Isekai Hussle by Shess
"Well, who WOULDN'T want to be reborn in an anime world full of thrilling adventures while gathering a harem of loyal supporters and showing everyone the power of superior Japanese cuisine?"

Story: you are a deity overseeing several worlds that are trying to summon a hero to save them. Thankfully, numerous souls are being regularly hauled your way, and all you need to do is dump them in a more or less suitable story, preferably after granting them with some bullshit OP skill or a bunch of weirdly obsessed followers. That's just how things go in isekai anyway.
And you are not doing it for free! The worlds are in peril, and their residents' prayers get converted to your own God Power. Sure, you'll need to spend some of it on gifts for the heroes, but let's call it a long-term investment. Off you go now, so many generic worlds need their even more generic saviors!
- Match potential heroes and their isekai stories
- Gift artifacts, skills and familiars to the heroes
- Fully fix at least 8 worlds to complete the game
- Accumulate God Power to spend on mighty gifts
- Play in browser!
Controls: mouse only. [DRAG AND DROP] gifts on the heroes, and the heroes themselves on the worlds you think would be a suitable match for their skills. [CLICK] on the buttons in the top-right corner to regulate game speed.
Tips and tricks: - rare souls come in silver and golden hues and can boast numerous positive traits; - each soul can carry up to three unique gifts; - the more of the same gift you buy, the more expensive it becomes, but the price mark-up will eventually reset if you switch to buying other gifts; - the moment you fix the world completely, it's replaced with a new one, so make sure you're prepared! - playing the game on the highest speed can be considered "hard-mode". It's totally doable though :)

Code: Yanrishatum. Gamedesign, art, writing: Shess. Music, SFX: Elvendan.
| in-browser (self) | https://yanri.cc/games/isekai_hussle/ |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/isekai-hussle |
Ratings
| Overall | 247th | 3.875⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 547th | 3.481⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 231th | 3.786⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 538th | 3.732⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 255th | 4.183⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 229th | 3.788⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 170th | 3.815⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 188th | 4.018⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 50🗳️ | 42🗨️ |
Very nice pixel art, great to look at, gamedesign and overall idea are unusual and interesting. The writing and jokes are amusing and very well fits the theme.
The only criticism I have is with pacing. The game is either overwhelming when you don't have time to read all the text and jokes, or it grinds to a halt when you wait for the next truck.
Anyway, very cute and interesting entry!
By the way you could put a screenshot or something on the thumbnail for the entry so it catches more attention.
The game looks good!

Hmm :thinking:
All good, serves as a work-in-progress memento ^_^
Thank you, good luck!
Really solid entry, completed the game with one world dead in the start when I didn't understand what I'm supposed to do, had fun, great job!
i whanted this game to be more dynamic like rts game... it's real time so it feels like i want some contrasting absolutely diferent options to save the worlds. like general progression and concept is amazing is just saving the world is dull for me... there's countless options to change it ...in short for some reason i wantsaving a world by placing souls there to be a whole another thought-through game withing a game ...because at the moment i like progression, i like giving gifts to a soul and droping it into a world, i like seeing several worlds and feeling myself in a role of multidimensional benevolent? god, i like saving worlds BUT i don't like having 4 simple stats & simple +stats gifts... but even like it is... with the ammount of gifts & souls & worlds in the game currently I whould have really enjoyed it, i think, only for 1 moment like when you equip a soul and hover it over the world it needs to indicate in some way if it's going to make an impact or no ...and some kind of a bonus\story for saving a world ...like saving a world needs to change something if it's like permament? maybe just simple overarching story connecting this worlds... story having like 8 steps and in someway this is revelead to the player... like demon lord\schemer dying and being a premium soul with one use and a story about hes\her downfall idk
feels very polished I like it above everything else except somekind of punch\grip, something that makes me spend time improving myself at... but maybe it's just me ...or intersting story elements\gimmick\mechanic ...it has SOME
> I would like to have a pause button
I agree that without full pause - game doesn't let you properly appreciate the funny titbits with hero generation (frankly sometimes it produces some hilarious combinations of traits and trivia). But at the same time - being able to pause at will would remove A LOT of pressure from the game. The game speed buttons were rushed last additions to alleviate waiting you have to do when worlds are stable or you have no heroes to spare, and slowest setting already sets it to 20% speed, so it should fairly easy to beat if you switch to it when feeling overwhelmed.
@tentacledream
> Game feels overwhelming at times, or slows down waiting for the next truck
Yeah, can agree here. Pacing was hard to adjust, and aforementioned speed buttons were a crutch to address that. In retrospect I'd make it a slider and allow for even higher speed, but it's retrospect, it's always like that.
@apoly
> Would love to see icons with different stats to understand what each one means and maybe in addition to text traits a small icon stating what it does would make it more accessible.
That actually was planned, but never made into the game. I wanted to put icons denoting which affinity the hero trait affects, but never got to it.
@zinkler
> There are too many gifts to keep track of, and it always feels like you race against the clock and don’t have time to read the perks, even if in fact you might be able to. Downtime between arrival of new souls seems a bit dull, and the worlds’ dynamics are not clear at times.
Yeah, it's intended to lay pressure on the player, because if they could simply do it at their leisure - game gets hilariously easy. But as I sad above - it sadly affects ability to enjoy the writing. And on topic of gifts: It should have been fairly easy, as each gift provides affinity buff, and each word has specific affinity. Formula is basically `(hero affinity + gift affinity) * trait affinity * world affinity`. Hero affinities are hidden values and are extremely small to the point that you can't really rely on them thought. Traits play a much bigger role here.
> simplified version of it, along with a pause button and an option to buy more souls using currency
There was a planned feature that got gutted pretty much immediately due to time constraints - ability to buy permanent upgrades. Including truck capacity and speed. And as mentioned above - speed buttons were added to improve downtime/overwhelming moments.
@n0va
> Like how ya used truck-kun lol
In fact I wanted to make it start off empty and hit sprites of people and thus increasing the counter while it was driving first quarter of the bar, for extra funny. But alas. It was so low priority it never came to be.
@vgxmecrew52
> sorry
I'm not sure if I should answer to your original message or not lol. But in short: That's what we could make in a given timeframe with effectively 2 people (+audio guy, granted Elvendan did give a few very good ideas, but mostly he stuck to making audio). Most of your suggestions are basically not doable within given timeframe and manpower. And in fact some suggestions were floating around during initial discussion stage or popped up during development but discarded as being infeasible.
The game is stunning and the music is good. It is fun to play, but sadly it's quite hard to take time to read every soul effect, so I ended up just slamming the most appropriate blessing on whatever soul there was, and it worked for me, so maybe there's something to rework there to make the soul effects really necessary and readable.
I also became very rich very fast, so by the end of it I could just spam the best blessings on every souls.
Overall the concept is solid and as I said it is very good looking, so I think it would just need a bit of tweaking to be quite a good game !