Salvation From The Alien Planet by Tomssuli
Download Salvation From The Alien Planet jam version (REVIEW THIS ONE!)
Download Salvation From The Alien Planet advanced edition (Latest version)
Advanced edition features - Some game breaking bugs and exploits fixed - Separate scoreboard - Health Bars - Voice overed tutorial - Power works now - New buildables: Power station, Metal mine, Radio Tower - Upgradeable: Power station - Boss waves - Unlimited pistols - Pause menu when pressing escape - Repairing damaged buildings
Story
Even at the spacefaring age, humanity is still plagued by diseases that shorten our lifespan and hinder our dream of living forever. Fortunately a new alien planet teeming with exotic life has been found and by researching it’s biosphere a breakthrough after another has been made to defeat the diseases and lengthen human lifespan - delaying the inevitable.
However, the native sentient lifeforms of the planet did not agree to humans strip-mining their land, cutting their plantlife and dissecting their wildlife for science. Humanity’s bases were eradicated as quickly as they were deployed and now only a final outpost stands. The amount of research data is enormous and your mission is to defend the outpost to the bitter end so as much data as possible can be uploaded to the orbiting station to bring salvation for humanity.
Controls - Left mouse - Open menu on item or tile - Right Mouse - Close menu
Tips - Click on the ground and choose from the menu what you want to place - Send units back to base to use them elsewhere - Units heal in base - Barbwire slows and damages enemies, but is damaged in the process - Pistol is weak but accurate - Shotgun is strong but inaccurate - Unmanned turrets won't shoot - Turrets cannot shoot through buildings and obstacles - You need available people to collect orbital drops
Ignore power for jam version as it was not fully implemented
Menu help
Team - @Tomssuli - Coding, game design, Team Lead - @KoalaNalle - Project management, UI graphics, misc art, AI speech etc. - @Turgunen - Character design/art - @duckman - Item and building design/art, sound effects - @Unbugged - Backend coding, sound effects - @A4po - Music
Screenies
| Salvation (Windows executable) | https://www.blackenter.com/files/Salvation.zip |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/salvation-from-the-alien-planet |
Ratings
| Overall | 1176th | 3.097⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 1167th | 2.887⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 1198th | 2.694⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 1249th | 2.983⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 1227th | 2.613⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 801th | 2.917⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 934th | 2.536⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 1226th | 2.833⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 33🗳️ | 56🗨️ |
When I first started playing it was pretty overwhelming, I had no clue what half the numbers did and even by the end (when I felt I understood it pretty well) I had no clue what half the numbers were. I think cutting out and streamlining the info fed to the player would help a ton.
Also, more feedback for the player would be great.Whether it be information on incoming enemy waves, or that Sometimes I would do something wrong (or something would die), and I wouldn't know what happened until I guessed it out.
That aside, I had a ton of fun moving around my human units and strategizing the best locations to put them around the map. Good job, I hope you continue and finish this game :)
I managed now making the description so you can read the plot of the game. We had planned to make a proper intro but as we were running out of time, we decided to use the remaining time to make the game more playable.
@therealmoebius @sacredbacon @jonathan-ray-pollard @zah Thank you very much for playing and giving positive feedback!
We repaired the broken Leaderboards. Re-download the game and they should work now!
@mopifish Thanks for the constructive feedback!
We had a tutorial texts and generated speech but we didn't have time to implement them. The placeholder is the "speaking" doctor on the bottom of the screen.
I put the instructions now to the Ludum Page description. The menu balloons are also explained there.
@sacredbacon We sadly didn't have the time to properly implement power. Also we didn't find the running-in-circles bug until the very end so we couldn't fix it in time. I still haven't been able to repeat it consistently to debug it.
EDIT: Actually we fixed the game breaking bug of running in circles. It was one addition of "<" to a if-clause. I think it's still in the spirit of competition to fix it as it was game breaking as in "unable to get more than ~1000 GB score in score based game".
I'm currently 4th on the leaderboard!
A couple suggestions:
- Knowing the health of the guys would be great.
- I kept trying to move the guys around in response to new threats. It took me a little while to realize I needed to send them back home first. I read the directions beforehand, but they didn't make sense to me until I struggled through it in the game.
- The music might be a little too low key for this type game. It was almost relaxing :)
An advanced version is planned and among other things there will be:
- Health bars
- A short ingame tutorial telling you how to place and recall infantry and build stuff
About the music - it actually changes according to how dire the situation is. At first attack it changes to jamming and then when base is damaged, it goes even more actiony and near the end it becomes desperate.
