Morpheus of Mars by AnneArkey

[raw]
made by AnneArkey for Ludum Dare 50 (JAM)

Morpheus of Mars is a real-time action strategy game. Or, at least that was the ambition. It's more like, have you ever wanted to play StarCraft but with way less features? Then you have GOT to play this game! :smile:

There is an HTML5 version, but if you have any issues, I have included a Windows download as well

Update 4/5/22: Added a change to force the HTML5 export run in 1600x900 resolution. Some graphics/text may be distorted slightly, however itch.io was clipping parts of the game outside the window prior to this, making it unplayable.

Follow instructions in game for system startup (uses A and D keys on keyboard)

Once you have some drones, you LEFT click to select a drone (left click anywhere else to de-select all drones)

With your drone selected, right click on various things for interactions, as indicated below: - Click the green crystals to harvest minerals. When the drone is full or the crystal location is empty, drone returns to the dome to deposit minerals. Crystals re-grow over time.

  • Click on the antennas to repair them and begin to send your distress signal. More antennas repaired means a faster distress signal, but WATCH OUT! Once you fire up your first antenna, you awaken the unruly aliens hiding just below the surface of Mars!

  • Click on your dome to repair it. If the selected drone is carrying any minerals, it will deposit them first. If the dome health is less than 100%, the drone will begin to repair the dome at a rate of 1 health for 25 minerals. If minerals drop to 0, the drone will keep attempting to repair until the dome reaches 100% (other drones can deposit minerals while the current drone(s) repair the dome. When the dome reaches 100%, drones will STOP repairing so you will need to select them and right-click on the dome if it gets damaged further.

Things which were unfortunately cut for time: - The instructions mention that Dyna and Mo may occasionally break down. This never happens, because it took a lot longer to get them to behave for the intro and frankly Rubix was tired of dealing with them any further. - Turrets, because I ran out of time to implement them. - More music and sounds, because I finally got the exports working with about 2 minutes to spare before the Jam deadline

Tools Used, Credits, Special Thanks, etc:: - Godot game engine - Trello.com for project board management - LabChirp and sfxr for the (few) sound effects in the game - Kenney for the font: https://www.kenney.nl/assets/kenney-fonts - AnneArkey for literally all the graphics and around 85% of the story - RubixNoob13 for the big ol' bowl of spaghetti code that is this entry - Ludum Dare for being AMAZING - Anyone who plays this and leaves a review - Special thanks to anyone who read this far down the page

Bug fixes since initial upload: (updated 4/5/2022) - Removed subfolder from .zip file for itch.io to allow playing in browser window - Game still running at gameover state - gameover screen not darkening as intended - enemy speed set incorrectly (forgot to reset after debug testing) - multiple drones gathering 1 resource will no longer cause them all to get resources at an accelerated rate - player should no longer be able to select multiple drones - player should no longer be able to start building a drone before turning the power on - repairs should take place if player clicks in the majority of the area of the dome instead of a very specific place - stopped various things from spawning even after game over screen was reached

Ratings

Overall 1221th 3.038⭐ 28🧑‍⚖️
Fun 1211th 2.827⭐ 28🧑‍⚖️
Innovation 1313th 2.462⭐ 28🧑‍⚖️
Theme 1200th 3.077⭐ 28🧑‍⚖️
Graphics 1180th 2.788⭐ 28🧑‍⚖️
Audio 927th 2.217⭐ 25🧑‍⚖️
Humor 1067th 2.159⭐ 24🧑‍⚖️
Mood 1193th 2.923⭐ 28🧑‍⚖️
Given 28🗳️ 30🗨️

Feedback

Trexxak
06. Apr 2022 · 11:16 UTC
Massive respect for doing an RTS. It's not too often you see those here :D

