The Antiquary by Bobap
Dust off that old collection.
Left click to interact primarily.
Right click will transfer items to your collection.
Progress the game by clicking "Begin" or "Next" in the bottom right of the screen.
You can make profit by completing the daily requests. Access them from the center bottom left of the screen using the "Requests" button.
There is a pool of visitors that dynamically generates when you start a new game and they seed their offerings based on a set of randomly chosen tags that stays with them. So if you don't like any of what your visitors have got going on, you can always full send on a new save to try and a get more generous visitor pool.
I was unable to finish the save system, so I'm very sorry if you end up losing your hard earned collection.
Happy hunting.
Changelog:
v0.11: The itch.io version has been updated to have a small tutorial, sound effects, and music courtesy of Kevin Macleod.
The embed on ldjam is the original submission version.
Dev Notes:
There was a lot more planned to interact strategically with the overall RNG heavy nature of the game. Of course visitors were going to have preferred items they would pay more for instead of relying entirely on the Requests system. In the end I doubled the amount of offered and saved Requests since that is the only agency in the current version. I would like to keep fleshing it out after the jam because I think the bones are good. You can see the ghost of a reputation system in place that I was planning for to improve rarity of items, number of available items, specializing in certain types of items and visitors, and unlocking additional difficulty tiers of Requests down the line.
Noted Bugs:
The African Gold spam. At some point in the last bit it seems like one of the items got reset to default values. Visitors that specialize in [AFRICAN], [GOLD], or [ARMOR] are likely to have a bunch of that listing show up.
Medium difficulty Requests can sometimes generate with pairings that don't exist. If it sounds wrong, like [IRON] [POTTERY], then it probably doesn't exist.
A few of the transitions are spotty. I had to forgo that polish at the end to deliver a minimum viable.
If you made it this far in the description, thank you for reading. Let me know what bugs you find, how you do with your collection, and what you might be interested in seeing from future development.
| Itch.io Web Build | https://bobap.itch.io/the-antiquary |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/58/the-antiquary |
Ratings
| Overall | 543th | 3.311⭐ | 47🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 640th | 2.883⭐ | 49🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 252th | 3.477⭐ | 46🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 90th | 4.185⭐ | 48🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 583th | 3.16⭐ | 49🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 659th | 2.103⭐ | 41🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 674th | 2.955⭐ | 46🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 39🗳️ | 73🗨️ |
Some music and additional visuals (art for the vendors?) would add a lot too.
I like the idea of influencing requests, perhaps the requests prioritize types of items in your collection.
The game is sorely lacking for audio though, I didn't even touch sound for the jam this time.
@blazerker Icons are a fantastic idea. I can definitely see it for the item Types. Might be harder for Civs and Materials though. I had thought about color coding them which would help identifying them at a glance in a similar way.
@thdudk I was definitely worried about the onboarding for the game, in fact at the last minute I tried making some of the buttons stand out more since I couldn't implement a proper tutorial. Glad you were able to figure it out. Definitely looking to add in more ways to influence the market to help "fishing" for request items. In retrospect for the Jam build I should have broadened the individual Visitor item pools.
@ayu Absolutely want to have the Renown and *nonexistent* Disposition system facilitate that growth for future versions.
On my first gameplay, I got a request of getting Byzantine items. I collected 3 Ottoman items. It took me a while to figure out what was wrong
I think for this kind of game, graphics for each item are important. Being able to see your entire collection is a part of fantasy. That makes it feel more like a game and less like a spreadsheet.
Also, it would be great if I could actually see my collection when choosing next request. I mean, I could keep track of my collection with pen and paper but it's a bit too much effort. 😅
It also really lacks musical accompaniment, as the gameplay is essentially quite monotonous.
The game could be improved with some kind of plot or at least a clear goal (for example, accumulating 10,000).
One UI suggestion: the 'Requests' button really does not belong on the visitor's tab, it should be under our inventory. I think this made it a bit hard to figure out what's going on in the beginning.
Also, how to gain reknown? I thought eventually I would earn it by unlocking more difficult requests, but I never saw anything above Medium in the end.
@khamekaze Honestly a lot of the UI features kind of got smashed together and didn't turn out as elegant as I had planned since I just had to get it in. Definitely ended up in some time sucks that were completely pointless. I spent like 4 hours getting stacked menus to properly close with ESC, but that minimizes fullscreen so who would even use that. That one hurt a bit.
@holysparks Definitely interested in expanding it and improving the UI flow.
@sick-machine Music was culled by the deadline unfortunately. The goal is technically "collect all the things" but there's 270+ items and some are ridiculously rare spawns so that it entirely unlikely to be reached. A small gold goal for the Jam would have been smart. I was too focused on full game elements instead of a proper vertical slice.
