Our project, Ark Initiative is officially started. Artist is making epic work already, I'm starting to write engine and API while the content developer is looking at Deponias artwork upside-down.

It's going to be a fun ride.

Title:

Ark Initiative

Description:

2D side-scroller on a planet, where players goal is to maintain ecosystem, care for alien animals and gain enough funds from space safari to continue his quest.

Story synapsis:

Human expansion left many ecosystems destroyed. You are selected as a new zookeeper with quest to use one of tiny, inhabited planets as a shelter for endangered species. Will you succeed in creating the ark?

Some sinuses, cosinuses and it's looking pretty good.

Screenshot

I'll now implement user interface and testing commands. That'll allow us for faster content creation and debugging.

Animals with basic AI are implemented. They hunt when they get hungry, they reproduce when they're happy and die when die are killed in battle.

Screenshot ( in debug mode :C )

We've finished behaviour files for 6 animals, have graphic files for 4. We wanted to make at least 12, but it seems we won't be able to make more than 3 biomes ( + ocean ).

I have to tweak targeting system of predators and add visitors. When @medu come back she'll have to replace these terrible placeholder sprites I've made.

I'll have around 8 hours to polish everything after I finish every feature I want. For me, it went extremely well, I hope you'll like the project as much as I do!

I have finally finished shopping for animals and targeting system. Visitors and it's finished :O

After hundreds of liters of coffee, energy drinks and few bottles of beer, I've managed to put Ark Initiative into somewhat playable state. I think my biggest mistake was not to make a working, playable prototype first, but scope of the project was too big and I couldn't lose any time. ( it was done in two days as we couldn't work on Sunday :cry:.

Site

Game

If secret update 0.1.1 fixed only animation name of wolfdog, this one adds:

• Fullscreen button - Press it and the game will magically extend to your screens resolution!
• Zooming - Use mouse wheel to zoom your planet up and down! See your happy boars really close, or just see whole planet in it's glory.
• No more money for empty planet
• interface is no longer saved so save files are smaller
• Old planet is now completely removed when generating new one. No more animals stuck in the terrain or lost spaceships ( you can of course load it back if you saved it )
• Camera clamp - you can no longer "go into space" as much as before. Camera position is clamped to a square 2048 x 2048 with your planet in the middle. So you can move your planet out of sight, but you can't get lost anymore.

I hope you'll be able to enjoy the game a little bit more now. Have fun! Oh, and please report any bugs you find.

Game page on Ludum Dare

Game page on GameJolt

Game website

Hello! It's me again. I need your help! Ark Initiative needs your help! We're both in a dire need of feedback.

As you can see on the picture above, I've been working on bigger planets. That was of requested features. I've also optimized it so hard that it works extremely smoothly even with planets this big. Oh, and as you can see on that gargantuan beast, biome distribution is now working a lot better.

There were also fixes in animal behavior. They no longer get stuck in terrain because of changing angle of gravity.

I want to implement reproduction system which is nearly done and new interface in the next update.

And it's all thanks to your kind words! Kind words are the best fuel.

Want to help me out? Drop a comment or two!

Ark Initiative: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/ark-initiative

Hello everyone!

Some time ago I've published my game here, it was supposed to be a little gardening simulator that focused on breeding plants together to achieve better statistics and mutate them into different types of flora.

Biggest issue during development was figuring out the main gameplay loop. Looking at numbers going up with no reason is cool but serotonin without dopamine is not worth much on the long run.

So I tried implementing crew management and food requirement. I can achieve enough food production in the first three turns. Sadly, I'm the one who planned all of this. That's probably even bigger issue. How to balance the game properly when you're the only tester?

What else was planned?

Story. Three crew members that descended into the surface alongside you, the captain were supposed to have their personalities shown in dialogues and actions. The help book inside the game? It's written by Botanist ( the red-haired girl standing next to the soldier ). She's not a real botanist, she's a writer. That book is fiction. Nothing was supposed to work but it did, so she's a specialist now.

Their civilization is on similar level to ours with their spaceships working only because of their racial ability to hibernate. You can see that on both Botanist with her phone and Engineer with his laptop.

So, overall it didn't really turned out as I wanted. Crew management wasn't "big" enough to make it as a loop. Thing is, time was over. With only four hours to finish line, I've decided to just surrender. I wrote the "help book" and published, kinda wishing it'll all work on itself. Well, it didn't. Gardenia is buried deep underground like the roots of Greenweed.

11 days left. I need votes my dudes.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/45/gardenia-1

Whole project was made from scratch, using pure JavaScript, untainted by any frameworks. Fresh, fully organic, from my own space garden.

Source code is freely available on my GitHub if you're interested in how things work.