Despot 3900 by alxm
You play as a despot whose power is waning, and the goal is to accumulate as much wealth as possible and survive for as long as you can. Took 72h to make this, but I played by 48h compo rules and everything here is open source and made from scratch!
Manual
As despot, you interact with two factions that don't like each other: peasants and nobles. You choose an action to perform every turn.
Stats
- Year: Each turn advances 6 months.
- Age: Despot loses health points every turn after the age of 60, and faster every decade past.
- Health: Game ends when health drops to 0.
- Wealth: Final score is Wealth * Age / 10.
- Popularity: The percentage of peasants that are on the despot's side.
- Loyalty: The percentage of nobles that are on the despot's side.
- Revolt Meter: When full, the peasants launch a revolt against the despot. Starts the count once popularity dips below 50%, and increments every turn with no way to stop it.
- Coup Meter: When full, the nobles stage a coup against the despot. Starts the count once loyalty dips below 50%, and increments every turn with no way to stop it.
Actions
- Do Nothing: Recover health points at the expense of loyalty and popularity.
- Collect Taxes: Take money from either peasants or nobles, at the expense of popularity or loyalty, respectively.
- Give Money: Give money to one of the two factions to appease them, to the other's ire.
- Imprison Opponents: When the Revolt or Coup Meters start to worry you, round up the ring leaders to stave off the inevitable. Need over 50% of the other faction's support.
- Wage War: A gamble with large rewards in case of victory and large losses in case of defeat. Incurs some losses even if victorious, if popularity is under 33%.
Running
Windows
- Built for 64bit system
- Launch
despot3900.exe
Linux
- Built for 64bit Ubuntu 16.04/Linux Mint 18
- You may need to install these libraries:
libSDL2 libSDL2_mixer libpng12 - Launch
despot3900
| Windows | https://alxm.itch.io/despot3900 |
| Linux | https://alxm.itch.io/despot3900 |
| Source code | https://github.com/alxm/despot3900 |
| Other (document) | http://www.alxm.org/notes/ludum39.html |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/despot-3900 |
Ratings
| Overall | 117th | 3.857⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 204th | 3.524⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 173th | 3.524⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 42th | 4.19⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 174th | 4.143⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 267th | 3.35⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 250th | 2.85⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 185th | 3.667⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 20🗳️ | 18🗨️ |
I could see you taking this further -- adding some random events that throw a bit of chaos into the mix, and a few more factions to make your decisions a bit more interesting. I'm glad I played this one!
I kind of like these simple "choose an option" games. Hovewer in this one it is relatively easy to develop simple strategy that is highly profitable. I would suggest adding random events to the gameplay. Those would on one side increased difficulty of the game and hopefully also prevented early feeling of repetition during playing.
To the bright side, I really enjoyed the graphics you made. It was simple and practical but still very pleasant to play with!
Thank you for sharing the game with us!
One thing to point out tho is if war is always a coin toss, the first turn should always be war. If I lose, then whatever, I'll just quickly reset the game. If I win then I start the game with free money. If you didn't want that then you could have war be something the player has to buy into. Like they need to pay in 4000 to start the war and it has a 1.5x payout if won.
However, I found myself executing a simple loop of taxing the peasants -> imprison peasants, with the odd Rest to stave off death for a while. I was surprised the game let me do this without any bad consequences; I was expecting the events to fail at some point, making at least this strategy a bit risky. Maybe some diminishing returns on the chance of success of repeated actions would have kept things interesting a little longer. I'm sure that more choices / more elements would make this game shine.
It still is a very impressive entry. Looking forward for more!
I tried some ways to play the game but from what I tried the most successful way is the one the other commenters wrote before.
Any case, I simply loved the humor and the management, and your take on "running out of power" is absolutely brilliant.
Everything is really solid too, love the simpler style of the graphics and sounds. Managed to get a few highscores too, so that's good!
Maybe taxation of a group shouldn't work that well once popularity/loyalty drops below 20% or so with a random chance of terrible things happening right away. More groups (zealots, merchants, immigrants, etc) might work at making the balancing act more difficult.
Good work nonetheless.