Horde of Methuselah by mrjeremy

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

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Ready to play this real time strategy game that will place your resource management skills to the limit? Be prepared to expand your small group of survivors to a well oiled zombie slaying machine empire! This simple game will have you glued to the screen watching literal pixels, as you expand your territory and fight off the ever growing zombie threat! How long can you survive? And can you rid the island of the zombie infestation?

Witness the never ending death and rebirth of the Methulselian Horde as you struggle to claim territory and resources in this hostile world. Build up your base, manage resources, and expand your territory as you struggle to gain a foothold in a procedurally generated hell-scape. Keep a close eye on resources and population, as famine can set in unexpectedly, wiping out your units and leading to the downfall of the last remnants of humanity.

The shelters will light a safe zone for you to build in. New buildings can be purchased for 200 wood and 200 stone. Buildings will spawn gatherers to collect resources for you. Gathers can only collect resources if they are on the right pixel. Green for wood, brown for food, gray for stone. Barracks will spawn soldiers, units that will fight and kill incoming zombies. Soldiers are the only friendly units that can leave the safe zone. Your settlement requires food to survive, when your food reaches 0 units will begin to die. If your population reaches 0, you lose.

Ratings

Overall 783th 3.464⭐ 30🧑‍⚖️
Fun 617th 3.446⭐ 30🧑‍⚖️
Innovation 803th 3.196⭐ 30🧑‍⚖️
Theme 834th 3.536⭐ 30🧑‍⚖️
Graphics 1155th 2.857⭐ 30🧑‍⚖️
Mood 1084th 3.089⭐ 30🧑‍⚖️
Given 12🗳️ 9🗨️

Feedback

LDJam user 279610
05. Apr 2022 · 01:57 UTC
Ambitious! I love the map and zooming in and out. really game the game a great feel for scope. It was hard to tell which building was which, maybe if the color of the buildings was matched by the color of the fonts with the building names? Or a 2 or 3 letter abbreviated building name on the buildings.

Very impressive you built all this, well done. Also the intro scene is great!
Alexthehuman2
05. Apr 2022 · 02:00 UTC
No matter what I do I still couldn't find the right combination of building to start with that lets me survive long enough before zombies reaching into my sphere to destroy it. Definitely need some rebalancing because the end of the game while can be long, it isn't all that much fun. I definitely sunk a lot of time into it, but I don't see a clear strategy to overcome the horde without running out of food or having enough material to build enough barracks, because some maps are actually impossible to play with even with a barrack protecting them, mainly because the Barrack troops just don't react strong enough against the zombies which led to zombies running over a building (killing it in the process) despite the guard barrack being literally 10-20 tiles away, and therefore less resource, eventually lead to death.
Stefan Funke
05. Apr 2022 · 21:57 UTC
After a few tries and a good starting position with enough of all 3 resources, especially brown color (food) it worked out quite well.
My strategy was building mostly food at the beginning. After a while I had so many resources that I just kept building shelters.
Shelters are a bit overpowered in my opinion because they clear out all zombies within their range. I cleared half the map by just building shelters. :D
Barracks seemed a bit useless and I stopped building them, sorry :(

But nontheless I enjoyed the game a lot. Good job!

![screenshot.png](///raw/0fb/54/z/4cdf5.png)
🎤 mrjeremy
05. Apr 2022 · 22:00 UTC
@stefan-funke Thanks for playing! You found the secret strat. The shelters are bugged right now and cant be destroyed by zombies. When i update things that stratgey shouldnt work cuz the zombies will attack it when you place it in the middle of them. But nonethelesss appreciate the feedback!
subvertissement
05. Apr 2022 · 22:36 UTC
absolutely amazing game! this is highly impressive, one of my favorites i've played so far!

