Really awesome game! You are the first people I saw, that are using a family tree. What might be cool is that when your game over you can still see your family tree.

Nice little game. I would have preferred if the ui automatically moved the other families to the bottom of the screen, and if they were order by age. But good theme and nice clean ui.

Really charming little game. Strong vibes, would've liked some music. The animations were spot on and the portraits were interesting. I found myself setting little goals for myself, like pairing the youngest and oldest. It's a bit too sandbox at the moment, not really lot of incentive to think, just drag and drop wherever you see a heart. Very difficult to lose unless on purpose. That said, I did play for a while and laughed at points along the way as well. So well done!

Love the looks of this game. It felt more like a toy to me than a game, though. But maybe I was missing something. I would also suggest a bit more visual feedback when dragging and matching, so the players get a better idea what's happening. I clicked on the fastest button and things went crazy quickly. I love the art.

Wonderful art.

Really interesting idea. I'd love to have some of the backend info that you mention be exposed!
This is like a chunk of content that would be integrated into a larger game, which is pretty interesting.

My shrotest run was a family that had two kids, who then just got old and died and the game ended, which was kind of funny.

As others have mentioned, some kind of interaction would make it more of a game. Jesse Schell defined games as "a problem-solving activity, approached with a playful attitude." Even if there is no end goal, I really wanted to match characters together to have them cross-breed. I understand that this was made in 3 days of course, and honestly it's very cool and very polished. Well done!

Thanks for the nice comments and good feedback!
We are looking into tweaking some more of the game elements and making it more challenging. The score system should be more transparant and way more challenging. We think the minor tweaks will polish the gameplay part a bit more.

" I’d love to have some of the backend info that you mention be exposed!"
@microchasm I will do some future posts about the genetics and some graphs we used for fertility and health and such. @orion-five made some really awesome systems which I could play around with and tweak.

Really fun and interesting sim. I love the crest art, noble factions, and medieval stuff so this was smashing. For some reason when I got to my seventh generation it stopped letting match new suitors. I would be interested to see a screen at the end of my tree that I could analyze for fun after. This does feel like an excellent system for a bigger game of some sort, like a rouge like or medieval conquest game. If you take this further please let me know! Awesome work!

I love the graphics, but i think the gameplay needs some kind of event or something. Great game nonetheless!

Reeeally like this game! It could be even better if there was something else to do other than match up couples, like some kind of Faction-Based stat or something, or maybe resource accumulation.

Oh. my. God. I love it! I think some medievalesque music would've greatly fitted the atmosphere, but I didn't consider it as something lacking. It would've been a cool easter egg to be a able to pair same-sex nobles, and to be able to remarry widows and widowers.

At the moment, there isn't really a gameplay importance to the different houses, they just add to the atmosphere. I think this idea could be used to add some sort of competitiveness to the game, in combination with the mechanic that only male descendants could carry their family name. Your game is a raw jewel!

@blue-pin-studio yeah the faction based stats are currently in there but are not very transparant yet. Their unique features is already in their motto's but not yet too clear for the player.
Wincestor would have higher influence in their genes(we had chance of succes of matching depend on that but that's not yet in)
Salestor would have knowledge in their genes (being able to more clearly see succes rates)
Sapwood has higher fertility in their genes This one is actually in the game!
Krankhaus has better health in their genes this one is also already in the game.
Matching with these houses gives you a chance to also get better genes (or worse depending on the matches)
We might continue with that a little further in another jam we might do ourselves!

@alex-weiser thanks for the kind words. I'll look into your seventh generation issue. I haven't encountered it yet. Will try to recreate.
If you follow the game on the itch.io page you might see some patches in the future ;)

@pleyad Thank you! A friend who couldn't join the jam likes it as well and is currently trying to put together a nice soundtrack for it. We had audio on the list, but you know how it is, the list is long and the weekend is short.
We have considered widows and same sex coupling but simplified for now. We figured medieval times were not so open minded about these things. Maybe in the future we might end up using that thought though.
Anyway thanks a lot for playing!

A really funy way to deal with the theme. Cool system,
Waiting for the next challenging elements!! ^^

I discovered that I am not very good with family trees.
I've never seen royal families that don't have bastard children! LOL

Congratulations for the game!

You know, this is weird to say, but I think this might be the best take I've seen. So literal, yet so on point and somehow rather unexplored. hadn't seen it so far.

At first it seemed rather silly and simple to just match people, then the tree gets large and you start neglecting some branches and they die off and suddenly you have a few aging branches left and it hits you: Oh my! I might actually fail! Super cool! I wonder if the game gets harder or I hadn't noticed, at some point my people were dying young left and right (which led me to my doom).

My end was pure sadness with a widowed lady having lost her two kids young (didn't even make it to maturity!) husband dead! all relative dead! All I could do was watch, she sure lived long though!

