Ultimate Planet Habitat Support Tester 2020!! by mikouaji
I (tried) made a simulation game, where you decide what creatures will roam a planet. If there is symbiosis (for a couple of in game years) between all species and the planet, they all survive and you win!
Hello there young apprentice!
Today your skills as a Planet custodian will be teseted!
You have (almost) all the tools needed to have this planet survive as long as the cosmos will exist! Remember not to run out of the planets energy and dont let all the creatures die!
Energy is restored to the planet from dead creatures. Plants consume the energy of the planet to live. Animals eat plants and eachother.
If you dont like a certain species you can eliminate them or change its behaviour, but remember, everything comes at a cost!
Controls:
Most things are done by clicking the left mouse button.
You can zoom with the scrool wheel od +/- on your keyboard.
To move around press the right mouse button and move the mouse or use WASD/Arrow keys.
Have fun :)!
Didnt have time for graphics :< spent too much time on simple bugs. Didnt playtest enough and there is probably a lot more to balance and tweak with some setting there. There were supposed to be more options in the GUI, like modifications for creatures, not only kill and re-roll. Either way hope you like it :)
Used:
Godot 3.2
sfxr for sounds
Krita for graphics
Ratings
| Overall | 1018th | 2.733⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 974th | 2.583⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 327th | 3.533⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 577th | 3.617⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 757th | 2.375⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 723th | 2.308⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 932th | 2.536⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 35🗳️ | 32🗨️ |
Most game states seem doomed from the start (maybe not the case on a larger planet size with enough knowledge, I couldn't say). I tried dozens of restarts without any configurations that seemed close to stable. If I did find a winning state, it would just feel like luck more than anything I did.
A good first step might be to invalidate spawns that are impossible, like a planet with only plants or only carnivores.
Maybe if there was an option to tweak stats for an energy cost instead of only randomly re-rolling and hoping things work, or to add species in addition to replacing the ones you have.
It could be a lot of fun to work your way up from plant life to herbivores to carnivores if there was a little more player input in the process.
I love that you went for a whole ecosystem simulator for a jam.
But it's really good start, with more work you can build an amazing game.
Keep going !
Well done!
My only problem was the game speed. It seems that the gameplay is linked to its framerate, so the more things the game has to calculate, the slower it goes. This means that depending on your choice of planet size the game will run differently.
The game said that a large planet could be heavy on my PC, but I actually found it run the best out of the four (maybe a little bit too slow). Medium planet seemed alright, but small one run way too fast for me to be able to influence anything, and the tiny one just flew past me and within a few seconds the game was over.
When it comes to gameplay, I guess giving the player more ways to influence the world would work wonders. I also wish there was a way to simply add a new species to the world without replacing an existing one. Maybe it'd be nice to be able to click a specific specimen to see its stats, like age and health.
All in all, it's a really great entry. I enjoyed it very much! ;)
I think if you added a lot more sprites, indications of the ages of plants and animals, showed what actions had just happened (feeding, growing, death, birth), and had tooltips show up when you hovered over a plant or animal with fun information, the game would be way more engaging. All the information, from what I can tell, is already in the model. All that needs to happen is a nice way to tell the player what the game is already doing.
Nice work, regardless, I had fun toying around with it.