Spare Change by Swordishmage
This is a submission for Ludum Dare 45. The theme was "Start with nothing". In this short game, you play as a business person who decided to stop by the local casino one day after work. Unfortunately, that one day led to a powerful addiction and over the course of a week, you lost everything. Your home, your job, your friends, etc. Your goal is to make enough money to go to rehab so that you can overcome your addiction and start rebuilding your life.
NOTE: This is the unchanged Ludum Dare 45 submission version. I am currently working on a major update (more of a remake) of the game.





| Youtube | https://swordishmage.itch.io/spare-change |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/45/spare-change |
Ratings
| Overall | 969th | 2.95⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 1031th | 2.548⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 912th | 2.694⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 221th | 3.79⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 974th | 2.613⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 587th | 2.81⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 548th | 2.742⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 930th | 2.806⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 25🗳️ | 41🗨️ |
Great work, thanks :)
The narrative is nice and keeps the game going. Picking up the coins, going back to casino and such. For me, the minimap wasn't really useful (as it didn't cover large enough area), and I found shops, casino, clinic, dump and few residental houses - so I hope I haven't missed anything.
Technically I have mainly problems with camera, it was too shaky (I know that this is really a problem with first person cameras in Unity in HTML5 build).
Keep up the good work.
Also, maybe the area in general is to big, I found myself making alot of back and forth. The minimap is great, it's nice to see that you took time to create this feature :)

There was quite a lot of wrong with it. Or at least things that could be majorly improved. Lets start with the biggest fun killer in the game, the boring and useless cooldowns. I mean, let the people play how they want without adding too many restrictions. The cooldown should be per bin basis and not global. So if someone wanted to triangle run their way between three bins all the way to rehab, why not allow that? Or if someone just likes sink too much into the protagonist and gamble all their earnings, why not? Now you're just limiting the playability options to just gathering trash bags and loose coins while every now and then rummaging through bins (begging took way too much time). The remainder texts about the cooldown were also super annoying. I mean the "I should wait a while before..." texts. Yeah I get it after the first one! It just added another dumb delay so you couldn't do those sweet search & beg in quick succession combo tactics.
Next next issue was the map itself. It was flat and boring and since everything looked the same, it was easy to get lost. The minimap was so zoomed in that its only functionality was spotting otherwise ridiculously hard to notice coins. The buildings weren't obvious enough to distinguish from each other at least before you learned what and where they were. The biggest offender being the rehab since it didn't even have a unique color. I mean, for example the restaurant could have had some golden arcs like some restaurant that shall remain nameless. Casino could have had a flashing neon sign. And dunno for the rehab, maybe like a hospital association would be enough and you could have a red cross on it. The dump was actually pretty ok but even that couldn't easily be spotted from far enough because of its height and color that kinda made it blend with tree trunks.
If there was some terrain shaping, it would be way more interesting to look at, navigate and even that would be places more recognizible because you wouldn't be only pinpointing yourself on those few mark buildings. Extra landmarks with no functionalities would do wonders too. Like some different looking buildings, big rocks, whatever really. And last easy fix to help with the navigation on not getting lost is to add a north marker to the minimap.
The controls could use some love too. The mouse somehow jittered weirdly. Dunno how to explain it really. And don't even get me started with the sprint mechanic. It was completely pointless and just there to make the player miserable. I mean, it was just "press and hold a button every now and then not to die of boredom" really. Each (held) button in a game should have some kind of draw back or flip side, or just made automatically be on 100% of the time. For example in a shooting button... it could have ammo management, knock back or slower movement while shooting. Otherwise it could just autofire all the time. Stamina management works in games with combat or where you need to run away from things but not really in a explorative walking/gathering game. Well at least you didn't put a green donut on the middle of the screen like BotW.
Anyways, good job! :thumbsup: