Caravan by iovorobiev

What is it?
"Caravan" is a hardcore text adventure about resource management. You need to reach the city in a bottom right corner of a map. The more gold or goods you have the more events happens with you on a road. You also have guards who can protect you, but they need food. The more food and guards you have the slower your caravan is. In a nutshell: the more you have, the worse it is.

How to play?
You control a black camel (it represents your caravan). At the start, you are in the top left corner of the map. You need to get to the bottom right corner. Click on the city to move there (you can move to the cities connected by the road only). You can buy food, goods, and guards in cities, but only goods can be sold. That's it!
Easier version
Since a lot of people complained about the high difficulty I rebalanced a game a bit and uploaded the new version. What has been changed?
- Food consumption is less per guard (death from starvation is now less possible, but still persists :) )
- Prices volatility is now less in each city (it means that prices will be closer to average balanced values, but still random)
- Fixed bugs with some quests where you should die if you don't have enough soldiers but you didn't
- Some grammar fixes in quests (but there are still a lot, English is not my native language, sorry :( )
Who made it?
Original idea: Me and @polina-vorobeva
Art: @polina-vorobeva
Programming & Game Design: Me
Music: @tazumee
| HTML5 (web) | https://iovorobiev.itch.io/caravan |
| HTML5 (web) | https://iovorobiev.itch.io/caravan-balanced |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/caravan |
Ratings
| Overall | 545th | 3.477⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 651th | 3.227⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 580th | 3.159⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 211th | 3.909⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 852th | 2.978⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 315th | 3.455⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 378th | 3.318⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 156th | 3.841⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 33🗳️ | 5🗨️ |
I played again just to get further.
Beautiful game. Really well balanced effort in all aspects.
Loved it
I quite did not understand if there were any interest in buying good. I have just failed to reach the big city in front of it :(
I noticed though that price may vary, it would have been good to show +/- price against the average so you need whether it's good or not to sell.
I've also found out that in some situation, you don't have any more guards, some events will say you lose one but nothing happen. (You should die imo)
Otherwise, it was pretty cool and it would be perfect if more indications were given (Because I kind of played randomly). Also, it's a very good take on the theme !
If there is one thing I would maybe change is to make the encounters a bit less frequent, but nice job overall!
(our game, a bit scarier, over here x) : https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/the-darkest-light
Thank you all for your feedback!
@sidewalksleeper Thanks for your feedback, I am really sure I will reuse these mechanics with text quests in one of my games, it feels like a good meta-gameplay. Please try the new, rebalanced version :)
@richard-sage Noted your point, it is really helpful. Updated the game with slower food consumption and started to win more often. Please give it a try (I've uploaded as easier version)
=> overall I liked the game
=> the graphics are not perfect but they work fine this type of game
=> The mood and the music very nice
=> I really liked the idea of everything having a trade-off
Less Positive:
=> You use different styles of art, especially in the UI. You should try to aim for a more consistent approach.
=> The pressure over food in the game is a bit too hard what limits completely my choices as a player. I needed to buy a lot of food in every city a stopped leaving me with almost no money to use on the other stuff. Also with fewer choices, the impact of the random effect is higher what makes you feel that the game is not fair.
=> you should be able to see the effect of buying a resource on the speed, it was a lot of guesswork for me.
Played both versions. The original version is pretty much impossible. The second version is possible to complete, managed it once with a single crate remaining, yet it is still very arbitrary.
On each leg of the journey potentially 5+ events take place. The only thing you can do to reduce the amount of events is to travel light, which is thematic enough. Problem is some combinations of the events spell instant defeat, for instance sandworm kills your guards and bandits attack, so just two unlucky events per trip can be too much. If you guess wrong and buy too many resources then you are more than likely doomed due to random chance alone. This rapid rate of events also burns through the content really fast. Rereading the same events over and over again does get stale.
These issues can be fixed relatively easily. First set some limitations to the events. Special events like the jinn, the devil and the furry man, should only happen at most once per adventure. Repeatable events should be very simple and less severe as not to become boring to read and to reduce the impact of each event (less sandworms and bandits, more small issues with the caravan).
Next the UI could use some improvements. Estimations on how much food it takes to get to the next cities (with the guards you have) and what is the chance for bandits would be nice to have in the city menu. These could be plain numbers or verbal cues ("Chance for bandits: high", "Food needed for city A: about 25", etc.)
Lastly the amount of money you carry should not affect the amount of events. Currently a single lucky event netting you gold can completely ruin the rest of the adventure due to this. After all how would anyone know the amount of money you have?
A new feature that you should consider is weather. On the city page you'd get an estimation on upcoming weather and its effects (e.g. "A sandstorm is gathering outside the city: Lower chance for bandits, higher chance for accidents and getting lost"). Then if you have the money you can stay at the city waiting for better weather. The weather would be different per route too so a longer route might be more preferable in certain situations. This would add a layer of decision making currently missing.
Good effort, the design needs work yet there is much potential here.
Overall: Above Average (3.5)
Fun: Bad (2.0)
Innovation: Average (3.0)
Theme: Good (4.0)
Graphics: Above Average (3.5)
Audio: Above Average (3.5)
Humor: Above average (3.5)
Mood: Strong (5.0)
Come check out my game if you like!
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/virus-detected