LudumData

Spice Must Flow by arielsan

[raw]
made by arielsan for Ludum Dare 52 (JAM)

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The Emperor assigned our House, The Ordos, to develop a new Harvester vehicle capable of harvesting Spice at triple rate. By using our advanced technology, we are not only doing that but also making it fast enough to escape from Sand Worms. Pilot, you are in charge of testing the first prototype, we have great expectations, don't let us down.

harvester_travel2.gif

Instructions

  • WASD to move
  • Stop over Spice to start harvesting it.

My idea with this game was to recreate that moment when the Sand Worm was coming to get your units and your Harvester in particular in Dune 2 (and in the movies), but I wanted to get that from the Harvester perspective.

Known gameplay issues

  • Spice is too sparse and it is difficult to harvest (it was a last minute change to make it more slow to reach the objective but it was a fail)

Some ideas I left behind, mainly because of the lack of time.

  • Camera tremble based on Sand Worm distance.
  • Show height map in Minimap, and more indicators, like where to find spice, and maybe show more area.
  • More spice mechanics, one of them was consume spice when driving, plant spice bombs to distract the sand worm, others.
  • Random terrain on start + random spice locations.
  • Better sandworm animation.
  • Particles for movement.
Source Code https://github.com/acoppes/ldjam52/tree/release-for-ldjam52
Itchio https://arielsan.itch.io/spice-must-flow
Original URL https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/spice-must-flow

Ratings

Given 1🗳️ 1🗨️

Feedback

chispaLBC
09. Jan 2023 · 19:33 UTC
roomba gameplay
Actually the movement is nice and i didn't expect the worms to be like that... that was scary(?
The second patch of spice was too sparse and took too much time to collect
Good job!
publicidadeba
11. Jan 2023 · 02:20 UTC
Very fresh, first time I see something like this in the JAM. I think the milestones could be closer and picking up the spice a bit more playful. The vastness of the world the sandworm did a great work immersing me into the game. Btw do you make Kingdom Rush?
nullval
11. Jan 2023 · 09:47 UTC
Really good idea for the theme, it really feels like a vast empty desert with sparse resources, I don't particularly agree that there should be more resources or that it should be _*that_* more difficult to gather resources.
🎤 arielsan
12. Jan 2023 · 13:50 UTC
You are correct, I reduced the spice in each location at the last moment just to make the player have to find another spot but forgot to make them smaller to keep the density or even make it more dense so it is not fun to harvest.

@publicidadeba yes, I worked on the Kingdom Rush series :), you can see more about me [at my site](https://arielcoppes.dev/projects/) if you want.

Thanks everyone for playing it.
Tomssuli
16. Feb 2023 · 19:58 UTC
Found this just now. I thought I had played all the Dune themed games during the jam but I was wrong. Too bad as I liked the idea of this one and the theme was spot on. As others said, the later spice fields were too sparse and I would have liked to have some upgrades if milestones were so far apart... I collected up to 1300 spice before giving up as it turned so tedious.