Caravan to Empire by Hadryel

[raw]
made by Hadryel for Ludum Dare 50 (COMPO)

Sorry in advance for the lack of balance, it seems to be a thing for my Compo entries.

A snake inspired game, where you build a empire to delay the end of your caravan.

The bigger your caravan is, more food is drained from your supply. Build supply structures to reduce your food usage and increase the resource income.

Gameplay is only W, A, S, D or Arrow keys.

The possible recipes with your current resources shows as a transparent version of the building.

Feedback is appreciated.

Thank you for stopping by! :smile:

Ratings

Overall 326th 3.413⭐ 25🧑‍⚖️
Fun 300th 3.37⭐ 25🧑‍⚖️
Innovation 111th 3.783⭐ 25🧑‍⚖️
Theme 370th 3.5⭐ 25🧑‍⚖️
Graphics 448th 3.087⭐ 25🧑‍⚖️
Audio 358th 3⭐ 22🧑‍⚖️
Humor 301th 2.765⭐ 19🧑‍⚖️
Mood 361th 3.125⭐ 22🧑‍⚖️
Given 21🗳️ 18🗨️

Feedback

JulienLussiez
04. Apr 2022 · 16:55 UTC
Nice little game. It's a good idea to have a caravan instead of classic snake.
jesusnoseq
04. Apr 2022 · 18:29 UTC
Nice idea and controls!

I miss a game screen indicating which elements are good or bad and some feedback when the caravan changes
darandin
05. Apr 2022 · 00:34 UTC
I made it to day 54 with 3756 steps! I'm still not really sure what strategy to employ for efficiency and I think that makes this a great game! Definitely some more strategizing that can go on for the player than a simple snake game.

Nice innovation! Thanks for the entry!
yulotomorrow
05. Apr 2022 · 03:05 UTC
Fun idea and modifications based on Snake!

The icons lack contrast to the background and are not very standing out, and hard to recognize what they are or why they're there necessary for a caravan to collect, but it might just be me.
PurpledArtFrog
05. Apr 2022 · 12:27 UTC
Magnificent idea...... snake the caravan game :smile: Loved it :thumbsup_tone1:
Flightless
06. Apr 2022 · 10:43 UTC
I loved the city-building aspect. I would have played many more times if some of the progress carried over to the next round.
yetanother
06. Apr 2022 · 23:59 UTC
Very original take on snake!
Jimbly
07. Apr 2022 · 04:02 UTC
Neat idea! I wished that I had some control of what to do with my resources, but seemed it was just random what showed up as able to build (and I wasn't sure what they did) - it would have been cool to be able to see two different ghosts of things to build, with their resource costs and description (e.g. "cost: 3 stone, generates 1 food/day") under them, so I had an interesting choice of "build this thing now or save up for that thing later".

The itch.io fullscreen button is getting in the way of clicking Unity's fullscreen button, I think you can uncheck the "needs fullscreen button" on the itch.io side, should make it slightly easier to go fullscreen.

Music was pretty good, didn't get annoying, for as long as I played, which was 15 days =).
LDJam user 261538
07. Apr 2022 · 16:55 UTC
Very neat mix between snake and colony management. Love the mashup. I didn't totally understand the quests, and at some point new things stopped spawning on screen, but I enjoyed it! Nice work!
GeneralSturgeon
09. Apr 2022 · 10:56 UTC
Loved the idea! Could use a bit more clarity with how to fishish quests etc. Good job!
eeaann9044
09. Apr 2022 · 10:59 UTC
I really like the idea but things stopped popping into my screen at some point so i was unable to continue.
zimny11
09. Apr 2022 · 22:03 UTC
Cool music and nice art style. It is rare to not see pixel art in a Compo. Also, balancing games is hard and can take a lot of time. I never manage to balance mine either, so I get it :) Some explanation of what objects are doing, would be nice, because it looks like trees/rock and buildings do something else. And I can quite figure out what "ghost" building and regular buildings dose. Beside that nice take on a classic!
TheBlitz
12. Apr 2022 · 04:10 UTC
Cool game, great idea mixing the snake game with a colony building game :)
Having some pointers/clues to indicate what you're collecting would be a great feature!
0x746564
13. Apr 2022 · 01:51 UTC
This was an interesting take on the classic snake game with the added colony building mechanic.

I felt like the controls could maybe use some tuning. The turning precision seemed off a bit.

I liked how you could reduce the size of the caravan by making the buildings. I got to a point where a quests menu appeared, but didn't have any quests. I'll probably go back and try again to see what sort of quests I get.
Zackavelli
13. Apr 2022 · 16:45 UTC
I think the mechanic of building the village as you go along, also being the thing that inevitable ends your game is a cool idea. Had fun playing however I did notice the game was a sometimes unresponsive to my key presses. It wasn't always, but just enough where I would crash into something because the caravan didn't turn when the key was pressed. Could just be my old keyboard :smile:
deniskazantsev
15. Apr 2022 · 10:23 UTC
I really liked your vision for classic snake game. It's very interesting combining with strategic game. Even music is not so bad to volume down it by default)
M2tias
20. Apr 2022 · 17:22 UTC
At first it was kind of hard to understand why I should be running straight at trees and stones, but I guess I get it :D
The music loop was nice but it was way too short. You shouldn't put all the movement controls in one if-else. Then if I'm still holding up when I want to go left, the caravan goes up. Basically I'd read the inputs in the order you do, separate ifs and then ignore the direction that was pressed last frame.
Fun idea and great implementation. Well done!