Village of Sacrifice - LD 43

Its a really good game. I did not understand at first but I manage to understand

The game is pretty cool! Fits the theme perfectly and is very clever executed for a Ludum Dare.

Some improvements I would like as a player:
* The sacrifice button is not so clear at first glance (all my guys died due to god unhapiness on my first try XD)
* Maybe tweak a little bit the production of resources, my guys were dying a lot even when the proportion were 50% in food and 50% in wood.


Died a lot in the beginning, but eventually reached day 48.

@hadryel
Agree, the sacrifice button is not perfect, but that is due to the development of the game. First the idea was to sacrifice single villagers and the god only preferring one type of villagers instead of wanting a specific type. But that was too much clicking on + and - all the time and so I changed it.
Right now I would place a button next to the god happiness for sacrificing.
Am I allowed to change this after the deadline?

@hadryel @sarwin @craftlord
Yeah, you have to get the hang of it first because you are tempted to produce villagers as fast as possible, but that will cause your resources to drop really fast. Try to not overpace at the beginning and get a good balance between the resources and think twice if you have to build a house right now or if it can wait, because you get free beds as soon as you sacrifice some villagers :wink:
Wait with sacrificing villagers til the very end so that they produce resources as long as possible.
And of course, it is also a little bit luck involved, especially if the god wants to have that almost useless miners :laughing:

I will try my best today and post my highscore afterwards :wink:

118 Days is possible with some clever managing. I'm curious if anybody could top this.


Really nice game and concept. Graphics are pretty cute :o:

Awesome!


@wwh Nice, 85 days is quite good.

Very enjoyable game! The graphics look good, and the music sets a calm relaxing mood. The sacrifice system is a great take on the theme as well.

If you added an upgrade system (possibly from pleasing the gods) it would at a lot of depth to the game.

Very good game! I like the graphics and audio, and the game is very addictive and fun. My highscore is 87 days.

Nice game. I had a great time playing this game. it hard but it is ok, because i like challenge. my score is 56. this game has a very good balance and cool graphics and sound. I really don't know what can i tell more. (sorry for my bad english).

@aplite An upgrade system was not on the to-do list, but I wanted to add some additional resources, which I had to scrap due to the time limit. Also, the balancing would be crazy for more resources. But I could think of some sort of statue (out of stone) to please the god for a certain time to stop the happiness from decreasing.

I will add this point to my to-do list if I continue to work on this game in the future.

Thanks for your feedback.

44 days survived! That was fun, will try again... 79 days... final try, 84 days! I really like how the lightning bolts sped up at the end =). Balance felt really good.

Great entry! Balancing the resources and villagers is a challenging but rewarding gameplay loop. The graphics do the job well and are quite charming. The music brings the mood together and reminds me of scenes in movies with a catastrophe in slow mo set over soft music (at least when I play, those high scores are impressive).

One discouraging event that can happen is reaching the population cap when you don't have the resources to build new beds and you can't produce the requested units. If you could reassign workers for the same cost as making a new one it could be avoided and wouldn't be too broken since they'd still have to walk over to the new resource, wasting time and resources. Then again it reinforces how much you should be planning and preparing for the next groups you need to sacrifice so I might just be bad.

I think the introduction screen explains the premise well and the UI is clear and effective once you take a second to recognize the sacrifice button. The stats at the end are much appreciated in games like these.

Overall it's a well polished entertaining submission, good job!

Wow, I certainly didn't manage to beat @backurio 's score, but I had a lot of fun nonetheless!
Great game, well done!

@kramdar Thanks for good feedback. I really appreciate it.

Yeah, there are a lot of things that can be improved and a lot more was planned but I cut my goals to be able to publish the game in time. Maybe I will work on it in the future. I already have a few things on my to-do list for this case.

Oh man this game is good for 48 hours. Plays well and looks nice. Little tricky at first but you get hang of it. I can't even imagine how balancing a game like this must have been with such a tight schedule.

