Aqua Qaos by AlbionBrown

made by AlbionBrown for Ludum Dare 46 (JAM)

Thank you for checking out Aqua Qaos! A submission for LD Jam 46 by Josh and Lottie. The aim is to keep the five cities alive by supplying them with enough water. The cities begin by using the same amount of water as the flow of their rivers bring in. If a fire starts, you must increase the flow of water in that city's river so that the water level is above the fire level in order for the fire to be extinguished. If the fire is not put out, the city will burn! Leave the water levels too high and the city will flood! Not enough water and the city will be left droughted!

Sometimes the rivers get damaged too, so they need to be repaired before supplying water to the city!

EDIT: I found it's best to clone the repository and run using a small HTTP Server. (I used the Live Server extension for VS Code to build it). In theory it should just work by downloading the ZIP and opening game.html in the browser but I found that to be buggy for some reason.

2nd EDIT: Nevermind, I forgot about itch.io

https://github.com/albionbrown/LDJam46

Youtube	https://github.com/albionbrown/LDJam46.git
Youtube	https://albionbrown.itch.io/aqua-qaos
Original URL	https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/aqua-qaos

Ratings

Overall	2537^th	2.132⭐	21🧑‍⚖️
Fun	2535^th	1.868⭐	21🧑‍⚖️
Innovation	1993^th	2.868⭐	21🧑‍⚖️
Theme	1719^th	3.421⭐	21🧑‍⚖️
Graphics	2300^th	2.079⭐	21🧑‍⚖️
Audio	1596^th	1.206⭐	19🧑‍⚖️
Humor	2021^th	1.438⭐	18🧑‍⚖️
Mood	2376^th	1.75⭐	20🧑‍⚖️
Given		13🗳️	10🗨️

Feedback

yscik

21. Apr 2020 · 23:42 UTC

A mouse-based UI would be probably better here, maybe turning some valves by clicking, it's hard to keep all the keyboard controls in mind. I can see this idea and gameplay being fun to play with some better controls and feedback on causes and effects. Maybe throw in balancing a limited water supply too.

Akusan

22. Apr 2020 · 00:15 UTC

It's a good concept. Keeping the city alive by distributing water. I am not sure if I am playing it right though.

CarlOfAllTrades

23. Apr 2020 · 07:34 UTC

Nice concept but I preferred to use the mouse sincerely. Its a bit hard :sob:

🎤 AlbionBrown

24. Apr 2020 · 00:06 UTC

Thanks all for playing! Yeah I made it too chaotic on the keyboard which was one of my aims, but maybe it's too much. Next Jam will need to use the mouse. If I had more time I would have included a score counter.

GameCarpenter

24. Apr 2020 · 03:19 UTC

If you're in my state, you had best hope to live in NorthWestVille, cause every other city is straight up doomed. Simple enough idea, though at this speed, I think I could maybe handle 2 cities =P. It would be better if things just burned to the ground / flooded, slower. A level system where one city is repaired each level (ala missile command) would be nice. Then you could slowly scale up the difficulty as well.

I used a select and act interface, and I think that would work well for this also if you wanted to do keyboard controls. Select a city using the numberpad even, then choose an action. Or select cycle counter clockwise / clockwise with left / right, and raise / lower with up/down (or the wasd equivalent.)

windfall890

24. Apr 2020 · 21:53 UTC

I do think there is something fun about the chaotic "WHAT DO MY BUTTONS DO?" feeling.
With more feedback to the player, and some more lenient tuning of the city health i think it could work with these controls.

A very QWOP aesthetic!

Thanks for sharing with everyone!

🎤 AlbionBrown

26. Apr 2020 · 22:11 UTC

Thanks @windfall890! Yeah it's what we were aiming for. I can't explain why though. I'm glad you mentioned QWOP, my gf had never heard of it so that's all her boredom wiped.

Keppu

04. May 2020 · 06:11 UTC

Interesting idea for a game. Control scheme is kinda messy. Could it be done with mouse clicks instead?

Boaz

08. May 2020 · 06:45 UTC

Good game

NunoRibeiro

10. May 2020 · 18:41 UTC

There is a potential here. I had the same difficulties that everyone is mentioning here, the controls were beyond hard. With some tweaking and polish this could become something great!

VirtuaWorlds

11. May 2020 · 03:43 UTC

Interesting game. Need a bit of time learning the controls, was a bit confused on what buttons did what. Nice start, nice job.

kjscott

11. May 2020 · 10:21 UTC

Echoing many people here, the control scheme definitely needs some work. Being mouse driven with either +/- on/off for each city or click to highlight a city then one set of keyboard controls (say QWE) would have made it a lot easier to manage. Maybe also having it with different levels, start with 1 city, then 2, then 3, and so on so people can get use to managing everything, slowly building up the difficulty.

There's definitely potential here but needs some polish to see how this might truly come out.