Apart from being difficult to make, they usually require a fair amount of time invested before you can play them well. Here is where you made the smartest move, turning it into almost a pseudo "turn based" game lowers the skill floor and makes it instantly enjoyable. The first game I did die fairly quickly, probably only uploaded some 100Gig of data. But after that initial first run, I got the hang of it.
I derped though, pressed Escape and killed my second run when I had some 300gig :monkey_face:
My third round I did even better, and I managed 1642 gigs, 4th place on the leaderboards, quite happy with that :sweat_smile:
I think that this would do really well as a mobile game, or even better on a tablet. The controls would translate over really well.
Apart from the great gameplay, I enjoyed the audio and the graphics, both go really well together and make for a good coherent experience.
Well done to your entire team, it's not easy to get such a large group of people on the same page and working efficiently! Hyvä peli!
Here is what my game began looking like as I kept getting piles of resource boxes:
That said, I think there was a lot of fun gameplay before I discovered this strategy (and, admittedly, I had a lot of fun building a ridiculous base as well).
In particular, I think that having a small number of human characters in your base, that can be juggled between a bunch of different tasks, is a super cool way to build a game like this. It was fun trying to send out the shotgun and a couple pistols each time there was a new attack, and then sending them back in to heal.
I think it would be interesting if the game dove into the narrative a bit more. It seems to me that the humans are very much in the wrong here, and it would be cool if the game played with that a bit as the player progresses. (Maybe the game could simply reveal more of the story as the player moves through it? Something like video logs that the player watches slowly through the game?)
Overall, a fun, pretty novel take on this kind of defense game.
Edit: I left the game on for a while and it did start getting harder after around ~6000 GB. I decided to try quitting at 6969 GB for fun then. :smile:
We actually changed the controls mid developement. First we had basic command & conquer style moving and we suddenly had an idea of menu blobs. After I slept on it, it was so clear in my mind, We dumped the classic rts contols alltogether and changed to the blob menu.
...when we looked at what we had made, we realized only as afterthought that those controls would translate straight for a mobile game 😄
Great idea about the story unfolding as we play! I'll see if we could implement something along those lines for the advanced edition after we have first made all the planned and promised features :)
@kickononnell We are in progress of making an advanced edition where among other stuff we add some tutorial. Actually there was already kind of AI-voice-overed tutorial that we just had no time to implement.
There are other strong points, though, like the global leaderboard and the soundstrack. I especially like the dual interpretation of the theme: you're *delaying the inevitability* of your base's destruction, in order to send as much data as possible so scientists can *delay the inevitability* of death. Very clever!
Overall, though, I feel like this is a bit too ambitious for its own good, and the time restraints of Ludum Dare mean it's not quite there yet. I'd love to see a more polished, upgraded post-jam version of this.
It's a cutesy game with a simple goal, and I enjoyed the simple graphics. I just think the game could have been a bit more interactive.
Oh, and the calming audio definitely helped with eradicating those "space slugs".
Advanced edition 1.107 released
[Download Salvation From The Alien Planet **advanced edition**](https://www.blackenter.com/files/salvation_adv.zip)
**Advanced edition features**
- Some game breaking bugs and exploits fixed
- Separate scoreboard
- Health Bars
- Voice overed tutorial
- Power works now
- New buildables: Power station, Metal mine, Radio Tower
- Boss waves
- Unlimited pistols
We'll release updates still for a while. Follow me or ask me to tag you if you want to stay informed.
- Reset scores
- Fixed bug where turret stands are left on the ground when destroyed
- Added images to tutorial
- Fixed volume control resetting when minimized
(all download links for the advanced edition always lead to the latest build)
tags: @simon-rahnasto @therealmoebius
wish there could be more features.
Thanks for the feedback! We ran out of time badly, I wasted so much time fighting some bugs that wouldn't allow the developement going forward... We had to leave out lots of stuff that we had graphics and sounds made for, just because time ran out to code them in.
Did you also try the [advanced edition](https://www.blackenter.com/files/salvation_adv.zip)? We're updating it for a while still after the jam and we have added many of the missing features to it already :slight_smile:
- Escape opens pause-menu and does not quit the game
- You can now repair damaged buildings
- Health bars show colors
- You can now upgrade generators
- Balanced building healths and prices and power consumption
- Fixed some bugs
- Caused some new bugs
(all download links for the advanced edition always lead to the latest build)
tags: @simon-rahnasto @therealmoebius
- Fixed high scores breaking if saved with empty name