Neptune's Wake by feor

made by feor for Ludum Dare 54 (JAM)

Neptune's Wake

Play on Itch.io!

Sink or be sunk.

* Strategically dispatch your units to acquire more territory, send reinforcements or sacrifice parts of your empire for Neptune's glory !* (Note: there is no sound)

How to play:

You are the blue player.

You can invade an enemy territory or reinforce land you own by clicking one of your regions, then a neighboring region. One unit will stay behind to defend the region.

Regions that have sent units somewhere become unavailable for the duration of the turn.

You can also sacrifice your own tiles to Neptune's glory. This will increase your sacrifice counter by one, which you can then spend to sink an enemy's tile. You can only sacrifice or sink one tile per turn.

Each turn, units of every owned region will increase by the number of tiles that make up that region.

Click "End turn" to pass, press escape for a pause menu and to go back to the main menu.

Tiles that are surrounded by water are more likely to be chosen during the sinking phase.

Credits

Font: Monogram by datagoblin

Post-jam changelog

Higher camera speed for browsers
Random map generation menu now visible (yeah...)
Bugfix sinking not happening late-game
Bugfix various sacrifice-related crashes
Bugfix impossible scenario (italy map)

Link	https://github.com/feored/LD54
Link	https://feor.itch.io/neptunes-wake
Link	https://feor.itch.io/neptunes-wake
Original URL	https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/54/neptunes-wake

Ratings

Overall	442^th	3.69⭐	23🧑‍⚖️
Fun	352^th	3.69⭐	23🧑‍⚖️
Innovation	379^th	3.571⭐	23🧑‍⚖️
Theme	298^th	4.024⭐	23🧑‍⚖️
Graphics	548^th	3.643⭐	23🧑‍⚖️
Humor	914^th	1.853⭐	19🧑‍⚖️
Mood	908^th	3⭐	23🧑‍⚖️
Given		26🗳️	17🗨️

Feedback

yndajas

03. Oct 2023 · 02:47 UTC

Love it. Really fun gameplay and mechanics, great graphics, and impressive AI and turn automation for a weekend's work! Would love to see the idea developed further. The only thing that I wasn't sure about was how much RNG could affect the result - are the islands that sync totally random?

Lexyvil

03. Oct 2023 · 04:16 UTC

A strategy game of this caliber is very impressive to see in a game jam. It reminded me of risk. Great entry, and fitting to the theme!

Matt Barnfield

03. Oct 2023 · 09:15 UTC

This is a polished entry! I really enjoyed it and found it had a surprising amount of strategic depth for how easy it is to pick up.

My main note is that the sinking islands don't add much (despite looking awesome as an effect!) because there's not a lot you can do about it. Quite often they just split the island into pieces and make the end of the game waiting to see who randomly sinks first. If there was some predictability about it then players could take it into account when making their turns to add an extra layer of skill. Two possible ideas I had were:
- Showing which tiles will sink at the end of the turn _before_ you make your move
- Making it so the random sinking never completely separates an island (so it would sink from the outside in). This would be quite thematic for the ocean and would stop the final turns just being waiting and hoping.

Overall this is loads of fun- well done!

LDJam user 312900

03. Oct 2023 · 09:31 UTC

Really polished game for a jam, and overall was really fun to play. Reminded me alot of risk, as mentioned earlier more to do with sinking islands would have definitely been cool. Overall really cool strategy game though and well done!

manevich

03. Oct 2023 · 09:43 UTC

Wow, a very good strategic game! The topic fits good in the mechanic. I've also liked the graphics a lot. Would be nice to play it with some music and sounds (or I didn't hear anything because of problem on my side?). The only questionable thing in the mechanic is how the sinking work. It's often just cuts off you from your enemies and all you can do after — wait who sink next