Due to this awful (yet fantastic) end, I do want to suggest remarrying! don't let people be stuck with one person for life! (nobles certainly didnt!) Could add bastards with higher death rate (for everyone involved) and while I don't condone, incest! Desperate time calls for desperate measures (throw in worse health in progeny for accuracy!). Might technically already be the case with how we match people though. In my head cannon people started dying you due to assasinations (it was probably disease/health) anyways perhaps some political news and background for some more involved gameplay! (X declare war on Y -> increased death rate, Uprising against Z -> purge of a line, etc)

Got carried away with suggestion, but this was great and full of potential! Good job and wish you much success!

Hey joh, thanks for the indepth take!
There's indeed so much room for expansion, we constantly had to make hard calls what features to cut and which ones to focus on. I really wish I could continue expanding this indefinitely, since it's super fun to work on and can go so many ways.

So, grannies can marry with teens, but incest is not possible? I think that is what would make it interesting. You have to do some incest, but not too much or the family dies. Anyway, the portraits are nice, but some music would help the mood quite a bit. It is also very hard to keep a wide tree going, because so much is off screen or very small if you zoom out. Another issue is that when you drag a portrait it doesn't stick quite fully below the mouse. You want to drag the portrait on to another portrait, but instead you have to pay attention to where the mouse cursor is.

@euler-moises We don't want to imply that there are no bastards. But the Nobles sure want to imply that there aren't any. So they are not officially accepted into the family tree! (Also was a feature we wanted to brainstorm more about but... you know... time and all). Thanks for playing!

@joh We are considering assasinations, natural disasters and the plague. But that's quite a bit of extra work so it might take a while and another game jam for us to work on those ideas.

Your early deaths are most likely characters with bad health genes. You can actually select lines that get older because those probably have better genes to mix!
Like @orion-five said Thanks for your thorough thoughts!

@mika-la-grand teens marrying elderly is mostly a power move. They probably don't end up sharing the bed. But for more influence and such it can be a good idea. It was not unseen back in the days. We didn't add the succes/fail rate with the marriages yet but that would have caused those match ups to fail more often then succeed (would be a nice achievement or something in that case ;) )
Incest was one of the first subjects we talked about as well but we had to simplify and not tackle subjects like that lightly. If we would implement it we wanted to do it right. Give the genes in those branches mutations and possible negative alleles so they get family diseases and such. That is a lot of work (I would love to do some day).
Music I agree. A friend is actually doing some post jam soundtrack composing.
We were discussing pruning the tree and letting people die left and right once the tree grows a lot. Plague etc. But that's for later versions.
The mouse cursor is a bit of a pity... and might be patched!

Thanks for the thorough feedback! Hope these insights in our progress are interesting :D .
Come back to it later (you can follow it on itch.io) and you might see some interesting patches.

Very good graphics and easy to understand. The problem is that as a game is not quite that funny like any positive feedback for player and the family tree growth so quickly at the end I even cannot see who is who. Also maybe it is better to input some accident events or cases to make the game more fun and enjoyable. Again, I was attracted by the art design for real and thank you for all the effort, good job!

@yangying thanks for playing! Glad you like the art. We wanted to add events and missions but as a team of two and with all the simulation we ended up not being to add those yet. We might update those aspects later on. You can follow future patches on itch.io

I loved it! The simple concept alone had me hooked for a while!

I could honestly see myself playing this over a really long period of time if the game were further developed. There's so much potential here and I'd love to see it taken further! I'll definitely be keeping an eye out for it.

Great job!

I liked the graphics so much. easy and simple. I like the idea (Family Tree). Also, I can see full tree <3
Good Job

@tom-robson Thank you for your kind words!
We will look into some future updates and a possible follow-up, either in the form of another game jam for us 2 or to look into turning this into an actual project (once our current projects are completed).
If you follow us on itch.io you will be informed of future updates.
I'm doing some patching as we speak ;)

@meme-310 Thank you!

Having so many family trees is great! I had a great time discovering more and more of the tree! Well done and a really awesome entry!

This is a really unique idea for a game! I really like it, it reminds me of the family tree in the sims but minus all the waiting and doing stuff. I didn't know you could move the other houses' boxes at first lol I think it would make sense if it was on a separate layer from the rest and didn't scroll, because it can be challenging at full speed to move the houses box over fast enough before yo kids turn 80 :O) Overall very cool game, great work and good luck!!

I love the idea, for me its 5 stars on innovation, its well done with gorgeous procedurally generated graphics.
It would have been perfect if i didn't have layout problems : on the thirs rows, characters where hidden behind UI and i could'nt read their age. I tryed in different screen resolution but had always that problem.

Baby faces could also help understand they are young ^^ a baby with a mustache Was funny !

@savvu Thank you, glad you liked it!

@toasted-oregano Thanks! We had to improvise a bit on the UI. This seemed like the fastest and cleanest option possible within the time. But yeah I wouldn't call it ideal either. Luckily you did find out it could be moved.
Thank you for playing!

