The Cold Equations by incobalt
You play as pilot 8383 on an emergency mission to Woden, where six scientists desperately need the fever serum you're carrying in your cargo. Unfortunately for everyone involved, there's something else in your cargo, and the calculations that filled your tiny ship with fuel didn't take the extra weight into account.
The Cold Equations
This is an adaptation of "The Cold Equations" a 1954 short story by Tom Godwin. "The Cold Equations" is an excellent science fiction short story that really evokes a strong emotional response. It's probably my favorite sci-fi short story, but I admittedly haven't read very many. Although I have adapted the story, every line of text in this game was written by me, by hand, during the compo. There might be some exchanges in dialogue that are very close because they left a strong impression upon me, but I strove to make this an original adaptation. For those who have read the short story, you may notice that the character names have been changed. It was an accident at first, but I decided to stick with my misremembered names.
Controls
The Cold Equations is controlled entirely by clicking with the mouse. It works very similar to a visual novel. If you're stuck at all, try investigating your cargo. If you're on the desktop version, you can hit 'c' to take a screenshot if you need to show me something. It gets saved in your data path, wherever that is (on Windows that's \LocalLow\Cobalt Sky\The Cold Equations\ for me, but your experience may vary).
Tools
Engine Unity 2018.1.0f2
Art Paint.NET and Blender
Sound Audacity and Bfxr
Media
https://youtu.be/nxJFlYb1ZnI
Ratings
| Overall | 190th | 3.56⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 371th | 2.9⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 206th | 3.3⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 43th | 4.16⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 213th | 3.48⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 92th | 3.542⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 18th | 4.18⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 27🗳️ | 21🗨️ |
EDIT:
Loved it. The only feedback I have is for the buttons/UI in the cockpit. It would be nice if they had some kind of on-hover feedback or something so the player knows they can be interacted with. Otherwise, excellent work! I'm glad someone brought *The Cold Equations* to Ludum Dare :)
Almost missed out on the whole thing after my first playthrough where the first thing I did was to remove the other cargo, then wondering what to do I contacted eds and then the credits ran, and I was like :confused:. Glad I tried it again.
@firebug The short story is even more gut wrenching than my rendition. The 30 kg is the right number, and it's a guess, but I'm pretty sure that having only 22.1 kg of extra weight would make it possible with some speed throttling. Glad you enjoyed it!
@zanagi I knew that the immediate jettison was going to be a possibility (and I coded in a response that should suggest that something more was there), but I wanted it to be possible. The short story can't really explore those kind of gut reactions in the written form like we can with a game, so it was interesting to put in all the parts that didn't happen in the short story but certainly could have.
Really well done on the mood. Though I guess if people press the button sooner they would not get half of that, but this gamereally got into me.
@nkrim The time scale settings are honestly a debugging tool so I could get the time out endings (the game times out when you're forced to decelerate to .2 gravity). I left them in there, but there's no real reason to use them. In the short story, there's a period of waiting that happens where the girl can talk to her brother before he goes out of range, but I cut it due to time and complexity.
@velvetlobster You're right about the soundscape. I chose engine noise just to have some ambient sound in the background, but since I wasn't prepared to do Ludum Dare at all, I was really not prepared for making music.
@mruniverse I should have put a message up when you jettison. That happens if you time out, so there's no reason it couldn't happen then too. I think I also want to make sure people turn around before they can jettison (something about protocol is to check that it won't harm the ship, or something). The short story is a very good one from the 50s. It has some annoying 50s style ideals that I tried to massage out in this version, but it's otherwise good writing. It will make you cry.
@jupiter-hadley Thanks for playing Jupi! You're doing the good work :)
Amazing idea for the theme, and a great implementation, the ambience in the background added a lot to the immersion of what was going on. Glad I played this game, great job!
@captaindreamcast I hope that there isn't a way to get through without going through with it, but many of the numbers are guesses that seemed to work out. I managed to get up to 18:23 once by adjusting the speed, but I didn't have enough time to stress test it.
Nice job all around!
@pkenney There's something about giving people a bunch of functionality that seems like it should create a path to victory, but is instead useless. If I'd had more time, I'd probably have made even more things to fiddle with to impress the inevitability of the decision that much stronger.