Colony XG-29 by juxipolo

[raw]
made by juxipolo for LD34 (JAM)
As the leader of the first human colony on planet XG-29, it's your job to organize the colony ship launch, and help get the colony up and running quickly. Your goal is to build the colony up to a stable size. If you can grow the colony to 500 residents, the colony will be stable and independent. Stock the ship with as much gear as it will fit. Once you've landed, build the colony while managing the on-world resources and raw materials.

Card Types:
Purple - Building
Teal - Reusable
Orange - Unit
Green - One-time use

While stocking the ship:
Click one of the three cards to add it to the ship manifest

After landfall:
Use the arrow keys or click and drag to move around the map. Use your scroll wheel to zoom in and out.
At the start of every day you draw a card. The buildings you construct may use or generate some resources or raw material each day.
Click a card to use it. Some cards require you to select a location on the map in order to use them. Some cards require you to pay a cost in various resources in order to use them. The cards that you can afford are highlighted in blue.
Buildings can typically be placed anywhere you can see. Building cards are discarded after being constructed.
Units may be deployed from any appropriate building. Military units will return to your recycling pile after all threats are eliminated. Your units will move on their own towards the nearest threat.
Reusable ability cards will return to you recycling pile after use, one-time use cards are discarded after use.
At the end of the day, you will automatically move any cards beyond the first 8 to the recycle pile. If the deck is empty, the recycling pile will be shuffled into your deck.

Resources:
Population - The number of colonists living on XG-29. Citizens arrive as long as the colony is happy. There is a soft cap on population, houses extend that cap. Having more citizens than housing creates unhappiness
Happiness - How your citizens feel about living on XG-29. Some buildings increase happiness. Overcrowding lowers happiness. Having a shortages of supplies lower happiness every day. If the colony is unhappy enough, citizens will leave.
Illness - As the colony grows and time passes, disease becomes a real concern. Sick citizens spread disease and will die without hospitals or clinics available, lowering population.
Creds - Money in off-world banks. Used primarily for importing goods and services from nearby planets and stations.
Food - Colonists need food. On average, 5 colonists eat 1 supply of food each day.
Water - Colonists typically recycle their own water, but farming and industry buildings use water
Energy - Many buildings need energy to run their operations.
Alloy - Alloy is primarily used to construct many different types of buildings.
Copper - Copper is used by many tech buildings.
Oil - Oil is needed by military buildings or can be shipped off-world for a profit.

Strategy tips:
Don't just buy every card you can - a deck full of useless junk can be a real problem when you need one specific card.
Have a plan for generating food, energy, and alloy before departing.
Be cautious taking all the shiny cards off the bat, you won't be able to afford them early on.


Dev notes:
Originally submitted as Compo - just really needed more time. Post-mortem to follow.
12/13 - compo version submitted
12/14 - switched to jam, compo game needed serious balance pass and wasn't fun
12/15 - day 1 patch
12/19 - *hopefully* fixed random crashes, also you should be able to resize the window (that might be a bit buggy)

Ratings

Coolness 61% 3
Overall(Jam) 3.85 106
Fun(Jam) 3.73 117
Graphics(Jam) 3.30 594
Humor(Jam) 2.50 604
Innovation(Jam) 3.76 114
Mood(Jam) 3.17 553
Theme(Jam) 3.39 752

