Vortex of Life by yvpian
This is a card-based role-playing game where you play as a mouse scientist conducting experiments on tiny creatures that share certain similarities with him (well, at least he thinks so). By placing different material cards into the petri dish on the right and using a magnifying glass to observe, you will record your experimental data and draw conclusions. The state of the test subjects will influence the outcome of the experiment! How to play: 1. Click the left and right arrows on the cards below to switch card types either forward or backward. The numbers on the cards indicate how many of that type you have. (Note: there’s a temporary bug where the number may not update immediately after you consume a card. To refresh, just switch to the card type that you just consumed.)
Click the three magnifying glasses on the right side of the screen to view the three Petri dishes. You can choose whether to feed them the selected card, as different card types will affect the values of the three bottles in the lower left corner.
When you select "✔," it means one card of the current type is consumed, and a story panel will appear in the center of your screen. Please read it fully and wait for it to disappear before proceeding.
By balancing the values of the three bottles in the lower left corner, you can achieve the true ending before all cards are consumed. If any bottle fills or empties early, you will reach different endings.
Ultimately, these endings reflect your conclusions as a mouse scientist. You may successfully reach the true ending or fail early and receive a subjective false ending.
Notice: Thank you very much for rating and reviewing our work. However, due to an error during submission, we mistakenly submitted it twice. To ensure smooth progress, could you please also rate the other identical submission, as it has received more ratings? We really appreciate it and apologize for the inconvenience!
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(/game/img?e=LD56&gid=96319&u=raw/af8/06/z/66737.jpg)!
| Link | https://lola108.itch.io/vortex-of-life |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/vortex-of-life-1 |
Ratings
| Given | 14🗳️ | 19🗨️ |
I wish there was a bit more of tutorialization as i was a bit confused at to what to do.
The descriptions could go a little faster too.
Overall interesting experiment, thanks :)
However, the art style and the story behind rats experimenting on making a civilization in a petri dish is great!
Maybe adding a little better explanation of the individual elements might make it easier to understand the consequences of choosing one option or another. Having only visuals and a wonky UI makes it really hard to know what's going on.
As it has been said, the art and mood are great, the writting is also good. But the game mechanics weren't clear enough for me to know what I was doing, and/or if things had an impact.
A short list of this that could be improve:
- Text speed : Let the player the possibility to read the text at his own speed
- Better UI : A trick is to make interactable elements "pop-out", since your art style is very detailed, the sceen has a lot of visual informations the player needs to process. Having an element that makes a interactible element recognizable is key to navigate a game.
- The audio mixing is inconsistent (sometimes too loud, sometimes too low)
- For the gameplay, having more feedback is the main issue. I think it was the role of the little bottles at the bottom of the screen, but they could have been much bigger for example, more visible and present.
Anyway, this is a solid entry nontheless! It just needs some quality of life improvements :)
How to play:
1. Click the left and right arrows on the cards below to switch card types either forward or backward. The numbers on the cards indicate how many of that type you have. (Note: there’s a temporary bug where the number may not update immediately after you consume a card. To refresh, just switch to the card type that you just consumed.)
2. Click the three magnifying glasses on the right side of the screen to view the three Petri dishes. You can choose whether to feed them the selected card, as different card types will affect the values of the three bottles in the lower left corner.
3. When you select "✔," it means one card of the current type is consumed, and a story panel will appear in the center of your screen. Please read it fully and wait for it to disappear before proceeding.
4. By balancing the values of the three bottles in the lower left corner, you can achieve the true ending before all cards are consumed. If any bottle fills or empties early, you will reach different endings.
5. Ultimately, these endings reflect your conclusions as a mouse scientist. You may successfully reach the true ending or fail early and receive a subjective false ending.
I was definitely confused, I saw the instructions but might have needed a little more info - I kinda sorta figured it out. Definitely a cool and unique concept - couple of tweaks and I would be intrigued to give it another go!
I find the game pretty much hard to read (because of the low opacity of popup overlapping the rest). I think I see a Disco Elysium inspiration for DA and RPG-based, is that so? The game would have been greater to play with much more seperate parts of the UI/game (adding logs to journal dynamically, making the popup modal more important and text display much faster, etc...)
I hope I could retry a version with some quality of life improvements! It would be very interesting to play this kind of RPG-based game. The DA and concept are cool though!