Togo by Merin Car Trunk Key
Build a team of sled dogs and deliver the serum to Nome.
How to play:
You start at the camp with a notice board to your left and a kennel to your right.
In the kennel, you can buy a new dog for $150. You can swap the position of two dogs by highlighting one and clicking another. Click the highlighted dog to deselect. The dog in the lead position counts double for your team's stats!
At the notice board, you can pick a run to attempt. Different team stats make some types of missions easier. Agility will help with high difficulty runs. Stamina will help with long runs. Power will decrease the time taken in any run.
When you've selected a run and set up your sled team, head through the exit at the top to start the delivery.
You will only get half the promised reward if your run is late, but you will get a bonus if you arrive ahead of schedule.
After 7 days of sledding time, your team will be tasked with Togo's serum run to Nome. If you've built a strong team, you should be able to complete it in time and save the town from an outbreak.
You may encounter Balto, Akiak, or Togo himself on your journey. With one of these legendary dogs in the lead position, runs that are otherwise impossible will be within your reach.
Post-Submission Bugfixes:
- Nome result triggering on last normal run
- Notice board showing fixed order of runs
- Softlock if missions are completed too fast
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/53/togo |
Ratings
| Overall | 837th | 3.341⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 880th | 3.091⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 762th | 3.136⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 536th | 3.955⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 1055th | 2.477⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 715th | 2.625⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 787th | 3.31⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 36🗳️ | 40🗨️ |
As far as I can tell when your sledge starts going there's nothing you can do to influence it - at first I thought it would be arrow keys to steer but I guess not. That would have added some fun interaction!
It is very unique game, and it is excellent in its own right!!!
All the best!!
Also, play my game!
Right now however it’s very raw. It took me time to figure out the “buy dog” part. The art could be clearer, even some AI generated stuff would make the experience so much better. Nothing some love can't fix.
Like @freakyzelga said, would love to see this get a bit smoother around the edges. A small suggestion I would give is also the ability to keep a dog roster to allow the player to buy more dogs even when they're maxed. That way one could swap an injured or tired dog for a fresh one, or just buy a better one and retire the previous.
You really need to think which tasks to take in first days, because you sip through time very fast for the first 3-4-5 days. I didn't even think I could finish buying all dogs on time. But near the end it flipped around: first 5 days had ~8 deliveries in them, last 2 days had around 20! I was just too fast with all dogs, and it was so tedious going 4-5 hours at a time (even with biggest deliveries). And I really needed to think about money in first 5 days, but at the end of the game I had around $2000.
Also that's the reason I did not even touch my sledge after I filled it: there was no need to move wolves around, I already had good setup and during encounters I chose variants so that nobody died.
A good addition to the game would be that different difficulties resulted in different amount of encounters (for now it's always one, and sometimes lvl5 seems even easier then lvl1). Also a good addition would be different types of travel (lake, forest, mountain) - something, that would require to rethink the position of dogs in sleigh. It could be a really nice sleigh management game, but unfortunately this wasn't developed at all.
Anyways, I really liked the overall mood! Somehow even with limited music and artstyle you could achieve a compelling atmosphere, props to you!
The game could've worked if there were more events, happening unpredictably (instead of a single event at the half way point). But as it was released, it just feels unfinished (and I'm not even talking about visuals, those are forgivable for the game jams). The concept itself is not even scratching its full potential. Force me to make difficult decisions, make me prepare for a journey by buying different resources, make the time a factor that you even have to consider, make the game more difficult as a whole.
Making all graphics either hand drawn illustrations or pixel art instead of mixing various styles and scale of objects would really help.