Feedback

MadmenProductions
15. Dec 2015 · 19:11 UTC
Can't end the 1st turn becouse the window went below my screen. Tutorials nice, Graphics are nice, Idea is good.
Echo Team
15. Dec 2015 · 19:54 UTC
Exactly my jam :D Cards, resources, management... quite expansive as well!
tantumgames
17. Dec 2015 · 01:33 UTC
Great graphics and good idea.
SusanTheCat
17. Dec 2015 · 01:47 UTC
Very detailed! Got confused in the black market. It sold the ones I wanted to keep.
sP0CkEr2
17. Dec 2015 · 01:53 UTC
quite a lot of word here - seems very in depth - i have rated based on first impressions but want to play some more so i can update review later - nice work here
niccholaspage
17. Dec 2015 · 02:53 UTC
Ran into a crash the first time I tried to play it, the second time however I made it pretty far in and had a pretty sweet colony going before everyone starved and died :(. Had a lot of fun, great job guys!
pianoman373
17. Dec 2015 · 03:06 UTC
This is a really awesome jam, one of the best i've seen. This could very well be a full game with better art.
Weeping Rupee
17. Dec 2015 · 03:08 UTC
nice idea, but to be honest, a bit overwhelming. a tutorial and maybe a refinement of the cards available I think would benefit this game.
xodene
17. Dec 2015 · 04:42 UTC
Wow this is really well done, I can't imagined how much work you've put into this entry. There's so many cards to choose from and it's very detailed in its design. This is one of the few entries that makes me want to continue playing after rating. It's a little overwhelming with all these cards but I'm sure I'll get used to it in time.
utoxin
17. Dec 2015 · 04:56 UTC
I had to force myself to stop playing it, so that I could rate it. :)
Starspell
17. Dec 2015 · 04:59 UTC
This is a great little game. I had two goes at it. First time I didn't get my supply chain set up correctly. Second time I didn't have any money coming in. Lovely little idea. Just needs a couple of extra mechanics to help along players that get themselves stuck, a little bit more to do and sound.
Neonlare
17. Dec 2015 · 05:10 UTC
This is an insane amount of work for 72 hours, the graphics are cool, and the idea is pretty damn solid, it's a shame about no sound, and the wonky UI making it hard to end days, do you think you will be releasing a post jam version to add content or fix some of these issues? Really good work all over! Some insanely cool concepts, I may be playing this for some time :).
🎤 juxipolo
17. Dec 2015 · 07:57 UTC
Just pushed a new version. Resizing the window or enabling fullscreen both create problems, but you can now press enter or space to advance the next turn if the button is hidden.
monetai
18. Dec 2015 · 18:27 UTC
simple and extra fun, i liked it a lot , but daaaaaaaamn that's hard
WakeOfLuna
19. Dec 2015 · 18:49 UTC
Nice idea and execution. Got a bit tedious for me once I ran out of cards to play and just bought some cards and spent them every turn. My main base got destroyed by a big worm in the end :(
pkenney
20. Dec 2015 · 20:15 UTC
This game required really sitting down with it, and boy did I ever! I got up to a bit over 500 colonists I think, and by that point I had a strong inflow of all resources.

I think the enemy attackers need more noticeable graphics. I suddenly found I was out of some things and realized a wurm had destroyed all of my oil rigs and that was a big problem for me.

I'm impressed by this game - it was hugely ambitious and you really did a good job achieving a ton of that vision. Of course the balance felt like it could be improved a bit but great job getting so far in the limited time.

I wished I could have managed my hand a little better, by choosing what to discard rather than having a FIFO scheme. It was also tricky to pick all the cards before knowing the rules, and then I had to live with those blind choices for quite some time. However this is greatly mitigated by the ability to get more cards during the game. I overinvested in repair cards early though, and had a lot of dead draws.

I also wasn't sure what happened to my security officers. I found it was better to play them in response to a threat rather than pre-emptively, but only after some experimentation.

More clear enemy graphics, some kind of sound, and maybe a limited life to the pop-ups on the right would be minor improvements.

Great job on such an ambitious entry.
Wevel
21. Dec 2015 · 10:33 UTC
Very in depth game, the notifications should disappear after a while as other wise the end up just blocking the screen
Foofanoo42
21. Dec 2015 · 11:05 UTC
This was very fun and I genuinely played more than half and hour.
some genuine 'metagame' stories at play here:
my airport got destroyed by an alien one turn before I discovered oil and was able to build an oilwell to supply my airport with oil to launch a tacjet to kill the alien.

wasn't sure about networks halving maintenance costs, is this buildings that use copper/oil etc and does it change what the building says it's using?
+ unhappiness - happiness?
dx0ne
21. Dec 2015 · 11:44 UTC
That's impressive amount of work as for LD. And i'm a sucker for colony sim.