God of Man by pstudio
God of Man
You are god of a small world. The humans are expanding too much for their own good. They'll end up using all resources and then die. You must save the human race by killing parts of it with divine interventions like earthquakes. The goal is to keep the humans alive for as many generations as possible.
Play @ itch.io (WebGL or Windows)
Gameplay
God of Man is a strategy/simulation game where you are God. Humans have just been created and it is your goal to make sure that they survive. However humans have a tendency to eat a lot and procreate all the time. The result is there are too many humans using up all the food resources in the world. If a village or city don't have enough food the population will decrease and eventually die out. To prevent human extincion you have a few tools in you belt:
- You can bless the land which will give a boost to food in an area.
- You can create an earthquake that will kill some o the humans and destroy some food.
- Or you can even send the Angel of Death that will kill all humans in an area.
By perforimg these actions you can keep the humans from overexpanding. However each action has a timeout cost associated with it and you can't use the action again before X amount of time has passed. And the timeout cost rises each time you use perform that action.
At the end you must realise that humans are fated to die. The goal of the game is to keep the humans alive for as many generations as possible. The game will tell you at what generation the humans died, and you can then try to beat that score.
Controls
- Use mouse to select 'Actions' and 'Map overlays'. After selcting an Action left click where on the map you want to perform that action. Right click to cancel action.
- Arrow keys for panning the map
- 1,2,3,4 for zooming the map
- R key to generate a new world
- Space to pause the game
- '+' or '-' to increase/decrease game speed
Features
- Procedurally generated worlds
- A simulated world where you can control the simulation speed
- Map overlays to help identify problem hotspots in the world
- Create 'visually stunning' earthquakes :astonished:
- Revolutionary sound system that adapts to your musical preferences. Just launch your favourite music player, choose artist, album and or playlist, and then click play. :sunglasses: So yeah, there are no sounds or music in this game.
Imgur album for more screenshots and animated gifs
Dev notes
I'll try and keep this short. I don't like crunching. I went for the jam instead of the compo to have some extra time and bacause I was working on Saturday. Whenever I participate in a jam, I use it as an opportunity to try out new tools. In this case I wanted to get my hands dirty with Zenject Dependency Framework and Marklight Presentation Framework. Dependency Injection may not be the right choice for a quick jam, but I quite enjoyed working with Zenject and will definitely try it out again. Regarding Marklight. I want to like it, but I didn't have the best experience with it during the jam, where I was struggling with layout and finding a way to make it work nice with Zenject. I will have to try it out some more to see if I can use it. I really like the idea of using a WPF like workflow for gui.
Regarding the game itself. I had many more features I wanted to implement, but as usual time ran out. It turns out that making a world simulator is not something you just pop out :sweat_smile: I spent a lot of time tweaking the simulation, so that it would behave somewhat like I imagined. This meant that I only had 3-4 hours to actually implement the few actions that you can perform. Originally I had like 20 actions planned. At least there is a bit of gameplay in there, though I don't know how well my intentions ended up being translated into the game?
At least a playthrough only takes a couple of minutes.
If you read all the way through here are some few tips: * Humans consume food. There are two kinds of food resources on each tile. The confusingly named 'Food' resource and 'Animals'. Humans will try and consume food before animals. * Food and animal resources will regrow for each generation if there are no humans nearby. * A village population will grow each generation as long as there are food. At some point they will become cities. The larger the population the more ood they consume and from a larger area as well. * Large cities spawn settlers that will look for new food enriched land to settle on. This can both good or bad. * Use the map overlays to understand how food reoursces are consumed and how they regrow. * Small villages spawn next to larger villages/cities. If a city is in desparate need of food, they will take the food from the small village and that village will die out.
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/god-of-man |
Ratings
| Given | 5🗳️ | 4🗨️ |
The game overall has a "game of life" style presentation. It's minimal, but it's a fun toy. The overlays work well. The graphics are adequate and I especially like the effects associated with blessing, earthquakes etc. Controls were simple - perhaps a cooldown timer on the abilities would have been helpful, to give some indication of how soon different functions could be used. Buttons usually work better than dropdowns but no biggie. As a simulation, the game didn't appear to have any significant bugs and played smoothly.
If there's one thing I felt could have been improved, it was the depth of the simulation. After a few generations in the deep end not really knowing what's going on, it became relatively easy for people to sustain themselves for a long time without any intervention from me as a player. While it's fun to watch people moving about the map, even on higher speeds, it becomes a bit of a chore when at one point I had over 1000 generations pass with no intervention from me, and humanity had survived OK. I also didn't see much point in the plagues etc given this (which I ultimately found unhelpful anyway since the world was large enough that I could keep people migrating around it no problem). If there was an incentive to have the highest possible population in the world, or improve standard of living beyond a meagre hunter-gather existence this might be different, or if there were more resources to manage than just food.
That being said, the game was an elegant, simple simulation. I enjoyed playing around with it for a while overall.
However, I salute the effort invested in the AI. This is quite difficult to make something that works, so, just for that, congratulation !
The idea is really cool ! If you make what you want to, I think the game can be really, really good ! Keep coding and do not give up ! :)