Feed the Machine by DeathStorm
Introduction
You and your Crew arrived the Mars and built a nice big dome where you placed your most important machines to survive. Unfortunately all of your crew was exterminated by some space environment issues and now you are totally alone.
All the Stuff in your Dome was mixed up during an earthquake and you just regain your consciousness and see the big mess. Now it's up to you to survive and keep the machines alive till the shuttle arrives and rescues you.
Your job is to create O2 and reduce the CO amount with your O2 Generator.
You need also some Food and Water which will be produced by the Greenhouse.
To call for help and your rescue shuttle, you have to use the Radio Station.
And to survive the passage from your dome to the shuttle you have to collect some damaged space suit parts (Three of each) Helm, Pants, Jacket
and combine them to one functional on your Workbench.
If everything is done, you can leave the dome through The Exit and enjoy your safe trip back home.
BUT every machine is pretty damaged and break from time to time, so you have to repair them frequently.
You have to have a look at the pipes aswell. Usually they pump out the Carbon Monoxid out of the dome, but even the pipes can break and your dome fills slowly with the dangerous gas. So go and fix the Pipes.
Next to that, everything in your dome needs some Power so the most important machine is your ENGINE. Throw everything you don't need into it and produce some electricity with burning them.
Even the Exit needs some power to let you go.
soooo..... KEEP THE ENGINE ALIVE
GamePlay
- Stressful Coordination of various Tasks
- Hunt the Highscore and beat the Time
- Fix your machines and pipes
- Contact Home, Produce Oxygen, Craft a space suit and fill your stomach
- Burn Stuff, even with a purpose or just to see stuff burning
- Survive the Mars
- Flee back to Earth
- Scan your environment for interesting stuff
- Mostly Randomized Level
Disclaimer:
- WebGL Version seems to be still buggy, we recommend to use the normal download versions!
- MAC and LINUX version are not tested
Controls:
- W/A/S/D - Movement
- E - Use / Activate / Repair
- R - Scan Grenade
- ESCape - Opens and closes the pause menu
Helping Tips:
- Read the Tutorial
- Keep calm
- Find all 4 Machines and remember their position (O2, Radio, Workbench, Greenhouse)
- The Engine is always in the center of the Dome
- The Exit is always in the north wall
- Check below other objects for important items
Known Issues:
- Some typos and grammar issues
- Hard AF
- Volume Mixing can be a problem
- Some Graphic Glitches
Team:
Christian - Twitter: https://twitter.com/key_user
Christian - Twitter: https://twitter.com/DeathStorm1987 - Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/deathstorm_de/ - I would like to stream your Games, just enter it in this Form: https://forms.gle/eSwKEnw2Y3v3q46J8
We cant wait for your response and feedback! Thank you so much!
| Youtube | https://deathstorm.itch.io/feed-the-machine |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/feed-the-machine |
Ratings
| Overall | 1475th | 3.381⭐ | 44🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 1692th | 3.095⭐ | 44🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 806th | 3.488⭐ | 44🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 499th | 4.012⭐ | 44🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 1788th | 3.167⭐ | 44🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 1262th | 2.806⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 1032th | 3.488⭐ | 43🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 53🗳️ | 64🗨️ |
Nice game :thumbsup: great execution :D
@incd021 I feel you! The game annoyes you constantly and I've got so frustrated over playtesting ... I hated it :D
@bereg @slam0 @polyducks - The missing ui was a design choice we made. You all are right that its hard to keep track of everything if you cant see the status of, lets say the amount of oxygen in the dome. But maybe it would be too easy / not that stressfull with all the ui on screen. In retrospective we have probably learned that this type of game should need a ui. You have to make mistakes to gain expierence :D
Some problems i noticed: sometimes stuff is hidden behind the pipes. One time i could not see that my co was broken because of the pipes.
I would love to replay the game if you could made it a bit easier or less random.
EDIT: i just realised that i played your game for 40 minutes
Especially playing it for 40 minutes is pretty hardcore.
The sound is nice, and I like the machine animation a lot! I'd have a much easier time if the dome was a bit smaller though.
I know this have a tutorial, but a simple tutorial I guess is more great :).
The rest, I really like the environment and the mechanics, manly to take objects and give to the machine.
You guys have a good job in short time. Congratz
Other than that it was a great concept and looked great, balancing the machines was a lot of fun and it is very impressive how much you made in the time that you had.
The game looks really good though, and the putting stuff in the engine to burn was a satisfying loop. The sounds are fun, the story is fun, the engine is creepy in a cool way, great job!
For instance, interacting with the world requires the feet of the character to be very near the center of the target object. It really should check from the center of the dude instead, or, even better, check both. Repairing should be a priority, so that the character doesn't accidentally pick up objects when trying to repair a pipe. Alternatively, there could be a different key for it to begin with.
Repairing and using the stations is also very slow. It doesn't need to be as you could have just tweaked the other values to be slightly faster as well. The tenseness comes from not being able to do everything at once, not from the slowness.
I didn't actually mind missing some of the information in the HUD. There is always a need to pump in more oxygen, so I pretty quickly learned to just go there whenever I was nearby regardless. Same thing with the engine. Always fed it when going past.
So, I like the design. More polish and UX testing and this would be quite something.
I bet the game is pretty easy to beat if you understand the mechanics, but at least I couldn't grasp them.
Still, like I said, I enjoyed the concept and the random nature of the level was a nice touch. Aside from the difficult learning curve, an in game tutorial would really elevate the game play for new players.
Keep it up!
The UI could use a lot more feedback though. Your hunger bar is only visible when you're moving up or down. I usually spent most of the game moving left or right, so most of the time I couldn't see the bars getting low and lost. When a machine breaks, you have no idea it's broken and you have to fix it. It would be a nice idea to at least add some icons or text to the screen, something like "You are hungry" or "The O2 generator broke down". That way you wouldn't have constant access to full information about the state of each system, but at least you would know there is a problem somewhere and you need to take care of it.
Also, a lot more feedback when using things. Right now I can press E and not notice something isn't working. If I'm trying to use a machine and there's no power, play some sort of beeping or clicking noise to let me know it isn't doing anything. When completing the radio call for home, display some information like "message sent" instead of just hiding the interaction text.
While I understand the idea behind having to find each machine every time, I think once the player finds them they should have some sort of markers, letting the player know where they are. It would be better if the game remembered their location instead of forcing the player to do it.
The colliders could use some work, too. Pretty often I'd get stuck on things like the back of the chair, while stuff like broken pipes were very difficult to move to.
Overall it's a really good survival game. A nice jam entry, I've enjoyed playing it. ;)
The tutorial is too long, an interactive tutorial or message on screen when playing will be better.
It's too hard to find your way cause the map is big, you should add maker or map that will be updated when player explore.
Add GUI to show wich machine is broken.
Good work.
Thanks a lot to everyone ;)
I can see that there was a lot of ambition for this project and the fact that everything works and there are only a few things that don't work perfectly is amazing. You did a really good job on this game and with a bit of polish and some UI work this could turn out super cool. Really well done!