Exodus by Lachlan James
The galaxy is dying.
A strange and terrifying cosmic field has surrounded the galaxy, shrinking every day and devouring space stations, outposts, colonies and entire worlds. Nothing that passes beyond the negation field’s event horizon has returned.
The only hope is a transgalactic portal that leads to another galaxy, far away from the negation field.
You are the captain of a ship heading for this portal. You must survive this journey by managing resources and crew numbers with the ship’s limited space.
Will you brave distress calls, refugees, pirates and interstellar plagues and lead your crew to safety? Or will you fail and be lost, adrift in the darkness of space?
“It’s Papers Please meets FTL meets Tetris. It scratches a very particular itch. I need you guys to finish this so I can play it.”
~ Lachlan’s housemate
Controls
- Enter to continue dialogue
- Q / E to rotate building
- 1 / 2 / 3 to alter game speed
- LMB to select/place building
- RMB to remove building/cancel removal
Credits
Code: Jack McCaffrey and Lam Nguyen
Art: Tom Lindberg and Akashdeep Hehar
Writing: Bryn Smith
Music: Lachlan James
SFX: Oliver Clarke
Radio chatter sourced from NASA archives
Notes
- We are aware that you can easily 'beat' this build of the game by just maintaining the smallest possible crew and declining all events. Balance is definitely something we'll be addressing post-jam, but for now, the game is best played with the mindset of trying to save as many people as possible. Consider the size of the crew you escape with to be your score :)
- Still a couple of bugs around building placement - if you can't place a building, a couple of rotations (or at worst, a different spot) will sort it.
- Restart bug has been fixed; thank you for the feedback!
Thanks for playing!
| Link | https://chewiecb.itch.io/ld54 |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/54/exodus |
Ratings
| Overall | 108th | 4.1⭐ | 37🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 116th | 4⭐ | 37🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 281th | 3.7⭐ | 37🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 50th | 4.457⭐ | 37🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 149th | 4.286⭐ | 37🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 28th | 4.265⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 77th | 4.186⭐ | 37🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 39🗳️ | 56🗨️ |
I think the game crashed after I lost due to dehydration when I tried to restart.
Very nice Crew chat function :)
The ship design, comm chatter background sounds and general vibe felt like Homeworld homages. Also got some Battlestar Galactica vibes, and of course there was Mr Khan. Were the XO and comms officer portraits of members of the team, by any chance?
**Bugs**
I did manage to sequence break the tutorial by building things other than two hab block immediately. And it seems the game state is not properly reset on restart, I immediately get "-1 days to dehydration" and "-2 available housing" if I lose from dehydration with 5 housing spots, for instance. The tutorial doesn't actually seem to be skipped if you pick "skip tutorial", you still get the prompt to build habs after building vertical farms. I also got the "rescue governor" event twice in a row (the first time I declined).
**Balance**
I agree with @zerohalogen that it's a bit too easy, past the initial stabilisation of resources. If you want to pursue the game further having resources dependencies (food requires water, etc.) would be cool, and of course more events and event chains as FTL and Papers Please have would lead to a nicely fleshed out game.
I enjoy the art, very fitting to the vibe. Audio is also a plus.
The randomness could use a bit more polished, such as using a shuffled queue of events (similar to 7-bag random generator of Tetris) to ensure different type of events in-a-row instead of just picking a random event from the events pool.
I believe this game has potential, and team should focus on replay-ability next. GL and thanks for the game.
The balance was reasonably good but I think fixing degenerate strategies (running skeleton crew and never having resource issues) is paramount. The midgame was great where I was desperately balancing resources off eachother, but eventually I found stable equilibrium and smashed through the rest of the game.
I think there needs to be more ways for things to go wrong, more incentive to carry extra crew and probably some limitations on how much you can stockpile. The game is also paced a bit too slowly. Potentially turn based or at least a shorter timer would be much better I think, most of my gameplay time was spent waiting unfortunately. Oh yeah and it would be nice to color code resource icons to help identify them faster.
Great art and concept, solid execution too the actual interaction between systems etc. works great! No bugs!
Overall very cool idea, huge scope pulled off pretty well but needed a little more time to cook, great stuff!
While managing resources and pushing your luck with more crew is quite fun, I wish that the game was more challenging. I was able to maintain huge stockpiles of all resources without any difficulty and even reached the maximum of 999. Maybe, I was just very lucky with events, I can't say for sure.
Some kind of a final challenge after 200 days would make it more fun, too. As of right now, the game ends without any climax.
Still, it's a great game. Thanks a lot for making it!
Very well polished game, great music and visuals. Gamplay is really crips too, sadly it is too easy in its current state. The initial crew is enough to build a self sufficient economie and from that point on you simply reject any new crew and wait for victory.