Unadexus by smbe19
Hi there, adventurer!
After years of exploitation of the earth there is almost nothing left. The earth is low on oil and coal and due to pollution solar panels don't work anymore. We are running out of power!
Humanity's last hope is to move to another planet and start over. Our astronomer found a suitable planet with the beautiful name of Unadexus. You are in charge of guiding this mission and bringing all remaining humans to Unadexus.
Good luck!
Note: While the web version seems to run fine most of the time, it might crash without any reason. Try the desktop version to avoid unnecessary crashes :wink:
How to play
You start on earth with a few people. Your goal is to bring everyone to Unadexus. To do this you will have to gather enough resources to build large space ships. As there aren't enough resources on earth and it is too far to Unadexus to fly in one part you have to colonize other planets. On each planet you need to build up infrastructure to gather resources and support your mission. But don't run out of power. Once you don't have any energy left, the people will die!
To be able to play the game you should read the tutorial.
Below some screenshots of the game.
Planet management:

Map of the universe:

Space ship view:

Have fun playing.
Also available on itch.io. Available for Web (HTML5), Windows, Linux and Mac!
Post-Compo fixes: - When creating a new universe, there were still some buttons that led to old, destroyed planets - When all your dudes were in space ships, the universe thought everyone died - Solar plants were basically free, didn't need any solar panels - There was a bit too much sun on Unadexus - Dudes could leave a space ship even though the planet did not have enough capacity - Support high DPI screens - Fix web build: planet selection was not working, thus unable to fly space ships (thanks @jimbly for reporting)
Ratings
| Overall | 360th | 3.271⭐ | 50🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 398th | 3.021⭐ | 50🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 324th | 3.104⭐ | 50🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 114th | 3.896⭐ | 50🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 334th | 3.245⭐ | 51🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 353th | 2.205⭐ | 46🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 458th | 2.659⭐ | 46🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 51🗳️ | 51🗨️ |
The graphics are really nice. Don't have anything bad to say about it, other than that the UI might be a bit on the smaller side.
I am really unsure what to do to be honest. I've read the description, but I still randomly get 'all your dudes are dead' and I don't even know why. There's a lot of stuff to build and I'm not sure what everything is doing and what I should be keeping track of.
This game seems like it's really cool, but it definitely needs a tutorial or something. I'm so confused on what to do.
That being said - I think you did a really good job and I think it might be just me when I say I didn't quite understand the game. And you hit the theme perfectly of course.
I also did my game in java but I didnt use the framework you had, so maybe the next time I'll try that.
Also I haven't figured what Roads, Cityes and Solar panels are goos for.
@jimbly Strange. It should state the reason why it does not work in the lower right corner.
@hilvon Roads are useless, I planned to do something with them but didn't have time for it. Cities increase the number of dudes you can have on a planet by 100. Solar panels only work on other planets; earth is too polluted for them.
If you wanted to continue this post jam, I think you could solve a lot of the issues with initial complexity by adding something like a tech tree or research cost where additional build options unlock over time rather than all at the start
I think I had enough fuel on a planet in the middle of the map to get some people to Unadexus, so I'll call that win! I spent quite a while scouting planets before finding one with any water, had to keep ferrying energy back to earth to keep a small number of colonists alive there because it was the only planet I found (for quite a long time) with enough water to make fuel!
Great fun =).
Good job!
I found that once a coal plant/oil plant/gas plant had temporarily run out of gas, it seemed to stay in "disabled" (brown-colored) state even after there was coal/oil/gas available once more - shouldn't it spring back into action once there are resources available again?
Also, I couldn't get the "remove" action to work.
Other than that, I was enjoying trying to keep my civilization alive.
Thanks for reporting the remove bug. I was able to reproduce it and will fix it when I have time. If a building is disabled, it can't be removed. If it's active, then it works.
Note to self: bug is [here](https://github.com/SmBe19/LD39/blob/master/core/src/com/smeanox/games/world/Building.java#L95).
The game concept itself is awesome. The idea of going from planet to planet and stripping them away to get to where you need to go is a 5-star theme to me. I haven't seen something like this and it's very compelling. In a later revision if you really wanted to up the addictiveness you could have the planets potentially have a unique powerup you absorb when you colonize it, like +10% oil gain rate or something, and you'd get that rogue-like feel to it. I really wish people would give this game more time and power through the learning curve, I think the balance of all its game elements is shockingly well done.
And to answer your note on my game about large team size, yes it's absolutely an extra challenge. We brainstormed for maybe 3-4 hrs before we even put boots on the ground, and didn't agree on the final game elements until Saturday night. I'd say 6-8 people is the max optimal LD team from my experience, but I really do enjoy piling on all my friends and making it as chaotic as possible.
It is quite lenghty and I didn't make it completely through, as it is very hard (to build enough of everything). Sometimes GUI also failed (especially edit box while packaging ship).
All in all it has more complex idea and I appreciate it, although it misses some tutorial and easy start.
Congratulations and keep up the good work!
The player has to juggle quite a few different parts, and that balancing act was compelling. It felt a bit unforgiving, I had to restart several times before being able hit the right combination of build-order and timing to survive long enough to be able to leave Earth.
The graphics were clear, and the UI was efficient (if a bit bare-bones). The ship-loading and control had a few "gotchas" though, e.g. sometimes not being able to unload dudes when loaded by mistake, or having to destroy ships at a destination world in order to send the next ship there (because of insufficient fuel at the destination to let the existing ship fly away). The "colonization" part could perhaps have been simplified a bit with a "colonize" ship-type/action, which would automatically consume the ship at arrival to form a basic "colony", automatically unloading the cargo and dudes.
If you are making a post-LD version, I would suggest adding some tooltips to the different icons, and definitely a pause function. Using sliders for the ship-loading might make it a bit easier to tweak as well (and/or pausing the game while on the cargo screen).
Overall, it was a quite interesting game, with impressive depth!
>Our future looks grim...
>We're running out of power...
>To Unadexus!
I agree with Somnium that tooltips would have helped certainly and the helper text in the bottom right corner really felt akwardly positioned, I wish that the text popped up at the cursor position on screen so you can clearly see what it says and having some audio play would also make it even clearer. It took me 5-10 minutes before I understood how to generate power and how to sustain it but after that and thanks to the very detailed tutorial you provided (though external) I had a lot of fun and played the game for a long time.
With this complex strategy it becomes hard to balance of course but you did a reasonably good job. I just kept running out of power on earth (-66 power per second haha):

