Broke Custodian: From Dust Till Display by outstar
You have nothing but a dusty bone. a rotten banana peel, a shovel, and a dream.
Alright, you also have a museum, technically. It's empty and dilapidated, but it's your job to fill it with items on display and make some bucks!

Play by dragging and dropping items from your inventory to the museum. Press 'Continue' to let time pass and for things to happen. During expeditions, excavate by digging, then quickly pull items into your inventory!
Made for Ludum Dare 58: Collector
Authors:
titos2k - coding, writing
outstar - art, music
SFX from Epidemic Sound. Wall and table assets repainted and edited from OpenGameArt assets LPC Walls and LPC Wooden Furniture
Ratings
| Overall | 117th | 3.929⭐ | 44🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 244th | 3.583⭐ | 44🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 168th | 3.643⭐ | 44🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 18th | 4.476⭐ | 44🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 36th | 4.548⭐ | 44🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 95th | 3.964⭐ | 44🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 296th | 3.244⭐ | 43🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 147th | 3.964⭐ | 44🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 21🗳️ | 25🗨️ |
Few suggestions:
- Tooltips should appear fast, atleast in the digging minigame
- The custom cursor covers most of the tooltips for your popularity/friendliness/etc...
- The event that completely wipes your museum layout isn't really fun, just annoying. Though maybe it serves as a good way to force the user to reconsider their layout?
Regardless, I had a great time. Great job!
It gets a bit repetitive with multiple clicks per day, but it was quite fun! Sold poop for good profit, would do that again. And again :D
I sell all the poop and become rich. Yuppee! Nice game ^_^
The event popups and digging were a really nice addition to make the game feel more interesting.
I like how items that belong to the same category have a combo and the digging minigame, it's a familiar concept but the combination and execution makes it solid.
I think for the digging minigame, it'd be better if we have separate time to put our things on bag. But overall great job!
The digging site was really fun to do. The first time I did not read the big red text at the bottom so I came home empty handed. I love the events that pop up, even if I cant afford things or if there are no scary items and such. It makes the game feel more alive
Great job on this one!
- Maybe it was a bug, but after day 20 or so I was no longer invited to go on expeditions
- A lot of the decisions feel meaningless, as I do not see e.g. if my security system has improved, or whether my bribe worked
- I did not find a way to deal with any trash I found. So it just accumulated and I got fined for it.
Art style, music, execution are all on a very high level. I can see this going places :)
could have used a few more alert moments as kids destroying my museum over and over again got a little repetitive overall, lots of fun, moral of the game, ban children from museums or they'll eat the dinosaur bones and knock over your priceless vases

Very nice execution on the game concept and really well suited for the Collector theme.
One of my first impressions was there was a lot of red negative numbers on the screen every turn. It felt like it was telling me I was doing something bad so I put the items away and I don't think that was what I was meant to do, so I eventually put them back out again. If it is just a general rule that every item degrades then I think I don't need to see that unless it is an exceptional event.
I did struggle, though, with how quick the digging sections are and how to put items together. It was also rough starting negative with money and earning so little each day, to where it took forget to get into the positive and start being able to buy artifacts or pay for things.
I'd love to see where this goes in the future, though!
What I enjoyed the most was the atmosphere of the night museum; it really added a sense of awe.
The visuals are great, and the music fits the mood perfectly.
That was a nice relaxing experience and nicely broken up with the digging minigame. Love the art especially, all very consistent and impressive variety of items.
But damn those school kids! *angryfist*
As much as I'd like to give feedback about this, I really have no idea what was happening in this game lol. Keep in mind that these sorts of games aren't really my cup of tea, so take everything I say with a grain of salt.
At some point, I managed a setup where the starts were all green, but again, I still have no clue why the items when placed the way I placed them gave me those green stats. Is it that a section should only have items which are of the same type ? If that's the case, then why were certain stones not working with the other fossils ?
I think a little more clarity about some of the items would've helped a lot. I also agree with the others above me in that some of the events like the one's where the kids threw everything in storage were definitely more annoying than anything else. I'm not really a fan of how the digging minigame is structured. Having the entire thing be based on how fast you can click was a little annoying ( for me anyway. Like I said before, maybe take everything I said with a grain of salt )
That said though, the humour was on-point ( " Just pretend it's an extinct species of bird " lol ). The art in general was top-class as well. I know my thoughts about this game might sound like they're negative, but that doesn't take away from the fact that I think this game is still pretty damn cool for what you guys set out to do.
Great job on this y'all
I didn't really give that much thought to item stats beyond value. All I was doing was essentially just grouping categories of highest-value items together, which seemed to make stats increase over time. So I feel like something could be simplified there for a more focused experience. I think it'd also be helpful to display the value of items at all times, or have a togglable overlay that displays it. And/or remove appear delay on tooltips.
Anyway, the game definitely stands out as polished entry, congrats on making it happen ^^

It would be nicer if there were hints on how to place objects and more events to get artifacts to fit the theme.
Sorry I was running low on energy by the end of this one :sweat_smile: I actually think this concept is super neat! I'll probably be coming back to it in the future.
Love this game! :purple_heart:
