Exo Keeper by amarillion
Exoplanetary Ecosystem Care Game
After a long interstellar voyage, you arrive at the planet Kepler-7311b. The planet is an empty slate, waiting for you to take a hand in terraformation! The first step will be to introduce microbes.
But you have to be careful to "Keep it alive!" Not all microbes will survive - there is the harsh cold, lack of oxygen, and the hostile biotopes from lava lakes to sulfur plains.
Can you turn this alien hellscape into a lush paradise?
Once the game starts, you can select any of the species at the bottom. View their info with the 'Info button'. Choose one, and click somewhere in the map - now click 'Introduce species' and if the conditions are right, that species will start growing. The game has some hints that will pop up while you are playing.
The microbes growing on the surface will slowly darken the icy landscape and decrese the 'albedo', the reflectiveness. This leads to a warming of the planet. Your goal is to reach a lush temperature of 298 K (i.e. 25 C)
CREDITS: Code: @Amarillion Design: @Ehe Music: @donall Art: @kongroo
Music and art are all created originally during the competition. The game is web-based, based on JavaScript and Phaser 3. Source code is available on github.
KNOWN ISSUES: 1. We noticed that sometimes when the game is not completely loaded, some buttons are unresponsive. When this happens, it seems to help to give the game some extra time to download the required files. 2. There are layout problems on small screens (e.g. a laptop) with display scaling enabled. You can see annoying scroll bars appear on the main window, and the buttons in the species info dialog may be occluded. If this happens, you can work around this issue by changing the scaling in the browser (with keyboard shortcut Ctrl+minus)
If you get stuck, check out the explainer video (full disclosure, this was made AFTER the jam): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1PgdhizHl0
Ratings
| Overall | 1204th | 3.5⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 1748th | 3.071⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 326th | 3.786⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 1266th | 3.643⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 1661th | 3.286⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 593th | 3.595⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 1193th | 2.868⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 1300th | 3.357⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 51🗳️ | 17🗨️ |
- There's a lot of micros available at the start of the game, I think it will work better if you start with 4-5 and introduce more as you play. Maybe by finding them on grids or when some specific temperatures are reached.
- The controls could be simpler, ex drag a microbe to a grid, they could make sounds like in ex world of goo. Or having the mouse over a grid and pressing number keys 1-9.
- I also expected the microbes to continue live on the grid, like in game of life, but they would just die some seconds after I placed them.
Anyway, feel free to tag me if you upload a new version, I would like to play more of this :)
I agree with @nsadie that the game is actually too easy, once you get past the confusing concepts. I'd love to make an updated version with some of the kinks worked out.
I missed two things: that different micros work better in different temperatures and that I could click on a grid (you have to look at the text to see when it changes). It might also work to add bars to visualize temperature and the other values. Maybe also display the microb information as card.
Good luck with your post-jam version!
I feel like some additional feedback would be nice to have. Just to have better understanding of the ecosystem and it needs. There are bunch of stats, but it is hard to parse it and to understand what exactly is going on and what are my actions supposed to be. So basically I need some information to base my next choice of creature.
Some species got wiped out pretty fast and I had no idea how can I help them :)
The concept is just awesome.
Species 5 and 7 really got along together in my game. They dominated the ecosystem and spread wildly.
Room for improvement is definitely on user guidance. Everything is just overwhelming the whole time. Even though there are just 3 clickable things and one of them is the info-button :D
There appears to be so much going on the screen that it constantly feels that you are not in control.
A tiny thing that would help a lot is a small up or down arrow in which direction the parameters on the right are in-/decreasing.
The music was very fitting and relaxing. The graphics of the individual microbes were cute and fitting. The planet itself hurt a little in the eyes though, because of the very hard differences between and the colourfulness of tiles.
Other remarks:
- the info button hangs quite often
- on my small laptop screen the info box was hard to read. Switching to a monitor with more vertical space resolved the issue
btw: now that I'm writing this comment I see the explanatory video you made. That helps a lot!
I like the look of this game, it reminds me of Win95 shareware games or early 2000s HTML4 games. The issues with the scrollbars might be very difficult to fix, though. It might help to make the game only take up about 90% of the viewport, and then have a button to enter fullscreen.