Unlucky Town by tanis

https://youtu.be/AmYRJQ8uEwg
Introduction
You are the major of a reall unlucky town. Every 10 seconds, a disaster hits your town!
Disasters cause damage to the buildings in your town. You have to keep your town alive as long as possible. Add more buildings, upgrade the existing ones and do your best!
How to play
The game is based on a four cards deck. Each turn your deck replenishes. The cards you do not play will still be in your deck the next turn.
You can only play cards you have enough energy for. You can see your energy at the top left of the screen. Each turn your energy replenishes.
Each turn lasts 10 seconds. At the end of the turn, your town gets hit by a disaster which causes damage to your buildings.
You start with just one level 3 house.
- Use the mouse.
- LEFT BUTTON plays the card you are hovering on.
Buildings
There are different type of buildings. Some disasters only damage certain types of buildings.
Each building has a level that goes from 1 to 3. The level determines how sturdy the building is.
Playing an "upgrade" card will increase the level of your building and set its health to the maximum for that level.
The different type of buildings are:
- House
- Commercial
- Factory
Cards
There are different type of cards.
Cards are used to place buildings in your town, to upgrade existing buildings and to temporarily increase your maximum energy.
Each card has an energy cost. Some might have zero cost (i.e. increasing energy costs no energy itself).
The different type of cards are:
- Build House
- Build Commercial
- Build Factory
- Upgrade a building
- Increase energy
Ratings
| Overall | 299th | 3.292⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 392th | 2.875⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 209th | 3.375⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 262th | 3.542⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 369th | 2.979⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 166th | 3.396⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 208th | 2.737⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 233th | 3.239⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 23🗳️ | 29🗨️ |
Different buildings have different impact. i.e. houses can be hit by famine while other buildings won't. The same applies to factories that can be hit by strikes and commercials that can be hit by the economic crisis.
Upgrades are granting you more survivability as each disaster is only taking away one health from the building it hits. If you upgrade you get more health.
@jaykayey thanks for the kind words. You are right, the font choice is definitely not the best. And I should have worked more on the graphics of the cards to make them stand out more and differentiate them better without having to read the text.
I like the creepy guy as a second game mechanic to play around when you have played all you can in the round. I like this kind of game mechanics, but I think it's too much RNG... there is not really any room to strategize what building to build?
I could maybe anticipate, a tornado I'll play a bit more of one or another. Maybe having card to "look into the future".
Solid game (and the mac version works)
I enjoyed this. Took a little while to grasp all of the mechanics, but by my second game I was having fun =). Music was good, didn't get annoying, and audio cues were nice. The "add energy" card always seemed good, until I saved 2 of them and realized they were useless if you only have 2 other cards ^_^. Would have been nice if extra energy could be saved, or if they were "+1 energy and draw a card" or something. Still, were nice when then _did_ come up, as long as it wasn't 2 on the same turn ^_^. I liked how, once fully upgraded, a building will eventually crumble, creates a nice pacing.
You are right about the energy cards. If I manage to work some more on this game, I will review the mechanics of the card to make sure there are no occasions where keeping a couple of those cards does not make any sense.
@ismael-rodriguez thanks for playing the game. And yeah you can actually accomplish something just by randomly clicking on the cards, indeed. It does need some more love on the strategy side of things.
@43sam yes I agree that giving to player more awareness of what is coming next would help. Point taken! :wink:
@adecon thanks a lot!
One thing that I think could be useful is to add icons to the card to distinguish them more easily, especially when you are in hurry :smile:
I think there may be a resource leakage of some sort in the game. It gradually runs slower as I keep playing. Tested on both Firefox and Chromium.
And as others have mentioned, the strategy in this strategy game could use a lot of love. Given the game mechanics, I think you could prototype the strategy for this game entirely with pen and paper.
1. small misspellings "reall unlucky" -> "really unlucky"; "different type" -> "different types" (4x)
2. Ludum Dare embedded version: Emscripten stays in the ‘Preparing...’ phase! I get the following repeated error (and also several other ones) in the console (the French part is about page parameters preventing loading a resource); I am using Firefox:
"`warning: browser could not fully decode audio /assets/data/sfx/earthquake.wav, trying slower base64 approach index.html:1:356
Content Security Policy: [French] blob:null/11c0a75a-64eb-4d05-b6fe-096a8fc24192 (« default-src »).`"
3. only on itch.io’s game page, weirdly: extra space before "House" in first bullet point from "Buildings" (yes, this feels like an observation from Rain Man X))
4. Navigator version **does** work on itch.io; previous problem caused by Ludum Dare’s restrictions? (I also could not get my own game running that way, possibly for a similar reason, also getting a console error while loading.)
5. Very ironically, little guy’s controls are not layout-independent (I have an AZERTY keyboard), while this is more of an in-game joke and first Ludum Dare 51 game where I run into the classic QWERTY problem (which I commonly encountered in itch.io game jams). XD Just to let you know; this might be useful in case you reuse the code, as you say this is a placeholder. ;)
6. may well be a navigator-specific problem, as this happens for several people for several navigator games: keyboard gets unrecognized (except for my first run!), while the mouse (fortunately!) still works. And the game gets laggier with time (for both music and guy movement and animation), which I suspect is also a navigator issue. (The same happened to acdimalev, I see.)
7. also a navigator problem?: restarting the game seems to generate a new guy in addition to the previous one, so I suspect there will be as many copies as runs! X)
8. Classic sfxr coin sound? :) (I know I abused jsfxr for my own game!)
9. hard to anticipate what kind of building you should prioritise before knowing how disasters affect them, but maybe the game expects you to learn through some trial and error
10. use of the theme focuses on randomness; it looks like many (?) people took this route! Reminds me heavily of the ‘Roll of the dice’ theme
11. I like how the graphics vary depending on the buildings’ levels; reminds me of *Age of Empires* + *Civilization II/III*.
12. looks like I only seldom get upgrade cards, while they are so useful! (This may be the reason… :p) Nevertheless, I have trouble figuring out which building is to be selected by an upgrade card!! Is this totally random? Suggestion: allow the player to select which building will receive the upgrade.
13. Getting better how the disasters work (type-specific ones + harsh global one + random-sample one), I guess a good strategy is to diversify the building types, and not to have too many level-one buildings, saving building them for when you can apply an upgrade.
**Takeaway:** Graphics are to the point (I wish I had some pixel art skills too! I might try dabbling in it :)), and sounds too, although I think some more for selecting a card (and varying according to the card’s nature!) would have given even more life. By the way, I like the mysterious soothing music (how did you create it? :)). I think the use of the theme is fair but classic — and ironically feels like a mix between ‘Delay the inevitable’ and ‘Roll of the dice’. XD The concept is rather clever, this sounds like *SimCity 2000*’s disasters gone frantically mad. X) (By the way, the three building types are **exactly** those for the main coloured areas you can design in this latter game! Did you draw any inspiration from it?) I really feel giving some leeway about the upgrades would make the game more enjoyable, as opposed to have the player a bit too constrained by the randomness, although there is already some strategising involved.
A nice little pixel art experience which can definitely
> there doesn’t seem to be a reason to not play every single card that you can afford
Actually, it can make sense not to build a building if you think you will not be able to upgrade it right after, and also, you may have to select which type of building to get in order to have a varied enough sample to survive any situation.