@ditam I'm glad you powered through the lack of tutorial. Based on the feedback I definitely need to have better communication about visitor item pools and more agency over visitors that show up. Renown is gained from items in your Collection. If you Right click an item it will transfer from yours or a visitor's inventory to the Collection. Definitely going to have harder requests show up with Renown growth, but as is the 2 Tag requests are still generating buggy outputs. There is no way to deliver x [IRON] [POTTERY] for example.
@schu Glad you enjoyed.
At first, the game feels a bit challenging to grasp, but you quickly figure out what to do.
The core gameplay loop is quite engaging (at least for me), but after about 10–15 minutes you start realizing that things like smooth day-to-day transitions, limited visitor inventories, and random useless items all make the pacing a bit sluggish, and progression feels slow — which lowers the motivation to keep playing.
Still, it’s a really solid project: visually polished and built on a great concept. Well done!
The game is definitely missing music, or any sort of audio. Even a simple click sound would improve the interaction greatly. Also, the lack of tutorial (tooltips might be helpful) vs the apparent complexity and the balancing of it all (e.g. I didn't seem to get penalized for just proceeding to next day) made it hard to get into the game.
However, the comment above is more related to the LD format than the game itself. It's more about reducing the impact of RNG - even for simple requests I may not necessarily get generated items soon enough.
I think there's definitely a good idea here, and what's available feels quite polished.
Congrats on your entry, good job!
I was a quite confused at first. My first card was for gemstones which I never saw any of at all.
A quick tutorial to explain things at the start would have been useful, and the game really needs some audio.
I did find I was barely reading the actual names of the things I was buying, focusing just on matching the type.
I almost missed that there is a collection summary checklist which I guess is your overall goal?
Guess what requests I am going for here haha.
First off I really like the concept and even though it is basically just a matching game I really really enjoyed it and it works as a great memory game as well:))
Ideas for improvements:
I would love it if the canvases/buttons were of fixed size as when choosing the filter or when purchasing something with a long name they would jump around and with the button it was really annoying since I had to move my mouse to click it again.
The medium requests seem utterly pointless since most of them are so rare that I even if I've seen one or two of some I never came across more so I would definitely up the reward for them as for 1.3x it is not worth it not by a long shot, however the medium and simple ones seem to be well balanced.
Also requests for furnitures or other stuff that tends to be really expensive could be made medium as this game feels more like an inventory managment game with the available 'space' being your money. This also allows for a trick where you only need one or two pieces for a request but don't have enough liquidity you can sell everything buy the priciest options for your collection make more money than you would've been able to otherwise then buy everything back at the same price. This would kinda break capitalism haha so I would definitely add some kind of extra in the price when selling and buying back at the same place.
For this reason also, the 'collection' part seemed rather useless as you would just limit your ability to buy and basically throw assets out the window for no reason at least I could not figure out what having more renown did for me I reckon nothing and the theme of the game even without the renown system fits perfectly into collector.
I would also add in maybe some kind of daily cost (e.g. renting the shop) as now you can just spam the new visitors until you get something you actually need.
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All in all amazing game, I would live to see the mentioned barter and relationship system and I escpesially love this as I have been wanting to develop a game with a barter system for the longest time. Great effort definitely a 5/5 for me:))
@vladcfg Thanks for playing. I just updated the Itch build with a small tutorial to help onboarding.
@marudziik You're absolutely right, I just updated the Itch build with a bit of sound and music.
@skale Strangely enough I also noticed myself getting sucked in during playtesting.
@prunus-padis I was trying to shoot for Compo but on Sunday I realized it was far too barebones and pushed it to 72 hour. Icons would have been tricky with 270+ items, but would definitely like to add some in the future. The Itch build has been updated with some music and sounds.
@denissobolev You're not alone. The Itch build has been updated with a small text tutorial at the start.
@andreadbx Absolutely, my design revolved around being able to manipulate the RNG more, but ran out of time. I updated the Itch build to have many more items per visitor to compensate for now.
@someone Done. Tutorial and audio added to the Itch build. Yes the overall goal is to complete your own personal collection but with 270+ items and many of them being very rare, I don't think it's feasible currently.
@derek-glennon Definitely considering having a daily cost that goes up as you collect more items.
@dumchevdev Thanks for playing.
@torami Yeah, the size shifting was a last minute bug that cropped up with the addition of all the new items. I still haven't had time to hunt that one down. Great idea with tag types corresponding to difficulty, I'll add that to my balance list. I kind of like the 100% liquidity aspect, but for sure that needs to be fixed. Renown is useless right now, but will be huge in a future version to scale item rarity and request payouts. Daily "rent" is definitely on my list and will also scale with Renown. So glad you enjoyed it and thanks for the great feedback.
Right now, the game feels like it's missing a lot. It feels like filling out an Excel spreadsheet. So, I hope you'll bring it to life. Maybe add some story elements, add some music, and so on.
Good luck, I believe you'll make a great game!