What made it hard was all the combined factors and the fact there is no renewable energy source available (which is of course part of the game), for me it became a challenge and I found it very fun to try build a good enough infrastructure on earth to be able to travel to other planets but it just becomes a bit too much micromanagement to be able to keep up. You run out of power so quickly :p
I will try again some other day to see if I can beat the game but I would really like a post jam version of this game with an in-game tutorial and easier controls (sliders and high level management system for planets). The realtime factor can be improved is just what I am trying to say.
This game will certainly be something I will remember from this Ludum Dare, thank you for making such a cool game!
You have done a marvelous job with this game nonetheless! :grin:
What I liked more is that you used libgdx!!! I will learn a lot reading your code!!!
Great job!
There a few things I'd change about it though:
- It would be nice if there was music (of course).
- If you put some dudes in a ship, e.g. 20, and then there becomes not enough space on the planet to hold any more dudes, but you want to put more crew on the ship, you can't backspace the 0 so you can increase the number to 25 (because you can't move 20-2=18 dudes back on the the world), making it impossible to change the number of dudes on your ship. It should be that the game doesn't check whether you can move that many of a resource until you press enter or something, so that you don't get situations like this.
- The other planets seem to be REALLY small compared to Earth. Maybe make them a tiny bit bigger? Or at least provide a way to scan them so you know what you need to bring there and what you don't, that way you don't end up planning to build a metal mine there to get all your metal you'll need, but find out there is no metal to mine on the planet and end up being stuffed.
- It's a bit stressful that you are already running out of power from the very start. Maybe make it so that you start with a few coal mines and a coal factory or something, so that you don't start off losing power.
Other than that it seems like a really cool (although very hard (I am yet to even get dudes living on another planet other than Earth)) game. :)
Thank you very much for your very detailed feedback! If I find time I will incorporate your suggestions into a post-compo version.