LudumData

Biodiversity For Beginners by Mr_DanH

[raw]
made by Mr_DanH for Ludum Dare 49 (JAM)

Screenshot.png

Animals incoming! You've signed up for the animal breeder starter pack, your complimentary island has arrived and now they won't stop shipping you crates of animals! Apparently setting up a stable ecosystem is easy: keep the animals fed and they'll make more animals, something about food chains and starvation, I don't know, this is a lot of reading. Just make sure there are enough animals to ship off again and don't let anything go extinct on your island.

How to Play: Drag crates onto the island to deliver that many animals. Animals will automatically look for food and breed periodically. Gather enough to satisfy a shipping requirement on one of the boats, and then click on that boat to ship them off again. The food chain is randomised each time you play, so you'll need to figure out which animal eats what. You lose animal trust each time a species goes extinct on the island, so try to keep each species alive.

Code by Dan Hines & Samantha Keane

Art by Ben Claxton & Holly Briggs

Made for Ludum Dare 49

Link https://github.com/Mr-DanH/LudumDare49
Link https://mrdanh.itch.io/biodiversityforbeginners
Original URL https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/biodiversity-for-beginners

Ratings

Overall 358th 3.804⭐ 30🧑‍⚖️
Fun 590th 3.556⭐ 29🧑‍⚖️
Innovation 122th 3.981⭐ 29🧑‍⚖️
Theme 855th 3.426⭐ 29🧑‍⚖️
Graphics 67th 4.536⭐ 30🧑‍⚖️
Humor 605th 3.173⭐ 28🧑‍⚖️
Mood 606th 3.538⭐ 28🧑‍⚖️
Given 29🗳️ 27🗨️

Feedback

njs
04. Oct 2021 · 22:08 UTC
Nice little game. Very smooth and polished, plays well and looks great!
Andreadbx
04. Oct 2021 · 22:10 UTC
Woah! Very nice game! I love the concept, very fresh! About the gameplay, i find that is very easy to just wait for the right animals and just drop them without caring, so i think the frequency of the boxes can be lowered a bit so the player has the need to actually engage in breeding and feeding his animals!

By the way, congratulations, amazing job! My sheeps ate the tigers 10/10
Nebrazif
04. Oct 2021 · 22:10 UTC
Good game and very good graphics ! Good Work :D
Bougalu
04. Oct 2021 · 22:11 UTC
the graphics on this game are SO GOOD, I love the art style as well as how you made the fake 3d effect on the island! really cool game, I like the idea of balancing the ecosystem (even if I'm not smart enough to stop the sheep from dying). It creates a really cool yet hectic experience.
aldorado
04. Oct 2021 · 22:14 UTC
Well done, nice idea and a really nice game. Looks great and keeping the balance on the island is challenging
Lenan
04. Oct 2021 · 22:17 UTC
A really nice little game, the graphics looked very good and it had a nice style that felt connected.
It is a little hard to balance everything and the lack of sounds made it feel a little weird and lose a little of the juice it has,
Overall its a good looking game with a pretty interesting mechanic and concept.
Falien
04. Oct 2021 · 22:18 UTC
I honestly love this, it's so much fun. Love the graphics, love the gameplay. It's addicted. If this was on mobile I would have bought it and played it all day.
kbf123
04. Oct 2021 · 22:19 UTC
Game looks great! Love the spinning island effect.

I do feel like it's a bit punishing how it counts as extinction if you have the exact amount of animals for a shipment though. I also just find it hard to manage things in general.
RobbzenOne
04. Oct 2021 · 22:22 UTC
Very nice graphics! Good Work :) Also very challenging!
zyrjello
04. Oct 2021 · 22:54 UTC
This game is frantic! Could have used just a few sound effects to really polish it.
ToxicHouse
05. Oct 2021 · 01:45 UTC
Creative use of theme and great artwork!
Zeit
05. Oct 2021 · 03:33 UTC
Nice game! I love your art style.
circle
05. Oct 2021 · 03:37 UTC
I wonder if it would ruin the game balance to just let players choose their animals? Like maybe some currency system that's used to obtain animals, and you try and manage it to solve the puzzles? Overall though really cool concept. Super original too, I'm not sure if I've ever seen anything like this before. The arts amazing too, I love the kinda 3d effect you have. Really cool idea, I think a lot could be done with this in the future with a little more time spent.
LDJam user 230963
05. Oct 2021 · 03:42 UTC
Nice work! This concept has o'lot of potential.
MistaGiggles
05. Oct 2021 · 18:15 UTC
Great looking game, and quite challenging. Good fun but would be nice to know if I have surplus of an animal before shipping
Lazzor
09. Oct 2021 · 18:30 UTC
Wow, this game looks really polished! The graphics and gameplay work smoothly together with the only major thing missing being audio.

The biggest issue I have with the gameplay is that for me, I found it very hard to find out what I actually have to do. E.g. Which animal eats what? How do I complete a delivery? I figured these things out after some time but some more gameplay hints would be nice. Also maybe leave the delivery boats stable, as sometimes the boats are blocked by the mountain or the clouds and you don't see the delivery.

But as I said, I didn't expect this level of polish in a gamejam, so despite my minor issues you did a fantastic job!
Life_Lich
09. Oct 2021 · 22:24 UTC
That island is really good, is the ground 3d and everything else 2d also the way the water looks around the island. This is the first game that I will look at the source code, I have to see how you did this, thank you so much for uploading it.
HitchH1k3r
14. Oct 2021 · 03:39 UTC
This was a neat game. I liked that the randomized food chain required experimentation, and it was a really unique take on the theme. I got a high score of 11. It was a bit of a shame that shipping off all of a species counted as an "extinction," but I guess that prevents players from waiting to buy the exact number for a shipment. The art style was very nice, and I liked the gentle spinning with the billboarded sprites.