Lava Tactics by animawish
Overview
In Lava Tactics, you take command of a team of firefighters who are attempting to belay the onslaught of an erupting volcano for as long as possible. The map will be populated with lava sources and animals. Your objective is to keep the animals from dying for as long as possible.
When you click play you will be in the game configuration screen. IT IS NOT REQUIRED TO DO ANYTHING IN THIS SCREEN, YOU CAN SIMPLY HIT "START". Hover over buttons to learn more about them. On the left you have four team members, each team member needs to have 3 items equipped to be able to start the game. On the right are the map generation settings. Please note that at this time the preview in the map generation screen is only an example, your map will not be identical.
In game, each firefighter (normally) gets 1 action per turn, whether that's moving or using an item. Select actions with the mouse or a hotkey, and commit them by clicking a highlighted green tile. Cancel an action by selecting it again or right clicking. End the turn by clicking the button in the bottom right or pressing Enter. Once you end the turn, the lava and animals will simulate. Animals tend to run away from lava, but if they get caught in it, they will take damage and probably die.
There are three UI windows in game: the terrain and lava height information for the hovered tile, the unit status for the selected tile, and the actions window. Use mouse 2 to pan the camera, mouse wheel to zoom, and spacebar to center the camera.
There is no win condition for this game. Stave off the lava until it consumes everything, and enjoy your time with the wildlife. Experiment with the systems and try to last as long as you can!
Controls
- Mouse1: Select button or tile
- Mouse2: Pan Camera
- Mouse Wheel: Zoom Camera
- 1-7: Toggle view options
- QWERAS: Select unit action
- Tab: Select next unit with available actions
- Space: Center Camera
- Enter: End Turn
- Escape: Pause
- F1: Toggle display size (switches between 1760x990 and 1280x720)
Running the game
On Windows, run LavaTactics_v1.1.2.exe.
On Mac or Linux, install love2d (https://love2d.org/) and drag LavaTacticsv1.1.2.love onto the love2d application, or follow this guide https://www.love2d.org/wiki/GettingStarted
| Link | https://caius.itch.io/lava-tactics |
| Link | https://caius.itch.io/lava-tactics |
| Link | https://caius.itch.io/lava-tactics |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/lava-tactics |
Ratings
| Overall | 1041th | 3.242⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 1143th | 2.919⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 385th | 3.597⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 761th | 3.597⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 1165th | 2.823⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 903th | 2.586⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 1178th | 2.95⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 41🗳️ | 41🗨️ |
My best strategy was to hide in a corner while digging as many walls as I could. I got past 200 turns which seems like a lot. The most fun was watching the simulated lava flow across the entire map, I can see good potential in the system! Being a fan of turn based strategy games I would have liked more goals of some kind, but as it is this game is a good effort!
I liked the concept but I think the game is a bit complicated to understand.
I was able to survive 78 turns, though.
Good job on the game!
Clearly a lot of effort went into this game, it has a huge number of features and a lot of complexity. I like the simple art, and the map itself is pretty in its own functional way.
Very nice entry!
Everything made sense and worked as it should. It would be nice if dead teammates looked different than living ones. I liked the hotdog, and the fact that you can aggro the bears. Congrats on a great entry!
Impressive amount of options for a jam game, especially with all of the world customization.
If I had any criticism it would be that it felt like the only useful item was the ice and it would be nice to have the dead firefighters show a bit differently.
The game really lagged with the lava height overlay on which was unfortunate because it seemed like it would be really helpful.
For the amount of mechanics in here, I felt like I got the gist of them pretty quickly. I did forget to use all my people's actions a couple of times (it's tempting move someone -> end turn -> repeat). Since there's a 'wait' action anyway, maybe just don't let the player 'end' unless all the people acted?
I agree with other folks that fewer, more impactful actions would be my preference. I was playing with mostly random abilities and one run I got no ice cubes which made everything feel impossible. I love the idea behind the terrain/bomb/shovel stuff but struggled to actually use it well, and moving one tile of lava seems pointless compared to removing a whole area of it with ice. Same with the healing stuff where once I was being overwhelmed, getting a few hit points back didn't help much.
The concept is great though and I'd love to see a version of this that focuses in on the core 'lava removal' mechanic by doubling down on the movement and support abilities alongside the ice cube (using coffee to let an ally get closer to lava _and_ remove a chunk of it felt really good).
P.S. I'm so happy Love2D is still around and being used! I remember hearing about it _ages_ ago when it was first released and publicly available game engines were few and far between. Good stuff!
BUT that's a lot of things to understand right off the bat to play the game. In addition to that you need to control 5 characters. That becomes rather unwieldy.
Some thoughts / suggestions:
* Add keybinds to select your characters (1-5) and keep the visual modes for F1-F7?
* Would be really nice to be able to do simple actions as digging and moving entirely with keyboard. Would play a lot smoother.
* Having one action each turn (x5 while alive) against all the volcanos (9x by default) gets really overwhelming really fast. Reducing `fun` factor really fast.
* Add introduce volcanos over time. That would give feeling of achievement, when finishing or almost finishing to contain one volcano. Only for new threat to appear.
* Give more default actions, so player actions would feel like actually having impact. Or give some squares free movement?
* Now it feels like going against final boss at level 1 in classic JRPG.
* I think this time you went too much for `feature count` instead of `gameplay loop`.
Then again, all the work you did with all the options is really impressive.
Oh, and minor issue: once defaultly selected character is dead, it still gets selected by default, and you can choose actions for it. Though you cannot execute them, still had me confused a few times.