Power lines down! by thaaks

Some mean hacker corrupted all power lines in our biggest cities.
It is your job to re-establish them!
Each city has a limited resource of energy which will only last a little while so you better hurry and reconnect all power plants to the city.
Beware: different power plants (windmills, solar panels, modern wind turbines) produce different amounts of energy - you should connect the biggest producers first...
This game was created for Ludum Dare 39 and finished in around 20 hours total.
I'm pretty happy with the result (except that I failed on the music again) and I hope that you have some fun playing my game!
Cheers,
Thomas
Links
- Play the game! https://thaaks.itch.io/powerlinesdown
- Source code (GameMaker Studio 2 project) https://thaaks.itch.io/powerlinesdown

| HTML5 (web) | https://thaaks.itch.io/powerlinesdown |
| Source code | https://thaaks.itch.io/powerlinesdown |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/power-lines-down-1 |
Ratings
| Overall | 370th | 3.25⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 305th | 3.208⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 558th | 2.5⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 283th | 3.583⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 587th | 2.333⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 464th | 2.217⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 481th | 1.667⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 572th | 2.227⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 24🗳️ | 19🗨️ |
Excellent done!
The levels are procedurally generated. And I only wanted time be the critical factor, so time reduces the remaining energy every second. When you connect power plants, less energy is reduced per second. But with increasing levels the remaining time gets shorter and the required energy per second increases. And the later plants like solar cells and modern wind mills generate more energy so you should connect them first.
Oh, and I will give your game a run of course ;-)
@gilborn: Thanks, highly appreciated!
The only thing that I would personally change are cables on the power plants. They are not really visible and at first I didn't know why I'm running out of energy when all other cables were connected correctly. But it's a minor thing. Good job!
At all: thanks for your positive feedback!
The game Mechanic is pretty simple, but it's a good puzzle game. It makes fun and i like to play it. But sometimes the rotate sound is annoying :/.
But the game is still good, and i would play it again :)
Just to be sure I retried and again at level 6, whatever I connect, the prod. energy stays at 0. And this time I made it sure every connection was ok, from sources to the city. And yes, I understood that this level needed you to turn wire on sources too :)
Edit: I retried again and the level 6 really seems to have problems, esp. on wind turbines.
Quite addictive game though. Except that bug, maybe you should add a cursor or something to highlight the wire over which is the mouse. Sometimes, esp. with straight lines, I turn the wrong one.
Fun and addictive game, though! I also liked the generated levels.
@jnkrambrich and @mathiouza: Yup, sound effects are not the best ones and music could add a lot to the game. Those are on top of my list for improvements.
@elgregos: sorry for the bug - never ran into it but will look if I find something. The highlighting idea is good, will also add this to the list!
I lamented in a prior entry that speedrunning a timed puzzle becomes trivial once you know the solution inside out. Roll in procedural level generation and :boom: problem solved! The generator is rock solid too, which is nice to see.
Got to level 10 and could have gone on for a long time. The challenge doesn't seem to ramp up at all, or at least not by a lot. I would have liked to see the level generator add in some unnecessary powerlines to make it less clear which lines you need to rotate and use.
Also, how does a hacker scramble the physical powerlines themselves? Eh, I'm thinking too much into this. Good job!
@huvaakoodia: Yeah, also my son voted for additional powerlines to confuse the player ;-)
For ramping up the challenge I thought about adding tornadoes or earth quakes to scramble up some more powerlines during the game. Any ideas for additional hazards? Maybe powerdowns of some plants? But then the player should have a way to repair them?
Again: thanks for all your feedback!