Suck! It! Up! by Hjalte
"Suck! It! Up!" is the intergalactic gameshow about sucking up animals and creating a hospitable environment on a new planet!
The show takes place over 8 episodes, during which you'll see more and more animals, as well as build more and more exotic synergies.
Finally, if you can keep up with the ever increasing scores, you just might become Xirnu's Next Top Planet!

Controls
- Use beam: Space
- Move spaceship: A/D or Arrow keys
- Place animal: LMB
- Rotate animal: RMB or R
| Web | https://schubox.itch.io/suck-it-up |
| Windows | https://schubox.itch.io/suck-it-up |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/58/suck-it-up |
Ratings
| Overall | 52th | 4.12⭐ | 48🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 28th | 4.141⭐ | 48🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 59th | 3.978⭐ | 47🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 125th | 4.122⭐ | 47🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 200th | 4.098⭐ | 48🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 127th | 3.856⭐ | 47🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 43th | 4.122⭐ | 47🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 169th | 3.92⭐ | 46🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 50🗳️ | 72🗨️ |
I got blasted with sound upon opening so volume control would be nice.
The combination of a standard shape puzzle with the points multipliers of animal traits adds an extra dimension to placement of lifeforms.
Beaming lifeforms up is frustratingly slow at first, but gets more pleasant with beam upgrades.
I was somewhat confused how the animal traits worked at first, especially the rabbit. A quick animation of the rabbit doing its thing as a demo would be helpful.
I made it to 4 of 8 rounds, I struggled to math out the points a little lol.
It's the classic addicting gameplay of get stuff to make money to better make stuff!
Anyway, i had a great time, the design and the game is plenty of humour, really like it! Very good work, congrats ! :smile:
I was trying to avoid the fox eating stuff for the first few rounds :sweat_smile:
The gameplay is quite enjoyable and keeps things interesting by constantly switching between the two main mechanics. I’ve always liked puzzle games, so that’s an extra point from me. The art is really funny, and the overall visuals are great!
To be honest, I didn’t dive too deeply into the numbers and combinations, so I’m not sure how well-balanced they are, but I managed to beat it on my first try — the iguana-chameleon is just too overpowered!))


Also I see you're birdmaxxin', that's my favorite strat as well! And you might be right about the title hmm...
What impressed me most is how polished everything feels. The art style is absolutely gorgeous.
The animal suction mechanic is fantastic! I love experimenting with different combinations - the fact that you never know the final outcome forces you to think strategically and use multipliers wisely.
All those minor gripes aside, this game has probably gotten more time from me than any jam game in recent memory - very well done!
The gameplay is interesting and it has nice amount of complexity to it. Reminds me of Backpack Battles for sure.
However, I was little confused what the order of execution is in the grid. I assumed left-to-right, top-to-bottom but then my foxes on the right side went first.
Good work!
Graphics were good and consistent and the overall gameplay was good. As with other commentators I was not quite sure of the order of operations when scoring which made it a little more difficult. Overall great job :thumbsup:
And btw, you can rotate the animals with 'RMB' or 'R'.