Basil by Abdul Zakkar

A game of survival - manage hunger, thirst, and temperature - how long can you survive?
A Ludum Dare 45 Entry!
Theme: start with nothing.
You play as Basil, the only survivor of a plane crash at sea. He is left with nothing but his wits.
Help him survive as long as possible by managing his hunger, thirst, and temperature. Be strategic about your decisions!
Controls:
W A S D or Arrow Keys
SPACE to interact
MOUSE to select items
P or ESCAPE to pause
You've survived a plane crash...

But how long will that last?



A ZIP file will be downloaded. Extract the ZIP file, open the subsequent folder, and run LD45.exe to begin the game.
Log:
Bug fix 10/8 - Difficulty scaling was dependent on frame rate, fixed.
| Youtube | https://abdulzakkar.itch.io/basil |
| Youtube | https://a-j-z.github.io/basil/index.html |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/45/basil |
Ratings
| Overall | 251th | 3.771⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 150th | 3.804⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 529th | 3.208⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 133th | 3.979⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 283th | 3.958⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 256th | 3.563⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 321th | 3.196⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 510th | 3.391⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 20🗳️ | 29🗨️ |
Overall, a pretty solid game.

Overall, I was on board for this game - well, half on board and half in the water. :joy: It is a little confusing learning how the game works, but once I got the hang of it, that's when it got fun...and the difficulty started to ramp up. Making this an endless game felt kind of bleak, since the boy never calls for any help, and his desperation grows the more he's all alone, trying to survive. But it overall works for the premise of this game.
Don't know if this was intentional, but I found it strange that the game starts out in fullscreen during the cutscene and then goes into window mode when playing the game. What's even stranger is that when starting the game again, the cutscene was windowed the second time I opened the application.
I thought that having the balance between spending time in the water to collect materials and then build with them or use them to cook food was a good idea. Everything seemed to work fine; the character movement was good and the music was bleak, but had some nice tones that fit the mood. I really like how washed out the character looks - that suited the mood perfectly.
I am a bit weirded out by that fullscreen bug though
We first started building the game thinking it could be a web game, so I locked it at 800x600. Then I realized, being absolutely new to web dev, that I need to have it written in javascript (I wrote in C#). By then it was too late to go to js, and the UI was built for the current screen size (whoops). So I was stuck uploading a small window game that must be downloaded. A lesson learned!
Thanks for the feedback on learning how the game works, it's definitely something I want to improve on as a game dev. Finally, I'm glad you enjoyed the music and mood :)