try our 'scanner'. Its made for those kind of lost situations, it indicates if you are going far away from the exit or getting closer. So you know where you are going. Of course it doesn't show you where the exit is exactly, you need to find it yourself by trying different directions, that's the challenging part of the game also. If you didn't try it, I suggest you to re-try the game with the scanner :) Be careful though, it costs 10 water power. Enjoy!!


That I liked:
- The graphics are very, very nice and polished
- The music is good
- An interesting take on the dungeon creation
- A very detailed tutorial
Things I found that would make the game even better:
- The game could have been less based on luck
- Added support for WSAD (I had to place my left had in an unnatural way for me; this might be year of FPS games speaking ;) )
- The tutorial might have been a bit shorter
- The tutorial text and buttons would have been more easy to read and noticed if they were bigger
Overall I enjoyed the experience
Tutorial is great and describes everything you need to know without taking too long in my opinion.
The foremost thing that could make the game a lot better would be smooth animations instead of teleportation on movement. Oh, and tutorial is unreadable on 4:3 monitor in 1280x1024, which is, again, probably not a problem in 2017.
The Gameplay is sometimes struggeling and i didnt first realize what do do (as it said "move by arrows") and i didnt expect to put the tiles first there.
I love the angry crab :)
I agree with @Remzo, very polished in terms of graphics and gameplay! Normally I try to resolve that in the last hours but it is very important, and it makes easy and fun to play your game. You have even a tutorial, nice!
Music fits well with the game.
If you force me to find something that I dislike, it is that levels are not too much different but I understand that you can not make 10 levels in 2 days :P

@krunoslav yes that's the strategy I use when I play too, move as little as possible.
Only have one nitpick, there's a small bug where if you complete a level while next to an enemy, that enemy stays on the enemy indicator on the left side of the screen when you first appear in the next level. It goes away as soon as you move, but that confused me the first time it happened.
I queued the game on you twitch channel and I am hoping for a rating :)
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/disaster-on-nebula-one
The art was really good too.
The post is beauth too, awesome.
I hope to see this game again in the near future!
I like your entry very much. It is a very solid polished game! But i do concern the same thing @jusw85 mentioned in the post above me. Sometimes i got tiles that were very unfair, so i got stuck although my choices in the earlier game were not pure madness :) Perhaps you could implement an algorithm that checks the existing paths to avoid too much tiles that causes "dead ends".
In addition: Thank you very much for playing my game "Inhouse Baristas". Your gameplay video helped me a lot to understand what i did wrong in the development phase. Now i know on what i do have to focus even more for the next LD. Btw, if you remember my game and are interested in how to play this game exactly - take a look again at my game page. I already updated the description.
Cheers :)
P.S.: Unfortunaly in my office do not work a barista. We still got to make the coffe by ourselfs :( :wink:
But some improvement : I would like to choose if i want to take an item on the ground or not, because at the beggining of the game, i had a lot of life regen and water, but no other to choice than use them...
Other things, for the moment, i have the sensation that i don't know what i'm doing and walking in the sand and waiting to find something, the game don't talk to me enough (i mean you shall gave better clue than a warm/cold radar, like an high presence of enemy or else)
But a really great work, gg !
Have you considered a way to allow people shuffling tiles, perhaps at water cost?
i love the art, and it's a really cool concept, really fun, my favorite entry so far
Thanks for the comment. Just to clarify, Carcasone gameplay is totally different from Thirst. The only similarity is building the map with tiles. (But that can be said from a classic puzzle too).
Carcasone is a multiplayer strategy game where you try to control more territory then your opponents. Thirst is a survival rogue-like single player game.
Hint For finding the exit: with three scans (3 different corners) you should be able to pinpoint the exit assuming the scans are accurate. 2 scans are vertical from each other which tells you the x coordinate while 2 scans are horizontal telling you the y coordinate.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9fICCkJlG4

The game itself is a bit too hard for me though. The decisions I had to make were almost only random...
The goal "test" should be free. I did not figure out how to use the garbage can. Also what should I do, when the tiles presented are not working for me right now.
It could become a very good game if the decisions I have to make would be more tactic/strategic and not only random based.
Update: I played some more after reading some comments. It makes definitly sense to place some tiles before the movement and just move after some placed tiles. But I still can't use many of the proposed tiles...
Couldn't really figure out the scanner meter. Which way was supposed to be close and which far? One side had a flame (which I associated with hot/cold being close/far) and other had the word exit which also meant I would be close to it.
Also would have been nice to see numerical values of my health and water levels. Maybe even tooltips for what all the different items were. It was kinda annoying that I was sometimes forced to pick up a worse weapon because it was blocking the only way I could go.
Is this a bug? For some reason the L shaped tile didn't connect to the T shaped one on the right side of it.

The water/hp bars were misplaced on web version fullscreen for me.

The game could probably benefit from premade levels. Sure, you'd lose a lot of replay value that way but at least that way all the levels would be solvable. Or another way to make the progression feel more fair would be to make the levels start off way smaller. Something like 5x5 for the first etc, so you'd really have to goof things up to fail so early.
@daneestar to use the garbage, just drag & drop a tile/card onto it :)
@antti-haavikko
* The first picture doesn't seem to be a bug to me, both tiles need to not have wall connecting them so they can connect, not just one
* I have never seen the second bug, what browser do you use. Webgl is sometimes a bit weird, I wonder if any other person had the issue? Do you also have a zoom on your browser?
* I really like your idea of starting the game with smaller map, that would have been a great addition, but with the short amount of time, if was hard to fit it in.
As a side note, the scanner meter could have been explained better in the tutorial.
It indicate to the player "how far" the exit is, if the needle point to the left side, the exit is on the other side of the map, if the needle point to the right side, you are just next to the exit. A good way to use it is to use it once, then move a few tiles and use it again, you'll then see if you are getting closer of futher from the exit.

But I though that 2 was a T shape and should have connected to 1. Maybe I'm wrong and it only allowed me to put a tile there because of 3.
We should probably have forbidden the construction of a tile without connection, but time didn't let me work on that.
I really like concept. Ar the beginning I thought that this is some kind of puzzle, but it appears to be self-constructed dungeon crawler! I don't quite understand battle system. And randomizer sometimes ruins balance (at my first run I was surrounded by enemies, but I didn't want to start battle yet).
Game over screens are great :wink:
As some people have pointed out, it's a bit too luck-based. But fun, nonetheless, it's a shame I couldn't get past the first level :P
I love the art! It looks like a pro game, so congratulations for your artist. I love the enemies, the props and the UI.
Really good game!! Congratulations guys :)
Loved the mechanics, graphics and audio. The Dungeon Crawler + Tile Placement combo was quite interesting. I don't think I've seen that combination before.
I really had fun playing your game. It was a really interesting experience. One of the best entries I've seen this LD indeed.
Congratulations!
The only thing I did not understand is how to actually exit the level. There was a square hinting at the location of the exit... So I need to build a path that can be prolonged right to the exit point? If yes, how do I know where to build the road from the start?
Kudos for a variety of enemies and the prototype resonates with the theme. Would play a post-jam version. Cheers!