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Bac-Terrarium's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Theme | #653 | 2.167 | 3.250 |
| Aesthetics | #839 | 1.667 | 2.500 |
| Overall | #843 | 1.500 | 2.250 |
| Story | #860 | 1.000 | 1.500 |
| Fun | #890 | 1.333 | 2.000 |
| Mechanics | #922 | 1.167 | 1.750 |
| Music | #964 | 0.667 | 1.000 |
| Sound | #965 | 0.667 | 1.000 |
Ranked from 4 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
How many people worked on this game in total?
2
Did you use any existing assets? If so, list them below.
no
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Comments
Cool and unique game idea! I was hoping i could win by placing blocks around the purple blob and placing blocks around the green blob and that seemed to work at first but then the green blobs turned red and I lost. I know you mentioned you ran out of time to finish it but great job on getting what you had submitted!
I read your other comment but I am still not sure how the game is meant to be played... So I can place barriers to prevent the purple numberthing from spreading. I am not sure why I would drop one of those myself, as it seems to kill all cells. Maybe a little tutorial in the description page would help? :)
The purple number thing is currently coded as poison, but is meant to be antibiotics. To which certain cells can have resistance. If there were multiple antibiotics this can shape the outcome of the game in ways that it might be better to do a little harm if it leads to the competition to disappear.
This was a planned mechanics but cut due to the time constraint / problems mentioned in other posts. The tutorial is also a content that was intended to be created as the levels themselves. The first few levels were supposed to use a subset of the mechanics, like toggle the purple thingy and the green thingy (currently not visible) which would be the food available. And introducing more mechanics later.
This was a quick test level to check if the mechanics are working or not. It was changed in the last minute to enable multiple strains. The center one was the player originally, but that meant instant win without user input, so it was swapped to make it more challenging.
It is approximately impossible now to win, and no content change is allowed during the voting period. After the voting period ends I intend to release game-play updates to this game, because I care about this idea and I think this could be executed way better than this.
Stay tuned!
I had to replay it a few times because I was rooting for the wrong bacteria. Got the swapping working, but still I am very bad at the game so I do not survive long haha.
I hope you're better and good job on completing the jam!
I tried so hard, and got so far, but in the end it doesn't even matter...
Suffice to say, when I read your comment I was a bit touched, almost to the verge of tears, because not only did you try to play this game, but you replayed it again and again in order to actually try to win. This deserves a proper response:
I was experimenting with the current status of the game, if it is possible to win or not? The goal was to reach 100 cells. I wrote a system to emulate player input to make replays easier (to enable inhuman reaction times even), and experimented with ideal player options.
The best setup was just barrier around the enemy cell and the poison, but even then the player cell did not go as far as needed to win.
Then I touched the parts that used random choice between free cells and possible parents, and implemented heuristics that favor certain behaviors, like let the cell that has more energy multiply (dies probably later), or choosing places that have more food or further to the original cell, or even walls (because then no division happens and the cell does not lose energy from it), but to no avail. The most alive cells in a single iteration was just above 90, and no matter how I tried to "cheat" the random (saying that it is possible if it was true random for events to happen in this particular setup that favors the player) the results stayed the same.
So in conclusion, the possibility to actually win in this build is close to 0, but I cannot prove or disprove the impossibility of it. That would need some major rewrite to search the graph of all possible game states to find a winning move (individually evaluating each random choice), which is not a job for GDScript. And even if I would found one winning state that is reachable in this initial setup, that would probably mean it has astronomically low chance to actually be played out by chance like that. Not even factoring in the behavior of the pseudo random number generator, that might make some patterns of actions impossible to reach, and an entirely different problem of finding a random seed that makes that desired outcome.
Maybe one day i explore the wast possibility space and come back with a result. Or just fix the game and make some actually playable levels.
We'll see after the voting ends...
I definitely had two endings, when only bacteria survived (bad) and the other bacterial survived (because of walls). Still lost ahah so I am not sure how to approach it.
I think the very scientific approach to the game would loose a bit of the fun aspect of having bacteria turf wars, but happy to see how it turns out if you work more on it. Fun over accuracy any day as games are meant for entertainment. If it takes a lot of testing to win and randomisation makes the game unfair, then it would hurt the player i.e. doing everything right and still get punished.
Interesting take on simulation games though, hope you keep making them!
I'm not sure I quite understood how to play. Implementation was well done and it seemed like an interesting concept.
The game was rushed, and the "content" is missing, as in hand crafted puzzles. This is a debug build, which is probably unplayable as is.
missing mechanics (already implemented in code but not hooked into the UI):
I want to respect the rules and not add any features after the deadline, and adding a UI toggle to enable an already implemented feature feels like cheating, and not just a bugfix from the user standpoint, so I leave it as it is for the end of the vote period.