Delvecologist by Wheffle
An ecology-themed puzzle game in a fantasy setting
A popular dungeon diving locale is having an invasive species problem. As a licensed professional (you are licensed, aren't you?) you've been called in to solve the problem. Solve 8 puzzles by conjuring monsters into the ecosystem to rid it of unwanted populations, because adding more foreign animals to an environment has never gone wrong!
It's kinda weird but I think it turned out okay.
How To Play
Each room is populated by monsters with different behavior patterns and diets. Some monsters are native while others are considered invasive.
Conjure new monsters into the environment and watch how things play out in a rogue-like turn sequence.
Your goal is remove all invasive monsters and preserve all native monsters by strategically introducing new monsters.
Keep in mind that some conjured monsters are also considered invasive and cannot be left in the environment.
Tools Used
- Godot 4.2.1 (engine)
- Pyxel Edit (art)
- Bosca Ceoil (music)
- Lab Chirp (sound effects)
Disclosure
A bug was fixed post-jam. While not definitively game-breaking, the confusion it caused some people halted their experience which I believe justified the update.
You can find all previous Windows builds here.
Ratings
| Overall | 97th | 3.75⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 168th | 3.429⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 32th | 4.071⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 95th | 3.929⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 162th | 3.548⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 109th | 3.45⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 148th | 3.05⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 130th | 3.5⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 10🗳️ | 23🗨️ |
This game is really challenging, but awesome! Took me a lot of tries to just beat level 1 haha. But I started to get the hang of it after a while. Love the music - definitely kept me engaged to keep trying despite many early failures.
That lasted till about level 4 then it kind of got overwhelming having to keep so many different movement/attack patterns in my head, so I had a hard time making predictive strategic moves. I kind of just made random decisions trial and error to search for the solutions.
Definitely an ambitious concept! There are some tricky design challenges to convey so much information and I really think it needs an "Into the Breach" level of detail to what is shown. Being able to see predictive highlighted tiles or visual previews of where units would be moving would have helped a ton. But that would be wayyy out of scope. What you accomplished for 48 hrs is crazy good!!
Love all of the different animal designs and visuals! They have a lot of charm. I also really appreciated the free choice to try any level in the game. I had a lot of fun! Great work
I played through the first 4 levels and it was difficult to visualize what would happen at first, so I just stumbled through with trial and error, but I got the hang of the systems, which I think is a fantastic sign for a puzzle game!
Very charming game, well done!