Gaia - Keep It Alive by Hereward
On a distant world known only as Gaia, life has emerged. Your must help that live survive and thrive by ensuring the conditions are as favourable to life as possible. Use all the tools at your disposal to counter the hash realities of the universe; but be careful of side effects that can persist for thousands of years.
Meteors provide a lot of heat, but they can destroy land.
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Volcanoes can provide new land for expansion, if they ever cool down.
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Remember, life is precious; keep it alive.
| Youtube | https://gaia.herewardmills.com/ |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/gaia-keep-it-alive |
Ratings
| Overall | 705th | 3.708⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 1151th | 3.354⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 36th | 4.271⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 26th | 4.438⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 1264th | 3.6⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 982th | 3.5⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 19🗳️ | 16🗨️ |
Sadly I've always stopped making it, because I wanted it to be real, which makes it either really hard or really imbalanced. For example comets and meteor behave the same, and only heates up planet temporarily, because after a few years a "nuclear winter" like situtation will began :\
But yeah, maybe we have to sacrifice some of the realism to make it playable, like you. Or maybe there is a both playable and realistic design. Who knows.
Anyway, I enjoyed the game, and it was fun to erupt lots of volcanoes to prepare for an ice age. Loved the low poly style and realistic music. By the end of the session I had some performance issues, maybe the too many volcanoes caused it.
I'm going to comment specifically on a couple of things:
*Performance*
If the game is too laggy try "Low" quality mode. It doesn't look as good but it should be more responsive. We know performance is an issue and will try to fix this if we keep enhancing the game.
*Tools & Effects*
We had so many ideas for other mechanisms that we just couldn't get into the game in the time available. We had to focus on ensuring what we had was a playable game. If we come to enhancing it we definitely will be adding more features to help make the game a little less spammy.
@arcus I was being a _little_ cheesy reinforcing the theme - putting our finishing touches in place in the middle of the night was not ideal.
@tudvari There was a constant tension between realism and pragmatism as we developed the game. We had to be very pragmatic because of time constraints. I expect if we'd had longer we could have improved realism without compromising playability.
@joule I, personally, take full responsibility for the state of the UI. I am still very glad you enjoyed playing it!
It feels like not quite a whole _game_ yet, more of an enjoyable interactive simulation. But all the gameplay components that are present work really well, and it wouldn't need much more (maybe a couple of extra tools and some kind of objectives or challenge/conflict) to make it into a really compelling game.
Switching between overlays provided different perspectives and experiences - near the end of the game I was trying to make sure all planet was nice and cool, but only when I switched to population did I realize that some of my attempts to cool a volcano have ended up making part of the continent non-habitable, and thus separating a fraction of the population to live as an isolated society.
Overall, was fun and engaging, everything working smoothly.