Eventually Corn Runs Out by tgb20

[raw]
made by tgb20 for Ludum Dare 50 (COMPO)

coverphoto.png

Eventually Corn Runs Out​

​What do you spend all day doing when the world ends? Eating corn of course!

​Eventually Corn Runs Out is a strategy game for the Gameboy Color and Gameboy

The world has fallen to a zombie apocalypse and your job is to keep the United States running for as long as possible. Keep the population alive as long as possible to reach a maximum score.

​Controls:

DPAD/WASD/Arrow Keys - Move

Start/Enter - Open Menu

A/Z - Select

B/X - Back

How to play:

Select a city and after a short briefing you are presented 3 options:

3options.png

  1. Feed: Provides 1 food to this city
  2. Cure: Converts 1 zombie into a human
  3. Nuke: Destroys all zombies and humans in a city so you no loner have to watch it

food.png

Food can be found at certain locations around the map at random times and in random amounts. Providing food to a city grows its population. If there are at least 2 humans in a city every 5 seconds 1 food is consumed and another human is born.

Cures are a very limited resource, these can be used to convert zombies into humans. If a city drops to just 1 person it cannot produce more so a zombie must be cured to continue growth. Cures are a finite resource and do not spawn anywhere.

rundown.png

If the number of zombies is larger than the number of humans then a city will appear run down. This is a visual indicator that the city needs help. You cannot rebuild a rundown city.

destroyed.png

If a cities human population ​​reaches 0, either by zombies or a nuke, then the city becomes destroyed and you can no longer interact with it.

pausemenu.png

Pressing enter at any time opens the pause menu, here you can check your score, see how many humans are left, see how much food and cures you have, and save the game.

While any menu is open in the game the world is paused and your score does not increase.​

gbc.png

The game also has limited GBC support.

One final note is that you can cheese the game super easy by curing DC and then nuking the rest of the cities. I didn't have time to make a counter to this and does it really sit morally with you to bomb an entire country to save 20 people?

This is my post ambitious and memory intensive GB game I have made yet. I spent almost 12 hours just optimizing the map in the background to fit in memory.

Share your scores in the comments!

Ratings

Given 0🗳️ 0🗨️

Feedback

LDJam user 278918
04. Apr 2022 · 00:22 UTC
I love the nostalgic feel of this game. Before I read the bit about cheesing, I felt so smart keeping DC and Jacksonville thriving after I nuked all the other cities. :P I enjoyed it overall! I do wish it had some music, though.
darandin
04. Apr 2022 · 03:02 UTC
I struggled a bit without a resource counter on the screen for the cures and food. Having to actually go to the city to inspect it and find out zombie vs human count felt appropriate though!

The style was definitely a highlight! Love the gameboy game idea.

Good game and thanks for the upload!
LDJam user 258850
04. Apr 2022 · 23:48 UTC
Love the old Gameboy style of graphics, I just ended up nuking everywhere but 1 place :') Great submission!
cppchriscpp
06. Apr 2022 · 02:28 UTC
Very cool! I always like seeing more retro entries in the compo/jam. I managed to get 119 points, though I may have cheesed it. One piece of constructive feedback, it felt like it took forever to cross the map. I'm not sure if that's because of limitations of the console/your engine/etc but it would have helped to be able to accelerate the cursor a bit. (Maybe have it speed up if you hold b outside a menu?)

Either way, this was a cool idea, and not something you usually saw on the gameboy. Nicely done!
🎤 tgb20
07. Apr 2022 · 22:51 UTC
@iguanana Thanks for the feedback! Music is my weak point and making music for the game boy is even harder :(
🎤 tgb20
07. Apr 2022 · 22:52 UTC
@darandin I ran out of time to add something on screen but that would have been nice. Did you see you could press start to open a menu that showed your resources?
🎤 tgb20
07. Apr 2022 · 22:53 UTC
@cppchriscpp The cursor speed is actually a limitation of the GB CPU. If you go down to Mexico or up to Canada and all the cities unload it moves pretty quickly. I did most of the development with only 1 city so I didn't realize the bottleneck until it was too late.