The Heap by Profugo Barbatus

Can you manage a memory allocation nightmare inside your own computer? Can you help prioritize, move data, and make sure your heap doesn't get full? Or will you crash and fail, segmented across the datasphere? Welcome to THE HEAP!

This game was frankly so much fun to make. We actually didn't really click with the theme that much, no big obvious meme entry idea like many of our prior jam games. But, I think in return we created something with a lot of polish and potential depth. Particularly, the game shouldn't freak out on weird screens - hoping against hope there, someone always rolls in with a weird resolution that sinks my dreams.
That being said, there was hardly any time to balance the game, very wide strokes. I have no idea if its too hard, too easy, or both at the same time. The upgrade system is incomplete, as I simply didn't have time to implement all the upgrades, even though the framework is there. Everything you can buy should work, but there's floating code for slowing time down, reducing how aggressive and punishing the input is, and some other quality of life fixes.
Regardless, let me know what you think, and what your highest score is!
| Itch.io Download | https://profugobarbatus.itch.io/the-heap |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/54/the-heap |
Ratings
| Overall | 800th | 3.318⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 781th | 3.167⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 483th | 3.452⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 601th | 3.591⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 301th | 4.065⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 359th | 3.316⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 291th | 3.833⭐ | 20🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 42🗳️ | 18🗨️ |
Trying to manage all the tasks coming in was pretty fun! Often when playing I'd end up dragging something to a spot but it not getting registered, but aside from that it was nice! I'm glad you were able to get a tutorial into the game in time too! Ah and i love the art! Congrats!!
@smoe Sorry to hear that! I struggled nailing down the balance, but perhaps if you and other folks would be interested, I can throw together a post-LD difficult selector patch, adjust some of the timing and escalation in the players favor with an easier mode.
@orangeoceans Glad you liked it! There's actually most of the code in place for an entire category of ugprades that was going to glue into an adversarial background progression - Mandatory software updates slowing down the processing nodes, or a user application biasing one kind of traffic over another - So upgrades would always feel like just being ahead of the curve, rather than eventually becoming unstoppable. Codes even in place for the input queue penalty to be lessened, or the starting spawn timers to be buffed. I didn't have time to finish implementing most of it, mostly because of balance, but partially the overhead to communicate its existence to the player. The tutorial was already getting uncomfortably long.
@cronch Glad you like it! Do you feel that the difficult was from keeping track of all the packets at once, or was it more not being able to move them out of the input queue and dealing with that malus?
I will assume the intended game is the first run game, because after replaying once, simultaneous processing is on at the start and upgrades don't work, seems commands timeout faster too (I may be wrong about the last one though).
I like the design of Malloc and wish she would communicate when we try to do something bad (like more tasks at once, or drop wrong command into the wrong slot). I didn't figure out where the upgrade button was at first either (I expected it's the whole UI there, but it was just the little thing at the top). So in general, a bit more clarity to the UI would be good.
As others mentioned, balance is pretty nuts, starting menagable, transitoning to nothing happening and then getting 8 commands at once. Highest I got was around 600 points and that was a very lucky run. It does feel very satisfying when you manage to clean everything up and wait for the next wave.
Music is pumping too, gotta say xD