Ages of New Earth by HitchH1k3r
As you guide humanity through the Ages of New Earth, you'll find yourself...
Terraforming Planets 
Making Choices 
Keeping Things In Balance 
...but if your colony loses that balance, you might struggle to keep it alive.
Controls
- Interact - Mouse
Pro-Tips
- Don't let your resource numbers get too high or low.
- Gather cards you want later in the early game.
- Develop empty Regolith to make Towns and Cities.
Version History
Apr. 20, 2020 :: v1.0.0-jam - Jam release
Apr. 29, 2020 :: v1.0.1-jam - Added analytics capturing - Fixed bug causing card select prompt to display too high
| Youtube | https://hitchh1k3r.itch.io/ages-of-new-earth?ref=LD_Page |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/ages-of-new-earth |
Ratings
| Overall | 614th | 3.75⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 1361th | 3.25⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 467th | 3.688⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 1164th | 3.688⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 469th | 4.141⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 1119th | 3.145⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 1921th | 2.083⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 1177th | 3.419⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 106🗳️ | 15🗨️ |
I do recognize the effort to make a strategy card game for a jam. So pretty awesome to pull this off and I like the look of the cards - pretty slick!
Thanks so much for the kind words, and glad y'all enjoyed it! We tried to make something simple-ish that players could learn with time, but still challenging and strategic. Hope we managed some of that!
The 3D effect on the cards is one I think we're all pretty proud of too; it's actually just made of a few layers of flat sprites, which scroll at different rates. Like the parallax backgrounds of 2D-era games! It's a really neat effect, and one I've always been fond of... so I'm glad we got to work it into this.
Huge props to @hitchh1k3r for implementing both that, and the stencil buffer shenanigans that gave the cards depth, during the jam. I am amazed how fast he works!
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@lou-bagel
Thanks for the feedback! To answer your question, the choice part of the game comes in a few ways:
1) What season, and what tile you play a card on, can change it's effect (this is reflected in the card text changing)
2) Events between years often let you choose a card to add to your hand. Once you know what cards do, this lets you plan ahead a bit.
3) You have 5 cards in your hand, but only play 4. You can also increase hand size as the game progresses. And though unplayed cards stick around, you can postpone playing them; hand management is another way to plan long-term!
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@xmatos
Sorry for the lack of adequate tutorialization. I've found that pretty hard to work into a game jam timeframe, with these kinds of puzzley or strategic games. It's a real bummer, and something I definitely want to get better at. Thanks for the kind words nevertheless!
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@robert-li
I do like Catan, and that style of boardgame! Though I don't think this *plays* like Catan, we're definitely guilty of having cards, hexagons, and stuff you put on em. ><;
Also, an undo button, or even a full rewind system, *could* be nice in a game like this! Might help ease players into the mechanics, and let them explore and experiment a bit more. Thanks for the suggestion!
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@canti
We'd discussed placement and adjacency being an important part of later-game strategy, but had to cut that bit of design for time. In a full game, agreed that placement synergies would add a bit to the strategic element!
Music wise, that's my bad. I was bouncing between art and music, and really struggling to compose this jam. Ended up stretching out a simple loop I threw together in 30 minutes or so. Wish I had more time on it. I had such plans!
The design behind the Crisis Cards was that they'd make your existing problems worse, but with clever play (or avoiding playing them) you could restabilize. The other thought was to make it so that, once you got into a bad state, the game wouldn't drag itself out... so it kinda pushed you harder and harder toward a game-over. That said, I do worry we might've overdone it a bit!
In the early draft of the game, the player was intended to have the Terraform, Develop, and Work cards the whole game through, which gave them more options for bumping their numbers around. We ended up spacing those out into separate Eras, to ease players into the mechanics... but a side-effect was that it limited players ability to rein in out-of-balance resources. Given more time, I think I'd want to reconsider that all, and maybe redesign the eras and card-sets too.
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@ghast-neoh
Thanks so much! Making this a game about maintaining balance, rather than about gaining and spending resources, was one of the design choices we made at the start. The game-philosophy behind Analgesic Productions' "Even the Ocean" and so on was an inspiration for this! I definitely want to play with this concept some more.
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@matthewi
Thanks for the play! I hope the challenge with the Crisis Cards was welcome, rather than frustrating. And sorry about the text; we tried to make the game work on any screen size... but some of the positioning of UI bits, messages, the card scaling, and all that could probably have used some tweaks. Lessons learned for next time!
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@g-a-gamestudio
Definitely agree that pausing is important in strategic games, to give players time to think. We did work a sneaky sort of pause into the game, by letting the player take as much time as they wanted between playing cards, or making choices. Also, I agree that more detailed popups, and an ability to look at what cards are in your deck or discard pile would've been nice, if that's what you meant by more menus. Thanks a bunch for the feedback!
It took two games to get to grips with the basic mechanics of the game, and a lot more to realise there were more mechanics I had only just started to realise were there. By about the fifth game I really managed to do a lot better extending my gameplay to 19 years which was my best. I was unsure if there was an end-game or it was a game that kept on going until you lost so I ended up stopping after my next game (which was 14 years). Very much enjoyed it and would like to see this flesh out a lot more.
Anyway really nice entry. Congratz
I am not made to be an AI. Great game anyway, I like deck building games so it was fun nevertheless!