Chessapeak City by Sorrer

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

Description

Somewhere in the world, a plot of land is constantly afflicted by unfortunate weather anomalies. A few dare to live on there, but you decide you want to try your best to create a bustling city. In order to do so, you must be mobile and move your buildings around, build up, and hope weather doesn't destroy your progress. All while making sure your city stays afloat.

Try to build up a city, without it crumbling under your own hands or the weather's power. Your goal is to build the biggest city you can.

Game Rules

You can click on a building to move the building. It will move at the end of the cycle. Use industry points to buy new buildings

Each piece can move a certain way, and has their own production values.

Knight (Housing) - ​Houses 5 people, creates a person every 3 ticks. Every unfeed resident at the end of the tick dies. Rook (Agriculture) - Up to 4 people can work here. Each person produces 2 food.

Bishop (Industry) - Up to 2 people can work here. Each person produces one industry point. Everyone wants to work here, so make sure you have enough people to support this industry building.

Controls

Click and drag from the shop to buy buildings with your Industry score.

Click on a building to queue up a move for the end of the turn.

Screenshots

TitleScreen.PNG Gameplay2.PNG

Play now!

Ratings

Overall 1234th 3.115⭐ 28🧑‍⚖️
Fun 1391th 2.704⭐ 29🧑‍⚖️
Innovation 547th 3.5⭐ 28🧑‍⚖️
Theme 1283th 2.87⭐ 29🧑‍⚖️
Graphics 798th 3.558⭐ 28🧑‍⚖️
Audio 858th 2.917⭐ 26🧑‍⚖️
Given 16🗳️ 29🗨️

Feedback

Tattomoosa
04. Oct 2021 · 23:10 UTC
Cool concept! I had fun with it. It took me a while to realize it was more about building more buildings than keeping the ones you have out of harms way. It did seem like sometimes I could move buildings on a turn when I got a weather warning, but other times I couldn't?

It would be neat if there were some adjacency bonuses at the buildings or events or something to encourage still moving buildings around during good weather seasons.
Marossi
04. Oct 2021 · 23:13 UTC
Neat game, I would like to have a shortcut keys to pause/change the timer :)
c4ris
04. Oct 2021 · 23:15 UTC
Very smooth controls and great graphics. It looks like a game I could get for my phone and play 100s of levels through in a night. I love the unique idea here about loading a chessboard with as many pieces as you can. I have to admit I am a little confused by how the industry parts of the game connect but I still enjoyed trying to load up my board as much as I could. I hope you had a fun weekend with the game jam!
Tiranice
04. Oct 2021 · 23:17 UTC
It would appear that the levels don't have a goal outside of just seeing how much of the space you can fill before you can't move things. What is the victory condition?
🎤 Sorrer
04. Oct 2021 · 23:19 UTC
@tiranice We ran out of time, but there was suppose to be a bigger overall victory conditions of fulfilling objectives per level. We had to resort to surviving until the level ends. We wished we could've made that cleared ;-;
Feesh
04. Oct 2021 · 23:20 UTC
Really cool Idea and overall really well made! Love how simple and easy it was to get a hold of. My only suggestion is make it so that natural disasters come more often cause I often found myself sitting there during the early rounds doing nothing. Other than that well done!! Loved the art
Pavocado
04. Oct 2021 · 23:20 UTC
Even though it has simple rules, it's still a very nice game. Fun to play!
Staquet Sylvain
04. Oct 2021 · 23:22 UTC
it's a realy cool idea, a little difficulte to understand at first look, but interseting when you consentrate a little
jepjoh2
04. Oct 2021 · 23:27 UTC
Interesting game-mechanic. And what's seemingly simple turns out to be pretty complex

2 ideas for immediate improvement. I think point 1 should be easily allowed during the voting round:

1. Without consulting google I couldn't tell which piece was which (rook, knight, bishop) in the description. It would be nice if this was clearer
2. I sometimes can't move buildings when there's a storm and I can't tell why. I can just sit helplessly and watch my buildings be destroyed by an indeed very unstable world.. :frowning2:
🎤 Sorrer
04. Oct 2021 · 23:28 UTC
@jepjoh2 That might be a bug :frowning: . We'll see if we can get that fixed, gotta get through the college grind first.
dk5000p
04. Oct 2021 · 23:32 UTC
This is definitely interesting, a tutorial would have helped a lot.
stellarLuminant
05. Oct 2021 · 02:30 UTC
This is a really interesting game! For a while I didn't see my population number go up because I (incorrectly) assumed that houses must be next to farms in order to produce food. Number tuning could use a bit of work, there was a point where once I snowball 2+ bishops, I produced so much industry that no storm could actually destroy my settlement- I rebuilt it immediately without needing to move any pieces. Despite that, I did run into the bug where a few times a building was unable to be moved in a storm- this pushed me even further towards the "just tank it with industry" strategy.

Really good use of the theme, and the art is simple yet communicative enough to figure out what I was doing. (it might also help for people who have already played chess. maybe a more visual guide for those who aren't as acquainted with systems like this?)
VarunDevs
16. Oct 2021 · 07:27 UTC
Good one