While I liked the concept, I still would've wished for some basic military unit or maybe that the drones can be weaponised. The controls feel intuitive and on point, the flood of enemies feels natural. Well done!
RubixNoob13
08. Apr 2022 · 22:57 UTC
@trexxak Thanks for the review! I actually had plans to add turrets which would shoot at the enemies, but it took me way longer than I expected to get the pathfinding even close to correct, and then I had a few real life duties to attend to, so they had to be cut for time. Since it was supposed to be a research facility in the game's story, I didn't want to have TOO many militarized units. Basically, give the player the ability to build something to slow down the horde of enemies, but not stop them completely
Travis Bittel
08. Apr 2022 · 23:30 UTC
Pretty neat, great job! :)
Some military units/buildings would definitely have helped spice things up, but still great work for the amount of time you had!
JoshH
08. Apr 2022 · 23:32 UTC
Great work on building an RTS! Reminded me a little of Dune II way back in the 90s. :D Would love to see a few different drone types or maybe giving exisiting drone type the ability to build a wall to deflect enemies.
realryanrogers
08. Apr 2022 · 23:39 UTC
It took me a minute to figure out the loop but once I got it. it was fairly satisfying. I like the concept of a nice RTS style game, especially in a jam like this. Would love to see an update with the features and sounds you wanted to do. Overall a good entry!
TeamMonumental
09. Apr 2022 · 00:03 UTC
We attempted to do an RTS a while back for a game concept, but we ran into a ton of issues. RTS games are not easy to make; kudos for pulling one off in a jam! However, I do wish there was a way to fight back at the wave of enemies swarming my base. Maybe there was and I simply missed it. Either way, great job sir!
LDJam user 268934
09. Apr 2022 · 00:23 UTC
You can be proud to make an rts in a short time with just 2 people nice job.
Dune 2 indeed!
Itskdog
09. Apr 2022 · 00:28 UTC
Nice job with this RTS game. I made one by mistake in the last LD event. You had to build a village that was near a Volcano that had lava randomly come near the village.
radmccool
09. Apr 2022 · 04:36 UTC
i could see this being a cool wee RTS puzzle game of efficient resource management. not gonna say how many tries it took buti had fun figuring out the optimal order of doing things.
Nikl
09. Apr 2022 · 14:47 UTC
It took a while until I got the hang of it, but it's a nice small game! I don't fully understand why the Y + A/D phase in the beginning is needed.
Noirox
10. Apr 2022 · 09:52 UTC
Delightful and very different experience as others have said! One piece of feedback I have not yet seen from other commenters is that I felt the info-window was a bit underused. I found some functionalities and loops slightly unintuitive and I think displaying information about the selected object at the bottom-center/top-right while leaving the text box open for some hints/humour could be an easy way to make the game a bit more accessible, appealing and interactive.
Amazing job though, and definitely a memorable game in this jam. RTS is a hard genre and we royally failed creating one for the last LD... impressive!
gamescodedogs
10. Apr 2022 · 17:18 UTC
Nice game, please go on! Its great to see a RTS game here on ludum.
Imaginary
10. Apr 2022 · 17:39 UTC
Good game. The instant call for enemies once you start repairing communications is a little weird, though. A little tower defense would have been nice, but I assume that's in the works with more time.
codebug
10. Apr 2022 · 21:49 UTC
I'm always amazed at how much other people are able to do 72 hours. There's not much I can say about it that you don't already know as you had more features planned.

However, a simple thing is that when you have a drone selected there could be an icon whenever you mouse over something that would show you what the drone can do at that location.

Well done!
jessekaz
10. Apr 2022 · 23:54 UTC
Was a bit confusing how repairing the dome didn't always work (didn't realize at first that you need resources to repair), and how repairing comms didn't always work (maybe it was you need the dome to be repaired first?). Also wasn't clear what repairing comms did for you.

Really liked how you did the startup sequence. Very clever and gave some character to the world.
RubixNoob13
11. Apr 2022 · 19:37 UTC
Thanks to everyone for all the feedback. Here are some replies / updates to everything that's been commented on so far:

- @travis-bittel @teammonumental Turrets were a feature planned so you could build them and they would attack enemies. The sprites were actually in a folder in the final build, but unfortunately I ran out of time before I could get them implemented and had to submit

- @nikl The Y + A/D sequence was supposed to be you as the player starting up a manual power generator which was to be assisted by 2 bots, "Dyna" and "Mo", as in a "dynamo", which is a type of generator to make electricity. I was also planning to implement then occasionally breaking down, so you would have to "fix" them by spamming their respective buttons of A or D while playing the game. When the power is out, the oxygen would no longer refill, and possibly the turrets would stop firing / drones stop working, as the idea of the drone limit (which I never fully explained in the game) was that the computers inside the base were only strong enough to power a small number of drones, which is why you can only have 5 drones built

- @noirox @codebug I did intend to have the minerals, dome and comms dishes to have a status that will appear when you mouse over them to indicate which actions can be performed there.

