Living as a _ in a Small Town by Unentokku
Text based game about trying to survive in a Harvest Moon like town as a dog of sorts. There's a hopefully fun ending once you've properly met everyone and it's end of a season.
I really like how this turned out so I'll probably make a more fleshed out version that uses just JS instead of twine.
Update:Made the UI slightly less painful to use and fixed couple of bugs.
| Link | https://mauno.itch.io/living-as-a-in-a-small-town |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/living-as-a-in-a-small-town |
Ratings
| Overall | 740th | 2.862⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 613th | 2.966⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 692th | 2.776⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 810th | 2.107⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 523th | 2.586⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 631th | 3.034⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 36🗳️ | 39🗨️ |
Not sure if there was a greater point beyond just wandering and interacting with people, but it was a cute little experience. :)
@jeffsobel There is an ending that I think is kind of cool(though would be even better if I had had time to do it in phases), you need to meet everyone(some things that should count as meeting probably don't, you can check the awareness level in the sidebar to see your progress) and wait for the next festival to see it.
It would be nice to have status text and condition text different color or cursive e.g. *You're hungry.*
I think a nice touch for the future would be to have a (ASCII) map drawing as you discover new thinks this would create some sort of visual progress and would help the player to remember.
I did notice that all the people I ran into were in a variety of moods, which didn't really seem to affect their behaviour - whether I got fed or not seemed wired directly to RNG without confounding variables like mood or location. Same thing for e.g. 'Escape' - if it didn't work, I could just try it again repeatedly and eventually it would take (maybe chance of success increased with each attempt?). There was one case where I tried to escape repeatedly and it didn't work out, so I stayed of my own free will instead, and the person got distracted and let me wander off.
Some of the events also have odd triggers - I can rock up at someone's house and they'll ignore me, and I can wander off, but if I specifically 'flee' then I get caught? I get the impression that 'flee' and 'hide' are the main interaction commands, and characters don't really take action unless prompted by my actively trying to look more suspicious than usual.
Once I got past these design choices, though, it was good fun exploring the setting and finding all the interactions. The 'Awareness' meter helped a lot with keeping track of what was going on, though at about 40% I started having trouble remembering who I'd encountered and who I had yet to meet. Again, in text form, schedules are hard to parse and keep track of, and I resorted to waiting around in locations until people appeared.
Overall, a solid stab with a pretty complex system that kept me engaged for a good while. Thanks for putting this together!
@avareii glad you enjoyed it! And yeah mood currently doesn't have as much effect I was planning it to have. Early on I got each character to have their own unique chance to be in specific moods and after that I meant to make each mood have their own character specific biases towards different actions but hadn't really added any actions at the time so decided to focus on adding things to do first but never found the time to connect the actions and moods aside from a few super simple things like anger increasing chance of starting a fight or not appreciating help) And yeah the interaction options are definitely weird, I was happy to just get everything to work without things instantly breaking and had no time to figure out what to do about needing to pick weird options to get things you're aiming for to happen.
@rincs I did spend the first few hours of the jam writing a lengthy intro but after looking at how far along I was with it and what I wanted it to cover realized I probably should first add some gameplay and just have you run away right away instead of having an hour or so of reading before you get to really do anything. Also thought about it and each house having their own food inventory while other places had ways to acquire food probably would have added enough context and events to make things more interesting.
It was really interesting. So much "potential" here, in my humble opinion. Really good stuff!
If it was me I would have put more "RPG Maths" into it. Like actions would show how much they cost. .. and I would see how my stats evolve between screens.... and I would be able to see all my stats on button press. ... BUT that's a different take I guess. I respect and like what you did here.
Loved it. :heart: