Colony Builder by The Vall

[raw]
made by The Vall for LD 42 (JAM)

Gameplay

Colony Builder is a strategy game where your objective is to colonise a planet. Your resources: metal, food, water and oxygen must not fall below zero or you lose. Build units on tiles to generate resources, each unit has its own unique resource upkeep cost. Get 100% development to gain more map space. As the game progresses corruption will spawn and start to take over the map.

Controls

Menu:

  • Up and Down arrows - To change selected option
  • Enter - To select the option

Game:

  • To place a unit on a tile click to select the tile and then click a unit
  • To claim more area click the plus on the rectangle when it appears

Screenshots:

title-screen.png

ld-early-game.png

ld-mid-game.png

ld-mid-late-game.png

Ratings

Overall 827th 3.167⭐ 26🧑‍⚖️
Fun 771th 3.045⭐ 24🧑‍⚖️
Innovation 324th 3.457⭐ 25🧑‍⚖️
Theme 512th 3.591⭐ 24🧑‍⚖️
Graphics 1105th 2.432⭐ 24🧑‍⚖️
Audio 680th 2.643⭐ 23🧑‍⚖️
Given 28🗳️ 4🗨️

Feedback

shundread
14. Aug 2018 · 08:07 UTC
"Ha ha, this is trivial to beat"

3 minutes later...

"Fuck"
Raziyya
18. Aug 2018 · 10:15 UTC
Really cool minimalist puzzle builder game. Had fun trying to keep down the corruption. These kinds of games are often hard to balance but you seem to have done a good job. Would love to see some simple graphics instead of the coloured squares.
Pavel Smejkal
30. Aug 2018 · 08:00 UTC
I never encountered any corruption. I just kept expanding and building walls all the way at the outer edge and just simply won. I sustained the walls by building a lot of mines and whenever I started running out of anything else I just built that. Not really sure if I exploited anything but for me, it was really easy.
Cannonperson
30. Aug 2018 · 09:25 UTC
Very enjoyable game. I really like the challenge it poses. I never actually beat it, because i kept building too many walls and didn't build the mines fast enough before i ran out of ore
guladam
30. Aug 2018 · 14:24 UTC
Awesome idea, simple yet fun and challenging gameplay! :))
Some funky tunes would have make it even better imho, but wonderful job anyways. :)
02. Sep 2018 · 03:27 UTC
Is everybody here joking or something? I passed it with ease on my 2nd try... the first time i didn't even know the controls but once i looked in the description i easily passed.
Blinkenlights
02. Sep 2018 · 06:48 UTC
Would've liked a little more description, was rather confused by the mechanics. Things like 'oh, there's a limited amount of ore? Why?' or 'Is the red stuff corruption?' or 'Why is my oxygen going down?'
Yayiest
02. Sep 2018 · 08:41 UTC
I really like this game, it fits the theme really well, and it's very fun to try and balance all the resources and buildings.
very dark lord
02. Sep 2018 · 14:44 UTC
Interesting concept, the kind of game where you can probably spend a lot of time refining your strategy until everything works perfectly. I found it a bit difficult to assess which symbols were what - it might have been better to use the symbols in the descriptions as well, instead of text. Also visual bars instead of numbers (or additionally to the numbers) would have been helpful for the resources. I didn't quite understand the corruption behaviour, so just surrounded it with walls on all sides - unfortunately walls seem to be quite expensive, so I couldn't keep up getting enough metal. Lost after covering 2/3 of the map. Also, building stuff via number keys or something would be nice. Building stuff on top of the map was quite a struggle due to the large distances to cover with the mouse. :D Fairly interesting mechanics though, good work!
CristiHKJ
02. Sep 2018 · 15:27 UTC
Great game! Very cool and interesting! :D
alexfalkenberg
02. Sep 2018 · 19:13 UTC
Pretty interesting idea, and pretty well executed. Took a bit to understand corruption and some of the mechanics, so I agree with another commentor about a little more description possibly being useful.

I was concerned about the minimalist graphics initially, but that faded pretty quickly. :)

I hope you refine this one and keep going. Have a great LD!
blubberquark
03. Sep 2018 · 08:35 UTC
This got really frantic in the end. I like the balance.