- @imaginary In the story that we had about half way fleshed out, in addition to the enemies, there was also going to be radiation clouds which would also damage the dome. So it is INEVITABLE that the dome will collapse. However, to give you a chance at survival, once you repair the comms, you start to send a distress signal. Due to the real world times involved in sending a signal from Earth to Mars and back, we decided it should take some time for the signal to be sent, and when the comms progress bar (top right) is full, it changes to a "Rescue" timer. When THAT bar fills, if you haven't been killed by the enemies and you still have oxygen, you get rescued and win the game. The idea as to WHY this causes enemies to start spawning is that the signal woke them up and they're angry, so they attack you. Was also planning to have them attack the closest of either the antenna or the dome when they spawn, but I didn't get everything implemented as you already know. Fun fact: "Morpheus" was a god of sleep and dreams, which is where the name of the game comes from. The story premise is basically that your signal "wakes up" more sleeping enemies while you're trying to call for help

- @jessekaz I should really include more text in the display to indicate that there are resource costs for repairing. If I remember correctly, the dome takes 25 minerals per 1 HP of repair (it has 100 total health I believe). The comms have 10 health, but I think each point of health takes 250 minerals to repair, so it takes a total of 2,500 minerals per comms dish. However, the dishes DO remember how many minerals were put into them, so they will take a partial repair, then eventually be fully repaired once you've chucked enough minerals into them.
Fromage
11. Apr 2022 · 21:28 UTC
Sounds like you know just what you need to do to improve this, I will say what is here works well, my only hopefully unique addition would be as a research facility, having upgrades they can bash out to help defend/repair/mine would be cool
zimny11
13. Apr 2022 · 20:00 UTC
RTS for a Ludum Dare is super impressive! Good job with the game mechanics. A bit confusing at the start, but after a moment I got it. It was fun to try it out.
Tanner Shelton
16. Apr 2022 · 06:14 UTC
Very impressive game! I needed to read through your tutorial under the game to really understand exactly how it works. And it feels like there is one intended way to win, so not much strategizing, just follow the same strategy to trigger all of the comms. But it was a very well done game
Link270
16. Apr 2022 · 06:14 UTC
Really cool to see a RTS game! The controls were nice and felt intuitive. Pathfinding was great! One big thing I would have liked to see would have been some music in game, that can make a huge difference. Also, it didn't seem super intuitive what to do to win and whatnot. I fixed all three comms and nothing happened, so maybe I did something wrong? Either way, nice job! And I loved the A/D sequence at the start. haha
RubixNoob13
19. Apr 2022 · 07:36 UTC
Thanks again to everyone for all the feedback! I've been working on getting a post-jam version together to basically just "finish" all the things I had wanted to implement for the Jam. To have the pathfinding actually work how I intended, I've had to do a few things to try to get it to run even close to the correct speed, as GDScript gets pretty slow when you start running into a couple of loops. But I'm working on it lol.
- @link270 I know it's not super obvious, but once you fix ANY of the 3 comms, you start sending a signal (there's a progress bar on the right. The more you fix, the faster that bar fills. However, once it fills, you still have to survive until the rescue arrives (Same area, the progress bar changes from "Comms" to "Rescue"). I meant to include some popups or something to explain what was going on but again, time constraints lol. I always tend to plan about 10x bigger than what I can realistically accomplish in 3 days, but I still had a ton of fun with this jam!
Link270
19. Apr 2022 · 16:01 UTC
Oh okay, that makes total sense. We had similar things in our game, where things felt obvious to us, but we didn't have time to put in good enough feedback for the player to actually know what was going on. haha I know what you mean by not getting everything done that you plan, we certainly did the same thing. Awesome job regardless!