> And can you rid the island of the zombie infestation?

actually, no.. because on my map one tiny island in the bottom-right corner was out of reach from any shelter. :P
![Capture d'écran 2022-04-05 18:28:04.png](///raw/14b/64/z/4ce4e.png)

the buttons sometimes felt bugged, as i had often had to click one 4 or 5 times for the cursor to change to the desired building. towards the end, it did start feeling a tad laggy, but that might be a browser issue. and the music looping would've been nice, but i eventually figured pressing escape and then resuming the game did restart the song. :)

anyways, again, wow! and thanks for sharing the source, i'm definitely interested to learn a thing or two from what you've done! <3
🎤 mrjeremy
05. Apr 2022 · 22:59 UTC
@subvertissement I appreciate the kind weirds, thanks for playing! The music, lagging when too many things are spawned, and ui including the buttons - are the top three things that i will be fixing in an update when i can, so keep your eyes out for that.
Itskdog
05. Apr 2022 · 23:23 UTC
Good job for your first Ludum Dare. I made a resource management game last Jam.
🎤 mrjeremy
05. Apr 2022 · 23:25 UTC
@itskdog I think the hardest part with these is the balance, idk if yours was the same
Itskdog
05. Apr 2022 · 23:30 UTC
I was able to do different difficulties so people could experience the game. Like easy was pretty much a sandbox.
FED44
05. Apr 2022 · 23:31 UTC
good sound effect.
cyangmou
05. Apr 2022 · 23:38 UTC
This is a very interesting concept and I enjoyed the game a great deal.
Got a lot of feedback, not bc. the game is bad, rathe rbc. I played quite a while and thought it's good.

Food is by far the most important ressource, as if it runs out everything comes to a halt. Effectively food shortage can kill you, if all your lumberjacks or miners die and you can't make a comeback, if you don't have enough resources.

I think it's bad that you can't remove buildings, with a slow and methodical approach this would be very necessary, as you can't really reposition anything except if the zombies kill it.

I also think it's bad that the amount of zombies is just rising and they literally don't move, as it means late rin the game you are only spamming barracks with the hope they kill off the zombies unless... you build shelters, as they pretty much kill the zombies.

Also if the zombie tikck is high, it really starts on the processor, it's a quite calculation heavy game and might need some optimization, especially in the areas where no zombies are anyways close, calculations probably could be driven back a lot.

Also the algorithm creating the map would need some check if there are zombies which can't be reached, as the game can't be completed.

And I think it's also a bit to motion heavy to always select a new building after placing one, as there ar enot hotkeys.

Moving around the map maybe also should work with rightclick holding.

That's all I can think of, really happy that I stumble dove rit. Loved the concept.
TimBeaudet
05. Apr 2022 · 23:54 UTC
Played for you on my [livestream](https://www.twitch.tv/timbeaudet) was challenging without reading instructions, but we got there in the end!!
jitspoe
06. Apr 2022 · 00:15 UTC
Good fit for the theme! My biggest complaint is that it's difficult to tell that units are attacking my buildings. They just seemed to disappear. Super ambitious to do an RTS for a game jam, though! Nice work.
LDJam user 251170
06. Apr 2022 · 00:24 UTC
Lovely entry!

It took me a while to get the right start going, but it was worth the trial and error and once I got there... FINALLY!

I'm looking forward to what else you could do with the concept, I think you have a pretty neat start here!
🎤 mrjeremy
06. Apr 2022 · 00:30 UTC
@cyangmou First off i wanna say, i have followed your art on twitter for quite a while now so hearing that you enjoyed my game really means alot to me, thank you! Within the last hour of the jam i tryed to add a sell button and changing the zombie spawns so that they didnt spawn to far away from the players zone, but it ended up breaking the spawns totally so i wasnt able to get that out in time. But all teh feedback you break up is things im looking at implementing in updates. Im thinking about taking the game to a full release including getting real sprites and everthing. So def keep your eyes out for it. Thanks again!
SasquatchBStudios
06. Apr 2022 · 03:19 UTC
I died real fast the first time, but once I learned how to play holy crap did I ever overtake that map!
Really REALLY fun entry. My wife played it and said she wanted to continue playing it for hours.
Amazing how some pixels on a screen can be so engaging.

Really really fun and solid entry.

A bit a audio would have done it justice, the game deserves it.

One thing that could be better was the visuals on the buttons, and it would be nice for the game to remember what building I selected so I can just keep clicking to build that same building again (as opposed to clicking on a building every single time I want to build it)

Really well done!