@adventureislands Balancing was surprisingly easier than I thought. Good for me, because I started to really balance it 2h before the deadline with tons of variables to tweak, but I was able to get it to the current status in 1h only.

But after playing it a few times now and seeing the reviews, I have a lot of things on my to-do list to improve already to make the gameplay smoother.

Nice game and relaxing until your villager got killed by a lighting ^^
I appreciate the music and the sound design, and like smooth art.

Nice! I wasn't very good though, only got to around 22 days.

I liked the simplicity of the gameplay, although it wasn't clear at first how to sacrifice a villager.

@ale Thanks for your feedback. I know that the button is not really clear, but it went through several iterations where you were able to sacrifice single villagers. If I'm going to continue my work on the game, i will make it clearer and add a better introduction :wink:

Hey Friend

SO FUN game. Its hard to make this in only 2 days with amazing images and audio. I thought the most complicate parts is the logic of the some UI parts which their relationship with each other number. Thats reminds me of one of my assignment. I have one assignment about one display. Populations, environment and the people happiness. More population will cause low quality environment. Low environment bring the decrease people happiness. Final, people low happiness will cause less population in the future. looks like circle right? Its spend our teammates many time in Javascript (P5). But you did it in unity! Very close to the theme BTW. Its hard to believe this is your time Compo.

Hopes you can reveive great rate and have a great day!

Only reached day 72. But I really really loved it, although this god can really be a dick at times XD. The game feels really complete and nice for a jam game.

Congrats on your entry, it's a lot of fun!

Your game was played on my stream ( twitch.tv/ursagames ) for the first day of Ludum Dare streams - you can find the timestamp of your game here: https://goo.gl/N2rkr8

Pretty good, though after a while when the god is demanding 7 or 8 sacrifices at a time, you literally can't produce villagers fast enough

Pretty nice game! The balancing for the resources felt right. I managed to reach 41 days.

@ursagames I really enjoyed watching you play my game. It was a little sad that you kept getting worse the first three tries, but you got the hang of it on the fourth try and reached a really decent score. Getting close to 100 is really nice for the current balance settings.

For the future I will for sure change the balancing and make a better introduction/turtorial.

@sheldonzs thanks for your feedback.

Yeah, at some point the game had to end and I tuned it so that it should be possible to reach around 100 days (=500 seconds played). I thought making it longer would bore some people and making it shorter was also no option.

If I continue working on it, I will definitely work on some goals (maybe multiple levels) and a better balancing ;)

made it a long way out nice game love the concept

That guy who got 118 days, that's some crazy shit.

Really nice management game though. It felt like how far you could go was capped by the villager spawn speed, and there was no way to increase that, but there has to be a cap somewhere I guess and that's as good a place to have it as any. It did mean that building more than four houses was a waste of resources though.

It also would have been nice if it was made apparent that food and wood were both needed to keep people alive. Food was pretty obvious, but towards the start all my guys were dying and I had no idea why, turns out it was because I needed wood.

Other than those fairly minor suggestions though, it was nice, well done.

@chao Thank you very much for your feedback. The guy with the 118 days is me, the developer. One can say that I cheated but I have to admit that I got really lucky with the wanted sacrifices of the god. I only made it above 100 two times in about 20 plays.

Yeah, you are correct that the cap is created by the spawn rate of the villagers, which was needed to not produce and sacrifice villagers too fast. This cap was trimmed as best as I could that a score of 100 should be possible, which is the result I see from the statistics here.

About your suggestions, they are already on my to-do list if I'm going to continue working on this game.

Btw. I think you would have been able to reach a score above 100 if your village didn't die that much. (compared to my statistic)

Pretty nice game! The graphics look nice, it feels pretty polished, having to sacrifice the guys adds a lot of challenged. Overall great job!

Love the neat, clean artwork and cool sound effects. Here's my play: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/345392409?t=01h11m49s