Post Solis by Nikolay Zapolnov
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Is it possible to delay the inevitable coming of darkness? Yes, if you are constantly one step ahead of it. But what if not just one person, but an entire city needs to constantly grow and literally creep after the sun because it is haunted by the night?
Post Solis is a real-time strategy game where your main adversary is darkness. After a cosmic cataclysm, eternal night has fallen on a distant planet, and only a small beam of light capable of powering the solar panels is furrowing the planet.
Build, explore, uncover secrets and find blueprints to improve your buildings. Send drones to explore and remember that only knowledgeable stewardship of resources can delay the inevitable doom. Although... who knows, maybe you'll find a way out?
We bet you won't find all of the Ludum Dare Easter eggs!
Controls: WASD, arrow keys or mouse to move the map. Click on an empty space to build an object. Send scouts and collecting drones by clicking on the surrounding ruins, forests, mountains and lakes. Collect wood, water, silicon, and scrap metal to build new factories, computing centers, and power generators.
The help menu (question mark icon button) contains some useful information on how to play the game.
The notes and journals menu contains a wealth of important information about the lore of the game universe and the events that led the once thriving colony to such a sorry state.
The blueprints menu allows you to orient yourself as to what buildings you can build.
The more I last, the less I glow, The darkness keeps me up to go...
Good luck conquering your new, uncharted world!
Post-jam update 1 has been released
Usability fixes: * Mouse wheel can now be used to zoom the camera in and out * Added hotkeys to control game speed and open in-game menus * Much less mouse clicks are now needed to construct a building * If there are not enough resources to construct a building, those resources will be colored red in the build menu
Gameplay fixes: * Factories now consume correct resources (in jam version there is a bug that all factories consume metal scrap as a resource) * Communication towers now give extra transport drones (as they should, we forgot to implement it in release version) * When warehouse go out of the sun light, the resources are not lost anymore * Fixed various bugs in production performance counters * Buildings can now be built further on the northern/southern directions * Many small bugfixes and improvements
| Post-jam (Win) | https://www.dropbox.com/s/ns7bswxl0tfr1iz/Ludum%20Dare%2050%20postjam.zip?dl=1 |
| Post-jam (Web) | https://drunkfly.github.io/ld50_webgl_postjam/ |
| Original (Win) | https://www.dropbox.com/s/55d1js805yeled8/Ludum%20Dare%2050.zip?dl=1 |
| Original (Web) | https://drunkfly.github.io/ld50_webgl/ |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/post-solis |
Ratings
| Overall | 175th | 3.962⭐ | 54🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 425th | 3.615⭐ | 54🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 206th | 3.802⭐ | 55🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 622th | 3.717⭐ | 55🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 372th | 4.027⭐ | 57🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 281th | 3.769⭐ | 54🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 789th | 2.778⭐ | 47🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 382th | 3.779⭐ | 54🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 59🗳️ | 84🗨️ |
The UI may have been a little overwhelming, or "in your face", with so much options layed down, but on the other hand the game could even not be needing a help menu if the tooltips were accessible/readable on screen at all time with a simple mouse over. I mean, people are dumb, but not *that* dumb. The need of the help menu only exists here because of the inconvenience of the information, not its complexity.
While you rather did that for menus, you didn't for ressources. Did it really need eight different ressources from the get go ? Really?
I don't know why I'm so salty about it. But what the hell, so much frustration with this one.
@emaigualmc2-art Sorry for the dizziness. Cylindrical world also caused a lot of trouble when I was writing the drone movement code.
The resources were calculated in Excel on day one based on brainstorm, and we didn't have time to recalculate the balance. Actually in the current build some resources are not used by the factories because of a bug. We will prepare post-jam version with fixed economics.
I really appreciate your comment! We will work on the balance and think more on the UI, and try to improve it.
However it might be beneficial to add a little bit more feedbacks to spice things up a bit.
I need to get back to it later and play it more, with more time to spare, but congrats to the team.
Great work!
The only thing I want to blame is the absence of FTUE (first-time user experience). I had to put in a lot of effort to understand how to play your game.
If i can suggest some things for the development part, you told about cylindrical world but you can solve this really easly with shader. Make the world like a plane and forget cylindric space but in shader make a small deformation at the edge of the camera and the trick is done ! Shader like subway runner will do it well. ;)
I love strategic games, i'm a big stracraft player. I think if you had some shortcut to construct structures and access to the menu that will improve the user experience (i love to optimize my control ;) ).
Big GG to all of the crew for this awesome strategic survival game ! :D
I don't have any big critiques besides the graphics being a little subpar, but i do have a couple little issues that require some attention
- Whenever i can't access a resource node (lack of batteries, collector drones, etc) having to constantly unclick and click on the resource node again get the UI to update was a little annoying
- Show what resources you still need to craft certain buildings. Whenever i couldn't build something i had to look at every resource to figure which was the one i needed
- When scanning ruins you would get a fullscreen popup of what was found, but this interrupted my playing pretty often. Maybe something like the notifications in Rome: Total War?
- After quite a bit of playing i accidentally destroyed my only remaining drone hangar, softlocking me.
I like the core gameplay a lot, and would absolutely pay for a more fleshed out release. I'm looking forward to it if that ever happens :smile:
I appreciated the in depth tutorial text about everything in the game and the care that went into making a fully featured interface. The concept is great and the building things with drones from a massive mothership put me in mind of the Frames from the Perimeter rts games.
Impressed that you are already working on postjam improvements and looking forward to seeing what this idea might become!
It's a very ambitious design, good job to everyone involved!
Indeed we want to implement "collect all" button. And we definitely need a tutorial, we'll look into it.
I died because I lost my drone hangar while at the same time I didn't have enough resources to build a new one, probably that would have been avoided with the extra transport drones of communication towers? Hopefully I can also try the post-jam version later.
One thing you could improve is displaying the collection radius of communication towers, but otherwise super cool entry!
Really liked the idea of an RTS builder where you have to rebuild again - it was a refreshing twist on the genre. Means you don't have to forget about early build order and keeps you on your toes.
Congratulations to the whole team!
Excellent graphics, nice UI and fun gameplay!
I don't know if I played badly or if the game is murderously difficult, but I couldn't finish it on stream. After some time I started getting the hang of it and I found it is a very compelling game, with a lot of buildings, lots of content, and a fast tempo. Interesting premise of the rotating world and the night that consumes all. The building's models looked neat.
There are some questionable decisions there, like having to click collect so many times and not being able to choose which resource to focus on. Some particles are too big, and buildings lack radiuses. Combining lore trivia with a fast-paced game made me skip most of the text so I don't get distracted from my goal that was slipping away. But that's what feedback is for.
But in general, this one is one of the best strategy/RTS games I found this year on LD.
Well done! :space_invader: :night_with_stars:
Nice graphics and controls, well done.