Haven by William Bundy
Save a group of travelers by finding the ancient artifacts! Haven is a lightweight town-management sim, somewhere in between a non-spacial version of Dwarf Fortress/RimWorld and Civ Clicker. As more people join your haven, the more frantic it gets!
UPDATE December 6th: I've added a "postcompo" version to the itch.io page. If you plan on rating the game, please play the original compo version first, otherwise, I recommend the updated version.
A changelog of the new features: Changelog for the postcompo version:
- Added OpenGL 3.1 support, which means some people with very old intel GPUs can play.
- You can now resize the window! Sizes below 1280x720 are not guaranteed to be readable, though. The default screen width is now 1400x720, which solves a lot of text wrapping problems.
- Fixed and tweaked some transparency. Backgrounds should be darker now.
- Made buttons larger and added a rim. This should make it easier to identify and hit them.
- Added a list of changes to people (health, hunger, etc) at the end-of-day screen.
- Clarified some text with regard to traders.
- I think I fixed some of the weirdness with hunger that was happening, though maybe only I noticed that.
- Fixed some events that weren't working as indented.
- Tweaked the overall speed and balance of the game. The beginning is now much slower, green events occur more often, and buildings' work costs have been tweaked to be easier.
- Added a couple new events. Sometimes, builders and craftsmen will show up to help you, for a fee. People sometimes have rough days as well as happy ones.
- Added some colored text and animated effects to help draw attention to things: if there isn't a crafting/building job set, the job text for people working on that will be red; the message text in the beginning now moves to grab your attention; the tutorial text about crafting/building is now in green.
- Internally, I've split stuff up into multiple files and worked to compress some of the noisier code. It's much nicer to work on now.
Hopefully for those of you who enjoyed the compo version, the postcompo version is more fun to play. I'm working on a postmortem and kind of development philosophy now; maybe that'll be interesting for some of you too.
The game is written in C using SDL2. Windows 64-bit only. The game is played only with the mouse.
| Windows | https://william-bundy.itch.io/haven |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/haven |
Ratings
| Overall | 337th | 3.382⭐ | 40🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 460th | 3⭐ | 39🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 309th | 3.243⭐ | 39🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 358th | 3.419⭐ | 39🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 495th | 2.865⭐ | 39🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 335th | 2.657⭐ | 37🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 389th | 2.972⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 44🗳️ | 32🗨️ |
The initial screen was a bit overwhelming, consider breaking it up to guide players through the learning process.
I also felt that the pop-ups in the day happened really quick. (I'm not sure if this was by design) I ended up having to skim read and missed some good things.
Loved the Lava Lamp joke.
Also could have benefitted from some background music, especially to highlight the intentionality of the gameplay speed.
Overall, I'm very impressed.
However, the amount you have delivered is impressive and I like the meaningless text as it adds character to the game.
As for music, in the end I didn't have time to add audio playing capabilities + compose music by the T-6 hour mark; I didn't feel like sound effects would add too much, either.
As for guidance... I don't know what to say? Make sure you have some people gathering food and try to click on as many events as possible? I don't really know if I should spoil the overarching strategy to the game in the description, but it behaves kinda like a clicker game/dwarf fortress hybrid, I guess?
The game feels a bit like Rimworld without people actually walking around, or perhaps a less abstract take on Hammurabi.
Nice. Btw, did you use ImGui?
I can't deny some Rimworld inspirations; I've dumped several hundred hours into that game. I had to consciously refrain from calling the people "colonists" in the code :P
I'd like at some point to work on a full spacial town sim kinda thing like Rimworld or DF eventually.
The pressure is really fitting with the theme, not just with how many people but also how many messages, seriously good job getting this working in a jam timeframe
I don't think your game's quite fit for me with all the frantic clicking and hyperlight reading, but (for what it's worth) I still think that it's a pretty good and complex game, especially for one made in 48 hours.
I'd say switching up some of the text for icons would make it way more readable and accessible.
Triggering a rescue event was always hectic, and a nice variety from the usual "click the events until the go away" basic mechanic.
The statistics and especially the traits of the colonists was a nice touch, even if their in-game effect was not always directly discernible. The stat counters went haywire for me for some of the colonists, at some point they had 18790482 in their food stat. I'd also have liked newly joining colonists to not be useless for the rest of the round, by e.g. autoassigning them to food collection, but this is minor point.
The merchant event seemed a bit too random sometimes, in that they might trade in goods that I possessed, but simply did not possess in sufficient numbers, robbing the event of its decision potential. Perhaps it would have worked better, if the amount that the trader demanded was capped to your current limits. That you get events for trading resources that you do not possess is nice though, it encourages the player to acquire all the different resources.
I enjoyed the art style. The character portraits were charming, and the background, while simple, lent a bit of atmosphere to the game as well. As other have mentioned, the text was sometimes a bit hard to read.
Some kind of sound effects to go with the buttons of the game, and perhaps to accompany resolving good and bad events would have improved the feeling of feedback, but it was not vital to the experience.
An enjoyable game, and a nice compo entry! An interesting take on the theme as well, both for the amount of colonists, and the amount of events.
>Running a haven,
>command your people quickly.
>Or all hell breaks loose!
Overall I like the style and executions, minor stuff I would like to points is that, time is not paused, when you are reading some events, either making you make chaotic choices, so you don't miss anything else or missing a lot, ...and events go by really fast. Might have been intended though, in which case it need just a tiny bit of balancing. Other stuff I noticed, is when you remember the color coding for various types of effects, you can just choose the positive ones accordingly (like blue is trader if you need him, or green for finding useful resources). And the last thing I would like is kind of a queue on building stuff that spans days, so I don't accidentally reset the progress on it.
Great game, played a lot, would play a more full version for sure! Good job!
Granted, I'm not actually suspicious of you, just warning you that some people will be. I've had GameMaker games completely deleted by McAfee. (corrected by McAfee within a week, back in 2010)
The constants messages and little time to attend it are awesome and fit the theme perfectly.
Congrats!
Come check out my game if you like!
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/virus-detected