@infinite Thank you for your vote! That blocking interface can be moved but I understand that you would expect the UI to be there and not be part of a thing you would have to drag. Maybe in a future version this will be altered.

I was looking at a general graphic for a baby but that would take away from the whole genetics part. So then my mind raced to a baby face with genetics and quickly realised I would have to make three times as much art, and I already didn't have a lot of sleep :P. I have some ideas for that so I'm sure I will patch that in the future.

Thanks for playing!

this game is really Unique to say the lease. my wife played this and told me about it. hi @meme-310
I wouldn't say its much fun after a while I got bored... but I enjoyed the new idea and the system.

first run I married two people and they just didn't have any kids (think I got unlucky)
also some guy once his wife died young. I wanted to Marry him again (maybe you should allow it)

I love the fact the most reason people will not get married is "we forgot to marry them" haha

I don't know how to improve on this one. are you planning on improving something? because I like the idea but I dont really know how to make it more fun.

one other thing. I think when you zoom out you should keep the UI names and ages from zooming out. because you cannot read anything

@abdurrahman-khallouf Thanks for playing it yourself as well! Thanks @meme-310 for refering!
Sometimes you can be a bit unlucky but genes do play a big part. Each house has their own genes. We will add their motto's in the game today so you can see more easily what kind of playstyle they might have. Matching them with the other houses will diversify the genes in that direction too. (1 allel from the father 1 from the mother)
So AA father and aa mother would become Aa which in our case stands for fertility. With fertility it's the more capital letters the more fertile a character is. So the child would have Aa. If that child matches with another Aa their kids can have all kinds of variations: AA aa Aa aA. BB is also a factor in fertility so these genetics combined can give various results. And that's just fertility! There are quite a bunch of genetical factors.

The we forget to marry them is a funny thing I'm sure actually happens in the real world too :P.

We have some more ideas on how to improve gameplay and gamify it more. I'm going to have a call with @orion-five in a bit to see which aspects we want to prioritize in a next patch.

If you'll follow us on itch.io you will be notified of the patch! I would love to hear if the next patch will improve gameplay for you.

Wow, that was something totally new on this LD, have some extra points in Innovation for that :D

And the idea of breeding and strengthening your family tree is awesome.

Just had to wait at some point for females to appear and save the day, and vice versa!

I guess on endless mode it could get repetitive, but as yoou've designed it, seems just about right :thumbsup:

Thank you!

@firellon Thanks for playing and voting!
Glad you liked it!
We are still doing some balancing every now and then. Will look into waiting for potential bachelors.

I liked it! It's fun and slightly addictive.

But I read a few comments about the genetics approach you had to it, and I hadn't felt that at all in the game. I was mostly just hoping my people wouldn't die young and matching them with whoever was available, of the right sex, and young. I think it's a very interesting part of the game that I, at least, completely overlooked (I'm not sure how you can make it more visible though).

Also if you start having really big family trees it gets kind of crowded and small and sometimes I killed off branches just because on the diagram they were too far away from my main one. I have a few ideas to fix it but I don't think they're easy to implement: reorganize branches periodically to keep active branches close together (or have a button to do it, or let the player reorganize it). Allow inbreeding. Allow players to mute some branches when they know they have traits they don't want. And an easier one: make dead people more obviously dead (when you zoomed out quite a bit it's not so visible any more; maybe just a lot of transparency?)

(well, off to play some more to test the genetics part!)

@nolanfa thank you for playing.
The last update we did made it me focused on scoring. We also balanced the rate of bachelor's from other houses but that does indeed make you focus more on age and sex. I think we can solve that part with our planned success and fail rate when matching depending on a couple of aspects like influence and age difference. That will probably take done time to implement.
Thanks for testing and your thorough feedback.

Very interesting. I married into a large family and it's crazy how few generations it takes to completely get overwhelmed by a large family tree. This game is a very lifelike simulation.

I like the names, how the faces get older, the smooth transitions of the tree. Would love to play around more with some game elements.

Good job! It kept me entertained for a while!

@zubspace Thank you for your specific feedback :D! The 2 of us are planning to do another small jam somewhere in the future to see what kind of game elements we can improve and magnify.

"And you thought your family tree is complex?" - The game

Man, I feel sad I didn't get to play this game before the time ran up! It's such a cool concept, I love it! Game of thrones got nothing on your family trees!

The only thing that would have made sense to me and I think is lacking: something to track the "influences" of houses, to make you choose from which family to pick someone to marry someone of your own. :smile:
Once again, congrats on making this game, and thank you, I had a really great time playing it!! :v:

@thibaud-ligneul Thank you so much for your kind words! Some early mock-ups included a stats menu when you clicked on an individual. Maybe we will add that in a later patch some time! Would be fun to iterate a bit more.

You can follow it on itch.io to see if and when we update it.