LudumData

Social Mediæty by const_arch

[raw]
made by const_arch for Ludum Dare 52 (COMPO)

screenshot1.png

You are an otherworldly horror who can entrance lesser beings with just the knowledge of your existence. Use social media to spread the word, and harvest the souls of your followers to pay for it!

screenshot2.png

Everything can be controlled by clicking. This game features autosaving, so if something goes terribly wrong try just opening it again and loading the autosave.

Don't be too discouraged if you get off to a slow start! Ideas can proliferate quickly with the right tools...

Post jam changes: - Changed leaderboard server to be run a less commonly used port (picking 80 was some real 3 AM brain stuff), as it was getting spammed with unrelated requests. - Fixed a division by zero error that caused crashes in two events.

If the game doesn't start, please try the OpenGL-Fallback versions in the downloads instead.

Link https://github.com/precup/LD52/
Link https://const-arch.itch.io/social-mediety
Link https://const-arch.itch.io/social-mediety
Original URL https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/social-mediaety

Ratings

Overall 173th 3.468⭐ 33🧑‍⚖️
Fun 204th 3.226⭐ 33🧑‍⚖️
Innovation 139th 3.433⭐ 32🧑‍⚖️
Theme 147th 3.75⭐ 32🧑‍⚖️
Graphics 250th 3.117⭐ 32🧑‍⚖️
Humor 17th 4⭐ 33🧑‍⚖️
Mood 196th 3.167⭐ 32🧑‍⚖️
Given 25🗳️ 42🗨️

Feedback

TomatoOmelet
09. Jan 2023 · 05:45 UTC
Reading the description already made me laugh. The writing for this game is so good super funny. The art is also super cute and yes eyes > tentacles.
cagibi
09. Jan 2023 · 11:38 UTC
Very good humor! I just felt the need to be able to pause the game sometimes (although quitting and loading an autosave *technically* does that).
Zuwu
10. Jan 2023 · 01:36 UTC
The dialog and the jokes are great! There's a ton of little fun things, I do wish you started with more followers though, it takes a while before you can really interact with all the systems
togo sepultraut
10. Jan 2023 · 01:52 UTC
maybe im just very bad at it, but i cant seem to catch up on followers, behind by many zeros.
fun narrative nevertheless
LDJam user 142503
10. Jan 2023 · 05:16 UTC
Cool game,i like just seeing the number grow~
ManchmalScott
10. Jan 2023 · 05:42 UTC
This game is so hard! Brother got to 1 billion and I was still at 170K lol
🎤 const_arch
10. Jan 2023 · 05:57 UTC
Thanks for the feedback so far everyone! I'm glad you're enjoying the writing.

Yeah, I probably should've put the current Normal difficulty behind a third Hard option. It's doable (oh god how is there 200 day run on the leaderboard), but requires quite a bit of advertising combined with the other boosts. Easy is more flexibly balanced if you'd like a chiller time.

The initial ramp up period was meant to be a time for players to toy with edicts and acolytes to figure out their basics, but it kinda just feels like dead time in hindsight. I think lowering the minimum ad price to 100 would've probably made this time period feel less bad, although yeah just starting you off with 500 followers could've also bypassed some of the problem.
Unentokku
10. Jan 2023 · 08:59 UTC
Can't run it getting a "Your video card driver does not support the selected Vulkan version.
Please try updating your GPU driver or try using the OpenGL 3 driver.
You can enable the OpenGL 3 driver by starting the engine from the
command line with the command:
'./Social Mediaety.exe --rendering-driver opengl3'.
If you have updated your graphics drivers recently, try rebooting."
🎤 const_arch
10. Jan 2023 · 09:20 UTC
@unentokku Sorry about that! Looks like the renderer I exported with isn't supported by your GPU. I just uploaded a couple "-OpenGL-Fallback" versions that use a fallback OpenGL renderer instead. Hopefully that will work!
Unentokku
10. Jan 2023 · 10:22 UTC
@const-arch It works! The game seems interesting.
LDJam user 0
10. Jan 2023 · 13:40 UTC
I dont like the graphics,I will feel uncomfortable.
Horda
10. Jan 2023 · 18:51 UTC
Very fun game, I'd like to play more, unfortunately the game crashed 2 times on new event. (can't click on event, windows turns white, processing smthg? )
The game is very well written its humour is a nice take !
🎤 const_arch
10. Jan 2023 · 21:46 UTC
@horda Uh oh, sorry about that. What OS are you on?
🎤 const_arch
10. Jan 2023 · 22:30 UTC
@horda Thanks for mentioning that it was on an event! I tracked down a division by zero in two events and put up new builds with that fixed.
bentglasstube
11. Jan 2023 · 02:51 UTC
This game was fun and the concept was quite entertaining. Overall the pacing dragged a little bit and the news flashes were pretty disruptive, but I enjoyed playing.
Horda
11. Jan 2023 · 04:42 UTC
@const_arch You're welcome! I played the game on windows 11.
streq
12. Jan 2023 · 02:15 UTC
Awesome game! really fun to play and strategize, funny dialogues and overall setting. Also appreciated the leaderboards, those are always a plus. The newsflashes get a bit annoying after a bit, but that's bound to happen to every game with a text heavy event system. Overall a really enjoyable and unique game!
givit-game-studios
12. Jan 2023 · 07:31 UTC
Not really sure how to play this game. It took me a couple of tries on where to click and what to click. I think a bit of feedback during the game would have been nice. Also is harvesting souls a bad thing? Becuase my score went down, I thought when you harvest souls your score would go up and start winning? But neither less I like the idea congratulation.
KekkoDude
12. Jan 2023 · 08:21 UTC
Søsiål Mediæty... Click Like and Share, dont forget to upvote, follow and subscribe, And for the extra devoted here's a link to my patreon page!