![screenshot.png](///raw/65b/34/z/4cf8d.png)
Tanner Shelton
06. Apr 2022 · 07:58 UTC
This was suprisingly a lot more fun then I was expecting. My first playthrough I didn't do too great, but a second time around, I figured out the colors and which buildings would go where. Then it was a lot more fun. It triggered that desire in me to manage resources like in a city builder. I did get soft locked twice though. Technically it wasn't a full softlock, as I could've just waited for the zombies to finish me off, but I would lose all of my mines and didn't have enough for another building, so I couldn't do anything but wait. But this was a really fun entry!
Bottled up Dark Peace
06. Apr 2022 · 08:58 UTC
I recorded myself playing, message me on the Jam’s discord @ Dark Peace and I’ll send it to you. I had trouble understanding the mechanics, granted I did not read the page the first time but I generally assume there's an in-game tuto XD Anyway, you can get stuck when you don't have enough wood and you can't do anything anymore. Except that I got like infinite food, which technically means I won ?

It was fun but just fix the stuck part (and fix the text in the buttons, it could all fit it)
KingOfSpill
06. Apr 2022 · 13:27 UTC
Found this from @jitspoe's stream. Had a lot of fun with it! Found myself not wanting to put it down, I would love to see some new things added for you to do after you've set up a stable group of settlements.
🎤 mrjeremy
06. Apr 2022 · 14:20 UTC
@kingofspill Im looking to expand the game to a full release so will totally be looking to add more things to do currently. Currently debating whether to stick to the 2d pixel graphics and just update sprites, or make it a full fledged 3d games. Any suggestions? Thanks for playing though!
KingOfSpill
06. Apr 2022 · 14:29 UTC
@mrjeremy Honestly I really like the style you have currently. I think it's the perfect level of detail to give you the information you need without getting overloaded.

If you're looking for general ideas it might be neat to include some kind of outbreak mechanic where one of your settlements gets destroyed and spawns a lot of zombies. It would mean you can't just sit back once you've got enough soldiers to keep the zombies away.
tigerj
06. Apr 2022 · 15:54 UTC
Well pairing the icons and colors was a challenge but once I got the understanding down it was a pleasant challenge. Thanks for submitting the game to my stream I enjoyed playing it!

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1447965941?t=02h02m47s
JoeDev
06. Apr 2022 · 18:20 UTC
After reading everyone elses comments and pics I see my strategy was awful :joy: I have massive population density and was building out so slowly! I had no idea the shelters were invincible ;)

Absolutely great job, I could play this for ours (and may well do), so fun! Love me some rts sim games like this

![z.png](///raw/22b/33/z/4d278.png)
andrground
06. Apr 2022 · 19:00 UTC
Nice game, simple graphics and quite in-depth gameplay are perfect in that kind of strategy game!

However I have always sucked at strategy games and couldn't really expand my territory but that's obviously on me :(
Mopifish
06. Apr 2022 · 19:06 UTC
Nifty game!!!
At first I thought it was too complex and hard to parse, but I gave it a second shot and managed to understand it.

From there it was pretty fun, but it petered out pretty quickly. ![Capture.PNG](///raw/2fe/54/z/4d2a0.png)

I got about this far before stopping as at that point I had essentially won (Had enough infrastructure I could build whatever I wanted whenver)

This is a SUPER solid prototype and base for a game, but it lacks depth. As a jam game though, it definitely kept me busy for a little while :)

Great entry, I hope you continue developing after the jam
Petunia Games
08. Apr 2022 · 03:15 UTC
Really nice entry. I am very bad at these kinds of games but I enjoyed what I played. It was unclear what buildings could go on which tile (it's in the description but having it appear in-game would be nice), but once I knew, it was straight-forward. Some way of knowing when buildings were destroyed and why would have been very useful because I found myself putting a building down and not knowing why it wasn't appearing even though my resources were being used.

I imagine if the player put time into this they could uncover a lot of depth and create strategies to rid the island of the green menace.
tetrapteryx
08. Apr 2022 · 12:25 UTC
This is super ambitious! The map looks really good. I wish there had been some indication within the game of what color corresponds to what resource, even something subtle like some little trees, rocks, etc. on the terrain? I had a lot of fun with this once I got the hang of it though!
Link270
09. Apr 2022 · 07:25 UTC
I like the idea a lot, really cool thing you've got here. However I don't think the execution was all that great. Hopefully you can re visit and upgrade some things to make it much better. A big thing would be more player feedback. I had no idea how much anything cost, or why my resources just randomly seemed to disappear. It made it hard fopr me to really come up with a good strategy. Good job though, I hope to see this continued, great idea!