Tkap1

03. Oct 2023 · 10:42 UTC

Some way to skip/speed over the enemy turns would be nice

sbeif

03. Oct 2023 · 10:56 UTC

Very cool game, it took me a while to understand how to use the sacrifice mechanics, but other than that it works great. The theme is a bit thin, I would have loved for it to be more present than in other conquest games. Another thing is if the random sinkage cuts you off early you can be as strong as you like in those regions but have no chance. One way around this might be to consider also the amount of units when you sacrifice to gain sacrifice points and the possibility to spend more points to sink larger areas. This would allow you to make a comeback from a small stronghold and to exploit more the sacrifice mechanic

Amedea

03. Oct 2023 · 11:07 UTC

Very great game! I liked the "Risiko" logic, maybe the Neptune's sacrifice could depend by the units you give and not only by the territory, because you can lose it in the next turn and in the end frequently you don't know what to do with the remaining units you have :)

Phillip Scott

03. Oct 2023 · 15:25 UTC

fun game, like the risk flavour, but it does feel a little random, almost want the edges to erode to force you into the middle to fight. but overall good fun, well done

nujank

04. Oct 2023 · 08:45 UTC

This was a very solid risk style game. I took some time after the stream to play again and recollect my thoughts and was able to do much better this time. I wish the camera would re-center on some part of your own territory at the beginning of your turn. Other than that this is very enjoyable all around. Nice, chill and charming game!

🎤 feor

04. Oct 2023 · 13:29 UTC

Thank you for the feedback everyone!

@matt-barnfield Thanks! I totally agree with both points. The sea eating away at tiles from the outside in was how it was originally setup, but then we realized our makeshift map editor didn't center tiles properly so all the scenarios had a major advantage for one of the teams, and we had to change how it behaved at the last moment before the deadline unfortunately.

@sbeif Great idea! We are a bit disappointed that we couldn't take the sacrifice mechanic further and that the game is so RNG-heavy now, wish we had thought of this workaround.

Little Doctor Games

04. Oct 2023 · 19:13 UTC

Very unique and interesting "Risk-like" with a couple novel twists! Unfortunately a game-breaking bug at the end of the game kept me from seeing whether my strat would have led to victory, but I was having a great time up until that point. Very impressive work! Thanks for showing us on stream!

tmpxyz

05. Oct 2023 · 01:47 UTC

Unique mechanics, it's very fun playing this game. More fun If there are some strategical resource on map or we could influence where to sink enemy tiles. Good job!

Lachlan James

07. Oct 2023 · 04:22 UTC

There's a heap of depth here for a jam game. Love the aesthetic - really cool way to leverage simple art into something that looks great. Clouds are a killer touch. Bit of a steep learning curve but really impressive for something developed within jam time.

Love the little ticker down the bottom and whatever's going on AI wise. Crazy you've managed to get all these different scenarios and so on done within jam time.

3mpty

07. Oct 2023 · 04:38 UTC

Interesting concept but very hard to balance and it shows, the game is a bit too swingy and the RNG of the passive sinking can really throw a game into chaos outside the players control.

I think the main things that need to change here are balancing tweaks to reduce the swinginess, make the sacrifice mechanic more relevant, and more obvious future gamestate (in particular the sinking) so you can plan ahead more effectively.

The core ideas are great and I enjoyed playing it, great submission!

pepnou

07. Oct 2023 · 13:54 UTC

I had a fun time to gather all my units in one tile & steamroll the opponents ^^

The game is fun to play but could use music & sfx.

Nice entry!

Le Don

19. Oct 2023 · 14:09 UTC

This game has a lot of potential and the concept is great! Unfortunately I think this game suffers a lot from RNG. I dominated the first two maps and lost both, because my land sinked. I also feel the sinking land option is a bit undercooked. Maybe it might be better if the player can sink land multiple times in one round, so it might be easier to "store" sacrifices and being able to counter the RNG at least a little bit. Sacrificingn land comes with a high risk itself, as the player is losing trops. But I really liked the strategic options that comes with sacrificing land and being able to cut off the enemy.

EDIT: I forgot to mention the camera control. I played on the browser and I don't know if that is the newest version, but I thought the camera was hard to control and for me personally the sensivity needed to be way higher. Maybe the option to control the camera with WASD or arrow keys might be a nice addition.