Save da people! by ehauckdo
Your objective: Save da people!
This Jam's theme was Sacrifices must be made.
So our initial idea was creating a game where you could only save a certain number of people, but not everyone. That's how a building in flames came to mind.
The intention was to creat a balance between each kind of person, so e.g. rescuing an elders would take more time but account for more points. Due to time constraints this feature was not so well explored though. Another idea was showing the death toll at the end, together with a list and description of the people you were not able to save, to reinforce the idea of sacrifice. Ideally we wanted to be able to calculate the optimum outcome of rescuing and, if the player achieve this outcome, he would win the game. This was somehow done but not as precise as we would like.
Overall the game still needs a lot of adjustments, but it looks not so bad for a two day challenge!
Link to play: https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/cart_info.php?cid=hoherahofi-0
Preview:
| Source Code | https://github.com/ehauckdo/ludumdare43 |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/save-da-people |
Ratings
| Given | 1🗳️ | 0🗨️ |
The biggest gripe is that sometimes when I go up a stair it keeps moving me upward back down the stairs on the next scene. If you were able to fix this and add some sounds it would really elevate the game, but it was a nice entry overall!
My thought process once I had played a few sessions was: Sort the people by the ones that can be transported the fastest. If I have fewer total people then my chances are better. I had one with 8 people and saved all of them, while the 27 person one was impossible. I "solved" the game, so my score was just a matter of good RNG.
In contrast this game could easily use the action presentation to support interesting trade-offs that work with the scenario: using limited resources like a fire ax or extinguisher to open paths, turning on the sprinkler system to buy time, losing paths and people as time goes on and the fire spreads. These are all things that could result in sacrifices, and they're more hands-on and make me think strategically while I'm playing, so they engage me with the theme better than trying to balance the score at the end. Scores are a relatively slow feedback mechanism, and they don't always guide players to want to do better.