Glown-Up by very dark lord
We're working on a post-jam version and will release it here within the next few weeks! :)
You've inherited a terribly run nuclear power plant that has won numerous prices, among them "worst place to work at", "most dangerous place in the country", "most unstable reactor" and "greatest threat to the survival of humankind". Things are looking bleak. Can you turn it into a flourishing force for good? (Well, you can't, but maybe you have some fun on the way to disaster.)
Observe your fellow workers to see what needs to get done around the power plant. You may support them, or you can spend some fickles (the highly unstable currency in this very unstable world) to buy upgrades and hire new coworkers. But beware: radiation might slowly (or not so slowly) turn all of you into mentally unstable "glown-ups" who have no control over what they're doing.
All pixel art (@fluffyou) and the game's soundtrack (@Jorvd) were created within 72 hours during the jam.
We recommend Chrome or Firefox to play the game.
Image shows reactor state UI. Blue = power output, the more the better. Aim to reach the grey line to meet the city's power demand. Orange = reactor heat, where less is better.
General rules: - throw green fuel rods into reactor to increase energy output - throw water buckets into reactor to reduce temperature - dispose of nuclear waste to reduce radiation damage (and keep your workers "stable")
Controls
Arrowkeys (or WASD) - Move
Space - Jump
E - Interact
F - Throw
ESC - Pause
There's no winning condition in the game yet - so maybe just try to make it to day ~~20~~ 90... :)
Bugfixes
- WASD & Arrow key controls (before only arrow keys were supported)
- some crashes & soft locks prevented
- fixed player spawn position
- fixed glitch in one background layer
- fixed wrong menu item highlighting
- fixed blurry icon rendering
- tilemap optimization to increase framerate on older machines
- day cycle / income related fixes (income would sometimes be below 0 due to error in calculation)
- fixed music getting messy/broken on some PCs
- partially fixed broken loading screen
- fixed AI getting & remaining stuck on ladders
- fixed the AI fix because it broke the AI in unexpected places
Final Notes
As you can surely tell when playing the game, we know our nuclear power plants. The physical and logistical processes are modelled in the game in quite some detail. One person from our team even used the weekend to intern at a nearby plant to give us some first hand information on how exactly the water buckets are really being dumped into the reactor, and what exact color code the green glow is.
That being said, the game is not intended to remark on the safety or viability of nuclear power. :)
Ratings
| Overall | 435th | 3.741⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 302th | 3.815⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 547th | 3.5⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 286th | 4.019⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 779th | 3.574⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 399th | 3.611⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 221th | 3.796⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 268th | 3.87⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 18🗳️ | 28🗨️ |
Very interesting concept and use of the theme as in addition to the reactor, the people begin to become unstable too.
@subsage the "die in vat" soft lock has been fixed by now. When it happens (and it does, to all of us) the "hire new staff" screen will open as it should.
@tomssuli we didn't get around to adding a win condition, but I think day 21 would have triggered it. :D Well done, and indeed there's no cure (only a "permanent" "cure", ahem). Avoiding radiation happens via a) high resilience characters, b) iodine intake (machine can be bought), c) clean reactor upgrade, and d) generally spending little time near glowing things. But even then this only delays the ultimate fate of turning unstable. Glad you enjoyed it!
Also, was there something to point out how far you are losing your stability and at which places you get radiation poisoning, or is it just everywhere? And I didn't know how far in the hole I had to bury the waste, does it radiate everywhere or just near it etc. I would have liked clearer indicators for the radiation mechanics.
Anyway, this is the game I've spent most of the time and got most out of in this jam so far 😊
...I wish you made a more polished and balanced post-jam version but I understand if you didn't, since it's much work if you're not planning to make a bigger game out of it.
Also indeed many things are not very clearly (or not at all) communicated. E.g.:
- radiation affects you to a certain radius of green glowing things
- waste disposal is almost useless (sorry :D), it's enough to drop things down the shaft and not care about them any further
- coffee intake speeds you up for something like 15 seconds (gradually fades away so you don't really notice when it stops)
- iodine intake increases your radiation resistance for ~15 seconds
- both caffeine and iodine are stackable in principle, but doesn't help much given the cooldown times of the vending machines
- how the stats affect workers and AI behavior - every stat has some notable impact
There most definitely will be a post jam version. We've got quite a few ideas of how to improve things and polish it up further. But if you'd like to see anything in particular, let us know and we'll see what we can do. :)
It was very engaging, that I was on the verge of losing for basically the whole time. No time to breath.
And I failed in the end when a mad co-worker just carried me around for too long.
When the first guy just randomly threw his co-worker carrying a barrel into the reactor, I genuinely laughed out loud :D
In general the quirkiness of the always busy co-workers around me really made the game.
I didn't buy many upgrades, since money did not really pile up for some reason… Would have really liked to see how jumping with strong legs looks like!
The music was really cool, but I feel like you could have gone more overboard with the sound effects. For the co-workers, but especially for the emergency situations of the reactor.
The main graphics are nice to look at and do their job. But I want to single out the mountainous background. It is really beautiful, especially with the parallax effect.
A few notes:
- you can throw barrels on top of the reactor building, and they disappear (?). Might be a shortcut for waste clean-up.
- I was very disappointed that I couldn't just dump the atomic waste into the water. I thought that is how it's done!?
- in my first try, I though the underground waste storage is the reactor, because I didn't explore the map to the left. Maybe a subtle help like a road sign at the start would have been good to direct the player in the correct direction
My take on the theme was also an unstable reactor!
I'm unsure if this is a bug or a feature, but 10/10 would get tossed in a reactor again hahaha. Overall, the graphics are really cute and I love the little workers running around. Another one also yeeted itself into the reactor and I'm pretty sure I heard a scream >.>
However, it's super fun and overall great job everyone! Super polished and cute experience :3
@corbeng you're absolutely right, we're really sad we weren't able to add a tutorial in time. I actually started working on one like 20 minutes before the deadline, but just wasn't quite able to finish, so we left it out and kind of hoped that observing the coworkers initially would be enough to figure out what the most important actions are. It's not ideeal, but things will look better in the postjam version for sure. :)
@aevek thank you! Indeed it wasn't easy to balance the "AI does stupid things that sometimes are really funny" thing, given it could at times just be frustrating. For the postjam version we'll probably add a limit to how long they'll carry you around, or even a "struggle button" to get released earlier.
@montazhnikus Absolutely, for the post jam version we're considering to add ways to cure workers again.
@sarah Definitely a feature! :D Glad you enjoyed being sacrificed to the great reactor. :pray: Thanks for your feedback!
Ура, 39 дней. Интересно.
- throwing fuel rods (the bright green bars) into the reactor
- throwing water buckets into the reactor
- bringing nuclear waste to underground disposal site
- occasionally buying upgrades and hiring new workers
In the first minute or so the other workers do this more or less diligently. Afterwards however they fall victim to radiation and turn mentally unstable, at which point they start acting randomly. So at that point they're not great role models anymore. :D
Glad you had some fun despite the lack of clarity!