Neat! We have a similar idea - a tycoon sim where you sacrifice your own units!

The game has some nice sound and music and the graphics were neat.

A 'speed up' button or 'skip' button would be nice however, so I might not need to wait the full 30 seconds sometimes (I know I know patience, but its the 21st century).

Also took me a couple of rounds before I was comfortable with the game.

Overall, a sweet little game, not bad.

@darylsteak Thanks! I was considering adding a skip button into the game but unfortunately ran out of time. I'm glad that you liked what you got to play

@secretmapper I will have to check that out!

With so many buildings, it's easy to forget what everything does - a quick reference card might have been nice, or some text labels or something. Was pretty nice though - we almost made our game with a similar worker assignment flow, until we decided to drop people on things instead.

@mcovert I will keep that in mind for future versions. I sometimes forget that other people haven't been staring at my design docs for the past 48 hours on what buildings actually do, woops. Oh well, things to work on for next time.

Nice game I also did a similar village tycoon game with an sacrificial alter.

I like the style and strategic gameplay. Quite a good entry :)

I got rather bored playing the game, and had a hard time dealign with the amount of text in the tutorial. But it is a super impressive feat for 48 hours. A whole world sim!

@wdelvi fair, it is pretty text and rules heavy. Likely wouldn't have been as bad if I had added tooltips to the buildings, too late now though. Thanks for checking it out at least.

A nicely presented game with a strong connection to the theme running through it! I like how strategic it gets. Well done!

I liked it.

+1 on the waiting and "what does this building do" problems.

I also wasn't a fan of the villager reproduction mechanic. Why not just produce a new villager for every 2 in the huts? Even after reading the instructions, I wasn't clear on what the various bars mean, what they indicate, or how I win/lose.

Best part for me is the art.

Nicely done! Fun to play. The only real problems I have are that there wasn't a lot of feedback for the sacrifices I was making (I was sacrificing 2 people each turn but the bar never went down), and that reproduction feels luck based. Overall though it's really well done and could easily be expanded into a fuller game.

Great moody art of the grim cultist village fit the thematic idea well!

Bit text heavy on the tutorial, and quite slow to play. I wanted to experiment a lot with your interesting system, but I could only try things at a snail's pace so I didn't really dig into the systems. In fact, I never sated my god. When he got mad I sacrificed people, but his anger level never went down. I sacrificed my entire population but two to him.. and he didn't seem to like it.

Another element that made it confusing a little was the way that the resources appear suddenly and all at once at the end of the day, instead of trickling in over the course of the day. It left me confused about what would (or did!) happen when I moved a character from one building to another mid-day.

In general when you have a complex system like that in LD, you want to go overboard communicating the secret state changes to the player. So like a little animation saying "this farm is working!" Even if it's a totally simple 2-frame cycle of the farm bobbing up and down or something, and its speed goes up or down based on productivity, that is enough. Then you have a little "Food "icon pop out each time it kicks out food. Then I can get a feel for your system. The way it is now, you have this cool system but only you the developer REALLY know what's going on! It's vital in these LD games where ppl only play a short time to make that stuff shine through... even at the expense of other features. That's my opinion, anyway!

Nice mood and some interesting complex systems here! Very solid first entry, and it even had music.

@pkenney Thanks for posting such a in depth critique of my game. I agree with a lot of the points you made and hope to do better in ludam dare 44 next year. Making sure to including more visual and audio feedback is likely going to be higher on my priority's and I will also try to scope down a bit more so I have more time for polish.
Again, thanks for your feedback! :v:

The game takes way, waaay too long to play. Problems I see immediately are the very low probability of increasing the population (which isn't good when the starting population is small from the first place), and the need to devote at least half on to making food, which further worsens one's ability to increase the population. I can already see myself wasting 20 full minutes (40 cycles) just trying to build a larger population alone. As prior comments have made, a skip button would have drastically reduced my frustration.

I don't especially think the number of buildings one needs to manage is too difficult to understand, but then again, I've been largely focused on population control only; the mining and wood-cutting buildings were extraneous coming from that play style. Personally, I would have increased the probability of a new meeple spawning, and also increase the number of food units made per meeple. I do otherwise think the sacrificing part adds an interesting twist to the regular formula, but it is quite frustrating at the beginning.