Nice game! I had a truly unique experience with it.
At first I was confused by the lack of any clear objective (and by the UI too, a little, especially by the default windowed mode, small fonts and lack of option to get out of credits without exiting the game). But then I quickly realized how the main systems work and started playing around with this world: trying different character skills, driving away all the rats, looking at plants grow. It was a very pleasant experience. Then I got interested at how much plants can I grow with the druid. Couple minutes later game FPS dropped to 1 and it crashed. My second playthrough with the archer wasn't much different. Both times game ended in a FPS crash for me, and this fact filled words 'Enjoy it for a time' with a completely new meaning. Then I tried maintaining balance between rats and grass, and failed at it completely for several times. Once I was forced to exterminate a whole family of rats who were feeding on grass to aggrssively, and this was a sad moment.
I very much enjoyed how almost all of my experience of this game was systems driwen: different situations happened on the intersections of various systems, and generated interesting stories. I liked interesting details like flowers growing in size and in quantity and new grass growing seemingly primarely on rats corpses. This sandbox experience is really interesting, and it really worked for me, as I immediately started setting myself different goals and experimenting with the system. I would've liked to see it balanced and polished a bit more, either by balancing how systems work on each other, or giving player even more options to interact with them (i.e. summon new rats and banishing chimeras would be rad).
Effects and music are very fitting, they really set the mood for meditative exploration and experimentation.
I realized partway through development that the issue with simulating an ecosystem with no boundaries is that it's not a matter of IF it will crash, its a matter of WHEN it will crash, so I put in a line of code to pull the plug if the frame rate ever drops below 0.5 fps. Definitely serves to make the experience more ephemeral for better or worse.
At first I thought about giving the player a game over if any one species went extinct, but I realized living in a world without animals is kind-of it's own punishment & I'm generally not a big fan of telling people how their supposed to have fun with a thing so I left it as more of a sandbox.
I think I will make a more polished version of this idea someday, definitely both characters need a way of dealing with the predator population for sure.
Regarding 'pulling the plug' at certain FPS threshold: interesting idea! That's probably how I would have solved this problem too. I'll keep this in mind for future projects :)
The decision to avoid hard lose states was definitely a right one, as trying to maintain balance between plants and animals in an unbalanced system would have made the experience much more frustrating.
Good luck to you with new projects! I'll be looking forward for you updating this idea, it is pretty neat.
← Return to game
Comments
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
Nice game! I had a truly unique experience with it.
At first I was confused by the lack of any clear objective (and by the UI too, a little, especially by the default windowed mode, small fonts and lack of option to get out of credits without exiting the game). But then I quickly realized how the main systems work and started playing around with this world: trying different character skills, driving away all the rats, looking at plants grow. It was a very pleasant experience. Then I got interested at how much plants can I grow with the druid. Couple minutes later game FPS dropped to 1 and it crashed. My second playthrough with the archer wasn't much different. Both times game ended in a FPS crash for me, and this fact filled words 'Enjoy it for a time' with a completely new meaning. Then I tried maintaining balance between rats and grass, and failed at it completely for several times. Once I was forced to exterminate a whole family of rats who were feeding on grass to aggrssively, and this was a sad moment.
I very much enjoyed how almost all of my experience of this game was systems driwen: different situations happened on the intersections of various systems, and generated interesting stories. I liked interesting details like flowers growing in size and in quantity and new grass growing seemingly primarely on rats corpses. This sandbox experience is really interesting, and it really worked for me, as I immediately started setting myself different goals and experimenting with the system. I would've liked to see it balanced and polished a bit more, either by balancing how systems work on each other, or giving player even more options to interact with them (i.e. summon new rats and banishing chimeras would be rad).
Effects and music are very fitting, they really set the mood for meditative exploration and experimentation.
Overall, thanks for the beautiful game!
I'm glad you enjoyed it.
I realized partway through development that the issue with simulating an ecosystem with no boundaries is that it's not a matter of IF it will crash, its a matter of WHEN it will crash, so I put in a line of code to pull the plug if the frame rate ever drops below 0.5 fps. Definitely serves to make the experience more ephemeral for better or worse.
At first I thought about giving the player a game over if any one species went extinct, but I realized living in a world without animals is kind-of it's own punishment & I'm generally not a big fan of telling people how their supposed to have fun with a thing so I left it as more of a sandbox.
I think I will make a more polished version of this idea someday, definitely both characters need a way of dealing with the predator population for sure.
Thanks for the feed back.
Regarding 'pulling the plug' at certain FPS threshold: interesting idea! That's probably how I would have solved this problem too. I'll keep this in mind for future projects :)
The decision to avoid hard lose states was definitely a right one, as trying to maintain balance between plants and animals in an unbalanced system would have made the experience much more frustrating.
Good luck to you with new projects! I'll be looking forward for you updating this idea, it is pretty neat.