Godcademy by Ian Crewe Edens
Welcome to Godcademy! In this visual novel you will design a planet and manipulate the life that lives on its surface in order to impress your fellow god classmates.
Despite struggling through a cold this weekend, I had a blast making this. All the writing was done by me, as well as the art. There was supposed to be some music in there as well but I ran into playback issues and didn't have enough time left to fix it.
| Link | https://foiledunspoiled.itch.io/godcademy |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/godcademy |
Ratings
| Overall | 935th | 3.06⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 762th | 3.154⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 835th | 2.92⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 1004th | 2.78⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 925th | 2.704⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 635th | 2.717⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 294th | 3.5⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 885th | 3.06⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 22🗳️ | 30🗨️ |
HTML5 version wanted to be WAY bigger than my monitor. I had to go into fullscreen mode to make it smaller, but it kicked me back out to windowed mode when I had to enter my name.
There were a few bugs with the sprites. The ones I found are:
- During the section where you talk with the four gods before you actually create the planet, when you choose a god to talk to it would briefly flash "Image '(god name)' not found".
- Carbon, Water, Heat -> Add worms -> Leave things as is: Dionysus' sprite disappeared and it says "Image 'dionysus neutral' not found"
- Heat, Carbon, Water -> Give the aggressive species tools -> Smite the aggressive species: The speaker is Artemis, but the warning label says "Image 'ares' not found". This happens for several textboxes.
There were some issues with the text in the Heat, Water, Carbon -> Give the carnivores tools route. The text fell to the bottom of the screen. There were also a few typos here and there, I can talk about it if you would like.
There are many funny moments in this game! My favorites include "sexually charged sentient pieces of coal", the disco party ending, and the ending where Garbanzo ends up as a god.
Overall a pretty nice visual novel!
Also I really appreciate that you had the time to even sculpt humanoids, although their eyes do creep me out just a bit :sweat_smile:
I also noticed that the web version was larger than my screen, but the full-screen mode seemed to solve that. The game presented some warnings at various occasions too in the upper left corner.
The capybara was the natural star of the game for me. Very good inclusion. If I'd critique the pacing, the introduction phase was rather long until I got to interact with the world. I get the point of introducing the gods first for me to form an impression and liking/disliking. But perhaps it could have been made really short and instead allow us to design several worlds rather than one, getting to know them from their reactions rather than having to reload the game to try different paths.