Keep Them Alive by acoto87
A short game about taking care of patients in a hospital room.
There is a shortage of ventilators, we only have one for each pair of beds, so you need to be careful to which patient you give the ventilator.
To take care of a patient you can switch a ventilator to that patient or just pass by the bed side of that patient.
It can be played with keyboard:
- move with arrow keys to move and take care of patients and switch ventilators
or with the mouse:
- just click a bed to take care of a patient
- or a ventilator to switch it

A game made by acoto87 for LD46.
| Youtube | https://acoto87.itch.io/keep-them-alive |
| Youtube | https://github.com/acoto87/LD46-KeepThemAlive |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/keep-them-alive-2 |
Ratings
| Overall | 359th | 3.596⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 528th | 3.28⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 551th | 3.26⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 111th | 4.12⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 410th | 3.611⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 666th | 2.731⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 697th | 2.37⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 761th | 2.9⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 18🗳️ | 24🗨️ |
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At a certain point, I felt locked down, because I only had a few beds left, and it felt like there was no way to push to recovery there. It felt like an endless vicious cycle, especially because sometimes the healthbars jumped back and forth randomly, despite the presence or absence of a ventilator. Maybe a bug? The Windows 64 bit version wasn't running for me either.
The art style was simple but conveyed a strong emotion. Loved the palette.
The biggest bummer was the ending screen. I saved all 24, but all it said was, "At least some survived". Would've liked some sort of victory screen.
Again, really fun game!
One minor issue I had was the inability to switch the ventilator I was standing at back again. Sometime I realized I had made a mistake and had to leave and come back to fix it.
Took a look at the source, and I also like the simplicity of the code! Overall it's a really great entry, good job!
@steve-dragon Yeah, I miss one text when you manage to recover all patients, maybe I update that bit later.
@brian-teng Well, it wasn't that intentional, patients without ventilation can always recover based on a random choice, so switching the ventilator back and forth may have that effect if the random goes negative serveral times in a row for some of the patients.
@no-grapes-games Yeah, I didn't do anything extra to make possible the switching of the ventilator once you are already there, I decided to leave it that way to not introduce another key into the gameplay. Thanks for taking a look at the code too!
Thanks all for playing it and review it.
I did like that you can actually queue the actions, it made for so much more enjoyable gameplay.
Nice game. As mentioned in the stream, the biggest problem with the game seemed to be the fact that the difficulty curve is the other way around – it gets easier (and less interesting) as the game goes on!
Greato Jobu! :smile:
There was one particular pair of patients - in the top right corner - who had almost no health between them, thus was impossible to get either one back to health as it seemed that they could not recover faster than they would decline. After half an hour I threw in the towel and just let one of them die, which was really sad since the room was filled with other unused ventilators.
Overall it's a solid, complete entry - you managed to keep me playing for a long time which is an accomplishment in and of itself. The art was pretty good, but I would've liked a few different frames for the player facing each direction, and maybe a simple walking animation. The music was fitting, but I would've liked a bit more variation/complexity as it got really repetitive really fast.

Great game, very up to date. The graphics look amazing and it is fun to save the lives of those who are sick. The music is pretty good too.
Serious questions need to be asked about the management of this hospital. By the end I had free ventilators and others with two patients still hooked up.
Ended up with all but one patient recovered.
@bilbycoder Yes, switching patients to unused ventilator-beds is one of the things that could make this a real time management game. Thanks for playing it!
@yonman Yes, you're a hero!
I am not sure what taking care of a Patient means.
But it is still a realy good game for 48h of time.
The music was a bit repetitive but overall gave that sense of panick that things needed to be constantly checked.
Overall I liked this way more than I thought I would, and I actually played till the end