TAKE ME HOME by PlintusB
You're the Hand of the Stars, and it's up to you to rescue the animals from planet Earth. Every day you summon new waves of animals, but not all of them are healthy and not all of them are animals...
You'll have to choose which animals you'll take with you.

Click on the animal and choose whether to take it or not.

Distribute the animals into the correct compartments. The first is herbivores, the second is predators, and the third is reptiles.

Unfortunately, exiting the game alt+tab
We planned to treat infected animals, but did not have time to implement it. We are thinking of introducing this a little later.
16.04 Fixed a bug with a click on animals in build 1_1
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/take-me-home |
Ratings
| Overall | 769th | 3.415⭐ | 67🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 901th | 3.123⭐ | 67🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 682th | 3.262⭐ | 67🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 1141th | 2.688⭐ | 66🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 237th | 4.215⭐ | 67🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 254th | 3.754⭐ | 65🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 376th | 3.403⭐ | 64🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 772th | 3.389⭐ | 65🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 47🗳️ | 104🗨️ |
The art and animations are nice too, nice to see what a crocodile/alligator looks like if you could pick them up by the scruff like a kitten :laughing:
A bug I found is that you can "pause" the animals indefinitely if you spam-click on them when they are first entering the scene (it opens the Load/Decline menu, and you can't select "Decline", only "Load") - in which case the animals will then just stop their walking animations and stay still.

There were some issues with animals registering clicks though. Sometimes I had to click literally over a dozen times for my click to be registered, and I tried clicking in different spots.
I also managed to break the game when I let a bear go into the ship on its own just to see what would happen, and as it went up I realized exactly where it was heading, clicked on it, the load/decline popup appeared and then the bear disappeared, gave me -25, but the pop up stayed, with its button not doing anything. then all other animals that came after I had the ability to pause. but not interact with, since the popup from the bear was still up.
While in general I was a little confused as to why I was suddenly sorting animals, your art is nice, the atmosphere is chill, and the "potato bear" was very funny.
And this is my favorite)

I also didn’t quite understand what object was depicted after the meat, which is why I could mistakenly place a new animal there.
But overall, I still liked it)
The track you are talking about is actually something that I initially hated. As a matter of fact, I hated it SO MUCH that I deleted the project file (thankfully, only after rendering the somewhat-finished variant) :3
But, next morning, I realised that it's not THAT bad and that I should probably work on it some more. So yeah, be sure to follow our changelog - one day, the FINAL VERSION (and LOOPABLE) would be there :D
Oh, and I also release my music on all the platforms. There isn't much, but there's something... #ShamelessSelfPlug
Some of the animal mutants are hilarious.
Why 'gator goes to eggs though? I mean... at first I thought meat = carnivores, apple = herbivores, but egg ??? I mean, yeah, 'gators are born from eggs, but other categories are based on consumed food, not on the reproduction type. So I was confused here.
Also not being able to abort picking up the animal needs to be fixed. If you clicked to early or by mistake on LOAD - that's it, you can't discard the animal. Sad.
Anyway, nice entry! Good work!
I don't like the fact that you can't interrupt the capture of an animal, but we didn't have time for a lot of things.
For example, the treatment of infected animals, the introduction of a second character and balance.
We'll post an edited version after the jam
Oh, thank you. This is a bug when playing too fast. So you have a very good reaction
The developers are fixing it now
But great game, clever idea, well done. I just wish it was more challenging, often I was waiting for animals to appear, none was able to reach the ship by itself.
I didn't like that you had to click on an animal then click on decline or accept rather than just grabbing it directly and either put it in the ship or an area designed to decline them.
Otherwise pretty fun, the goofy combinations are pretty nice, i had a bug where from thursday i couldn't even meet the quota because the day would end before even seeing 6 animals
I did think it was a bit sad that the mutated and sick animals weren't worth saving, what did they do wrong :(
At one point I think I saw a lion that was just shaven and I didnt take him just in case. I think that opens up a cool design point where you are teaching the player that "anything that is slightly different, isn't welcome". Could be a cool methaphor for xenophobia if you wanted to go that route.
Anyway, awesome entry, looking forward to see what you guys come up with next time! :)
Gameplay wise I wish it would have gotten a bit more challenging and varied as it went on, but idea's still good!
good entry!
The gameplay felt repetitive. I would need more depth to be interesting (healing mecanic maybe). Also drag and drop would have been better for fluidity IMO (1 click instead of 3).
I definitely think that there should have been some sort of 'disposable' section like many of of the other commenters suggested as well.
Big fan of the mutation system and how the animals were effected.!
The gameplay is sadly buggy, which detracts from the experience. Bugs I met in my playthroughs:
- Clicking on the animal works inconsistently. Sometimes you have to click and click and click before it "catches".
- Clicking on the animal that is near the edge of the screen will result in it just bugging out: standing there, motionless and uniteractable, making you unable to finish the day.
- Once picked up, the animal can't be dropped. That's probably not really a bug, but intended behavior. However, I do think you should be able to drop a picked up animal (change your mind about loading it), especially that it's easy to misclick.
Still, it is a solid concept and a good piece of work!
I also really love how you managed to build these animals in a modular way where you can fit giraffe legs on a turtle and it still animated properly. The turtle did appear to be making the noise it makes when it's getting a little too friendly with a shoe, which made me laugh.
On the final two levels, even though I didn't make any mistakes, the level ended before I got the full score. I'm not sure if that was intentional or not?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qc_7N6a2p5g
This is a polish suggestion, but it would have been neat to see the astronaut guy shake his head or give a thumbs up/down when you loaded/declined an animal.
Effective animation and creative sound design helped with the presentation! Nice entry!