Liked it a lot, my only wish is that the shop would stay open after i did a purchase, other than that, pretty neat! Kudos to everyone who made it on the leaderboard!
KekkoDude
12. Jan 2023 · 08:21 UTC
I'm sorry, dont know what happened here
KekkoDude
12. Jan 2023 · 08:21 UTC
Or here for that matter....
adam-gould
12. Jan 2023 · 10:03 UTC
A very interesting take on the Plague Inc-style genre! Took me a bit of time to figure out what everything was for, but discovering that was part of the fun (for me anyway). The balancing act of "I need to harvest but leave enough people behind to not destroy my recruitment" seems to be the core of the decision making process and worked pretty well. Well done!
LDJam user 315170
12. Jan 2023 · 15:21 UTC
Hey this game is pretty good, the biggest killer for me is the lack of sound effects and how long the game dragged on. I also seemed to be playing the game wrong and accumulated a huge disadvantage against the tentacle guy. The story and presentation is quite funny though, good job overall! I'd recommend possibly making the game shorter or otherwise improving the pacing. It becomes quite tedious after a while.
Tiseno
12. Jan 2023 · 17:34 UTC
Pretty awesome, I spent way too much time trying to optimize the ramp haha. I was a little confused at what the ultimate goal was (obviously getting as many followers/souls, and more than the tentacle, but the actual win-condition)
Then I was a little confused at first at what the currency was.
All in all, would be a writhing mass of eyes and flesh again 5/5 humor.
caeonosphere
12. Jan 2023 · 22:38 UTC
I've often asked myself: what if Hellstar Remina had a social media presence? Now I know. Adding a rival was a good way to differentiate from the typical sim. I'm a little ashamed that it took me over 500 days to win!
Pincushion
13. Jan 2023 · 00:00 UTC
This is a pretty unique game. Hilarious premise and dialogue. Nice combinations of things to do. I appreciate the scale of it, it really ramps up and starts going quick. It looked pretty good. The souls rising from the planet were a nice touch. The speed setting was really nice too. The core gameplay was fun.

The news popups were really funny at first, but they were annoying after a while.

I wasn't clear on the effects on the soul purchases. I got the gist that they either helped me or hurt my dear brother, but nothing beyond that. It would have been nice to see their effects, and in general more clarity on why the numbers were what they were.
island-jam-2-group-3
13. Jan 2023 · 22:59 UTC
I am not really into "clickers" but nice entry! and Godot FTW! :-P
Orhu
14. Jan 2023 · 00:11 UTC
Fun game! After a few minutes of blindly playing around, I figured out what was going on and started doing really well. Really nice work on this. It was a lot of fun!
Chase of Bass
15. Jan 2023 · 23:02 UTC
This was really fun and addictive -liked the humor too -awesome job on this! :D
Itskdog
15. Jan 2023 · 23:12 UTC
Nice job with this clicker game. It's the second one I've played so far. I like the speed controls and the random events, although I thought they occurred too often.
Mephistase
23. Jan 2023 · 18:42 UTC
This is the best game I tried so far!

It is witty, funny, working, pleasant!

Lovecraft/10, would it a planet again!

(spoiler, focus on asia)