Baby Boom Balance by DevEmil

About Baby Boom Balance
'Baby boom Balance' is a city builder with limited space!
The balancing of food, money and population is key. Upgrade the technology of birth control or make your populace more happy so the birth rate stays down.
Gameplay
Your folk needs houses to live in, but if they build too many, you will run out of space for food production and free time activity buildings.
Bring the rate of birth to a sustainable level, to set an end to the vicious consumption of space!
Screenshots

Our Jam
The team, consisting of @zmoa and me, now holding the name 'Green Acorn Studios', had its second game jam and generally its second game with LD42. You can follow us on twitter here: https://twitter.com/GreenAcornTM . @zmoa designed most of the art for the game with the program 'Marmoset Hexels 3'. After taking advantage of the Game Maker Promotion in the last jam, we now used Unity as our engine for the jam. Unfortunately, the time didn't suffice for decent sounds, but I made a little soundtrack on the piano. Although we had to leave a few features on the road, we are quite happy with the outcome and proud to present you: 'Baby Boom Balance'.
| Windows | https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YWtiGh0axjq1uTb5rgCchUQuCXOYBtL-/view?usp=sharing |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/baby-boom-balance |
Ratings
| Overall | 528th | 3.442⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 909th | 2.904⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 403th | 3.365⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 455th | 3.673⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 446th | 3.654⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 441th | 3.173⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 301th | 3.174⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 556th | 3.167⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 22🗳️ | 26🗨️ |
Fun: While I had fun playing it, it was not a big deal, I just felt like playing one old game from the internet, I just was distributing resources.
Innovation: I just saw a resource distribution game, I did not feel that space was something that really mattered in the game.
Theme: As I said in innovation, you do not feel the theme ‘running out of space’ involved in the game although it is a city and space and resources are managed, it does not feel like space plays an important role as the city gets smaller.
Graphics: I loved everything looks very good, it is a pity that because of the distance from the camera the player is not able to fully appreciate the art, fortunately you guys took some screenshots you guys or it would not have been the same. Having said that, the art of the game feels different than the than the one in the UI.
Audio: For it to be a single song, it does what it has to do, it also feels good and does not feel repetitive, too bad the time didn’t help in being able to have a wider repertoire.
Humor: Something else causes grace, such as the fact that the most expensive game is contraceptive methods and that evolving it makes a more civilized society, but it is not something that produces much laughter (at least for me).
Mood: Above all, music combined with art and play simply feels good, it is relaxing even when the game it is accelerated at its maximum, everything seems to fall in sync with the rest, it is a pity that you could not done it completely.
Without adding more, it is great that you guys have completed all this in just 72 hours and being just 2 people. Keep this up, for the next game try to make a more specific scope study so that you know that you can really complete the game in the given time. I hope to see you guys in the future.
Thank you for your detailed feedback, we appreciate it a lot!
Many things you talked about, we have considered, but just didn't have the time to implement. A title screen, a decent endscreen and a tutorial and free camera movement & zoom were among them. And we also barely had time to do any audio, which would have improved the quality of the game also quite a bit and not to mention all the polishing that the game could've used.
For the graphics, our artist @zmoa did his best to draw a nice background picture and made really good images for the buildings, however he had been busy for quite some time wherefore I had to do the UI graphics, which resulted in.. well... the disparity you mentioned.
I am sorry that you didn't like the humor of the game, but well, it's everyone's.
Of course the game has many flaws and shortcomings, but for the fact, that this has been our second game we ever made and we used unity for the first time, we are actually quite happy with the outcome.
Thanks again for your long text and see you hopefully!
Good job!!!
With a bit more polishing this could be really great, keep it up!
@awesomealliterationalliance Nice name, haha! Yeah, the game definetely lacks a tutorial, it was on our to-do list, but we literally finished on the last minutes. Parks increase people's happiness and farms produce food.
When your people don't have any food, they become unhappy and each farm only provides food for like 6 people. This is why you have to build a lot of farms at first! Taxes also make your people unhappy and when they are already unhappy, you cannot set any taxes, because they would lower the happiness to a negative value.
The game could defnitely be improved a lot, maybe we are gonna do that some day, but we are happy anyways, that by the end of the jam, we brought it to a playable state.
Thanks for the information, I will give it another try!
And a tutorial should be there too, if not in the game because you ran out of time, at least in the description of your game here :slight_smile:
I played for like 5 minutes, placing farms and parks randomly, watching the happiness bar go from "neutral" to "suicidal" without knowing what I did wrong.
Place more parks ? Nope.
More farms ? Nope.
And the defeat reason is not very obvious, I had no idea I was about to loose when I did.
On the other hand, the graphics are simple but effective, works very well with the game.
The music is simple, yes, but relaxing enough to fit your game.
Overall it's not bad, it just needs some polishing here and there.
Add this to a new version I can try! :slight_smile: