Doomsday Cult by ConradoClark
This is my entry for LD50, Doomsday Cult.
It's a card game where you, as a cultist, have to delay the arrival of a cosmic horror in order to bargain for a still definite but better ending for yourself or humanity.
There are currently 5 possible endings depending on your results (try to find all!) There are also 5 total artifacts. Artifacts can be acquired by accumulating stats (Faith and/or Sorcery).
You start with a deck of cards. Your objective is to go as long as possible and stall the game while gaining resources and artifacts. You can either: - Play a card, and if you win, you get its rewards. - Skip a card, then it goes to the bottom of the deck and gets harder. It also improves the rewards.
Each card has a special "action" which you must fulfill.
If you mouse over some icons on the game you can see a help text. The only available control scheme for the game is Keyboard & Mouse.
Spacebar - Clap. Mouse - Buttons and Drawing.
It's available on WebGL (play on browser) It has no sounds/music.
There are some "hidden" mechanics that help stalling the game, not all of them are mentioned in the game.
EDIT: The 5 possible endings are as follows: - End the game with less than 20 turns - End the game with more than 20 turns, but with less than 40 faith & sorcery - End the game with more than 20 turns, with >= 40 faith - End the game with more than 20 turns, with >= 40 sorcery but < 40 faith - End the game with more than 40 turns, but less than 40 faith & sorcery
| Link | https://conradoclark.itch.io/ld50 |
| Link | https://github.com/ConradoClark/ld-50-delay-the-inevitable |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/doomsday-cult |
Ratings
| Overall | 394th | 3.292⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 459th | 2.972⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 146th | 3.681⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 365th | 3.528⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 63th | 4.167⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 368th | 2.545⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 243th | 3.371⭐ | 37🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 40🗳️ | 57🗨️ |
Godly art for my taste, amazing.
Kinda clever and fresh, new idea, really liked this.
@notnasiul @delightfullymad I am so ecstatic that you got two of the main inspirations I had for this game haha, I've been noticing this a lot while playing other people's entries and it's super interesting to see. The other game I've took some insights from is Cultist Simulator! Originally, some cards were meant not only to be challenges to earn resources, but also gateways to unlock new features and/or endings. Unfortunately I couldn't manage to fit it all in the alloted time but either way I'm super glad that I managed to "finish" a playable version.
Talking about missing features, there's a "Burn" command which is greyed out that was supposed to be a mechanic to sacrifice your stats in order to eliminate "impossible" or really difficult cards. Difficult cards were meant to not only be highly rewarding, but also a huge risk (making you lose cards from your deck if you fail). So burning them would be a way to prevent losing cards in exchange of your hard-earned stats. That also didn't make the cut.
Again, thank you all for playing and commenting, this community is incredible and I look forward to play all of your entries!
The like the art style ! Animation are very clean.
I would like more kind of cards. Also, it's not very clear how the score impact the end of the game.
Very cool concept :thumbsup:
Currently, it's indeed possible to cheese it to hell and get an enourmous amount of faith and cards just by skipping blessed prayer cards haha.
On the plus side, I'm glad some people are seeing different endings! I'm going to edit my post to describe how to get them because it's really not that obvious and not everyone will keep playing until they get it :sweat_smile:
Again, thank you everyone for playing!
I have one complain: the drawing minigame should let you drawn, even when you click out the area and then mark the try has a failure... I was thinking the window closing right away was a bug...
For a compo, you did great. Of course more cards would be nice, but in so little time, it's a big success!
@dzejpi Yeah I think the drawing part requires way more precision than it should! I was worried about making it too forgiving, because there are some ways to cheat it haha, but by doing that I kinda overshot it.
Just in case anyone is curious, the way I made the drawing minigame is as follows:
- Upon holding the mouse, start spawning "ink" sprites (from a premade pool of disabled sprites)
- Spawn ink sprites only if you moved a certain distance with your mouse (to prevent creating a lot of sprites)
- I fill in the "gaps" between the distance the mouse has traveled with the ink sprite, because sometimes the mouse position may change a lot between one frame and the next.
- The drawings have multiple polygon colliders attached to them. While you're dragging the mouse, you need to be colliding with at least one of them (or else you fail)
- Each polygon has an internal count of minimum ink (I playtested a lot then reduced the values just in case)
- So small dots require just 1 drop of ink, small lines may require 5, other forms may require 30, 50, and so on
- After finishing the strokes, the game validates if the amount of ink spots inside all colliders match their minimum required number, and if so, it declares success!
- Otherwise, it's a failure.
As always, thank you for playing!
@lilianc The artifacts are obtained by stacking stats. Example: By having 5 Faith you get the first artifact. I think I made the game a bit harder that I should've, especially considering the effort required to get all endings. The main goal is to have a lot of turns (by obtaining cards) and to stack stats. Thanks for the feedback!
@jimbly Thanks for playing! I'm glad people are enjoying the art style, I'm nowhere skillful in this area but I love 1-bit (or low bit) drawing. (and playing games that explore it, like World of Horror).
Of all the things I could've done differently, I think having more cards and lessening the difficulty would be the best ones to improve gameplay/replayability. I'm super happy that I got an entry in nonetheless, it's my first one for LD and I'm having a blast playing through the games you all made. :smile:
I skipped the clapping and find impossible to hit 100 times in just a short amount of time.
I always get the same ending but I am not very good at card games though.
@lesinvisible Thank you so so much for the feedback!
I liked what you did with the theme and where this is going. I think if you had time to make some more content (types of cards and variations) and implement another mechanic or two (more options for how to approach cards), this would be really very good.