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A jam submission

At Nature's Mercy (GMTK Game Jam 2022)View game page

A tiny city builder game about surviving unforeseen disasters. Built for the GMTK Game Jam 2022.
Submitted by SlipPixel — 1 hour, 37 minutes before the deadline
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At Nature's Mercy (GMTK Game Jam 2022)'s itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Presentation#6293.8953.895
Overall#10823.4043.404
Enjoyment#15403.0533.053
Creativity#16453.2633.263

Ranked from 19 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

How does your game fit the theme?
Every few minutes, a random disaster occurs, causing chaos for the player in various ways. Although unpredictable, the player can make educated decisions by creating defensive structures to best combat against the random natural encounters. The player must live with the unpredictable consequences and go with the flow.

Did your team create the vast majority of the art during the 48 hours?

Yes

We created the vast majority of the art during the game jam

Did your team create the vast majority of the music during the 48 hours?

No

We used pre-existing audio

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Comments

Submitted(+1)

The art is really amazing! The concept is pretty unique, but for a jam game, it's really well done. Awesome work!

Developer

Thank you so much! 

I'm delighted to hear that you and many others seem to be enjoying the game! I'm working on a post jam update to improve upon the foundation we have here.

Thanks!

Submitted(+1)

Very cool and creative game!

Needs a lot polish of cours, but that is fine for a jam game (the first few minutes are very slow, you can pretty much get softlocked before being able to do anything about it, etc.)

Developer(+1)

Thanks for the feedback!

I'm currently working on a post jam update to address some of the soft locking issues. Additionally, I'm looking into tweaking progression and the sometimes slow starting conditions.

Thank you!

Submitted(+1)

Super cute and fun game! I love the style, and its refreshing to play a game without literal dice lol. Easy to get softlocked, but since it just a prototype it doesnt matter at all. The movement was so slow at the beginning, it was great! I was feverishly watchingmy little guy collect wood as the timer got closer to zero, freakingout over whether he'd make it in time. And its always good to just see a big swathe of buildings and workers later on.

Gj!

Developer

I'm glad you liked it!

When coming up with the idea, I tried to take a not so literal approach to using the theme. I decided to focus more on the random aspect of dice over dice itself; consequently, it made me think of playing with randomness and past the conditions the randomness may put you through. Therefore, I thought random disasters would fit in quite nicely with the criteria!

I will be addressing some of the progression and soft locking issues in a post jam update!

Thanks for playing!

Submitted(+1)

Incredibly cute game! I loved all the artwork and animations. I play management sims from time to time and this scratched that itch perfectly. I definitely see a future for this game if you plan on expanding at all.

Developer

Thank you so much! 

I do plan on expanding the game in the near future, in fact, I have a post jam update in the works right now!

I'm happy you enjoyed it!

Submitted(+1)

Nature is cruel to me. My buildings get wrecked by thunderstorms and I can't seem to build up the steam to get a city going. Love the pixel city vibe it's going for. The idea of having resources spawn randomly somewhere near the building and having the workers walk to them is intriguing. I bet if you added roads for the workers to travel on you'd have the bones of a really cool city builder.    

Developer(+1)

Nature can definitely be cruel at times!

In the future, I'd like to balance out the difficulty and adjust the progression to better suit the random disaster mechanics. Right now, a bad early start can unfortunately doom the rest of the game.

Some sort of roadway system is on my list of priorities; although, I'd first need to address the games difficulty!

I appreciate the feedback!

Submitted(+1)

Very calming and nice :>
There is a point at which you have every slot full, and you just kinda get meaningless items, i wish you could build roads and expand the area or something, to make it look nicer, also having the goal of each building spawn randomly was kinda annoying because it would often mess up the pattern i was trying to make.

No sound is a bit sad, i could really imagine music affecting this game in an awesome way.

Also the disasters being random is very vague theme wise, but i guess it doesnt really take away from the expirience.

Recommended.

Developer(+1)

Thank you! I'm glad you liked it!

In the future, I'd like to give more purpose to the individual items, not only functional purposes but also aesthetic. Ideally, items should be useful regardless of what stage of the game the player is in. I'll have to accomplish that some way in the future!

I agree that the random structure spawning can be a bit annoying sometimes and is something I want to revamp. Maybe the player can move them, or maybe they don't spawn automatically? We'll see.

Anyway, thanks for playing!

Submitted(+1)

This is a really nice looking game!

Everything is colorful and animated, it feels very lively and satisfaying :)

At first I did not really know what to build in priority, but I did find out what resources each building produce by observing the icons poping up!

The disaster mechanic is interesting, but it is not much of a challenge in its current state. It is very easy to always keep 1-2 drain and lightning rod, and after that, disasters becomes very weak.

The only thing I feel the game lacks is sound, it would really help feeling the progression and the impact of the disasters.

Developer

I'm glad you enjoyed it!

I definitely agree with disasters not being much of a hazard at the moment. In the future, I'd like to make each disaster a little more interesting with some unique destruction capabilities and some not so cookie cutter solutions to preventing them!

Following the jam, I hope to get some juicy sound effects in as soon as possible! The sound of thunder and rain would go a long way to making the disasters feel more impactful! :D

Thanks for the feedback!

Submitted(+1)

I really like the art and presentation, but I didn't feel like I had much control. My lumber mill was destroyed in the very first disaster and I couldn't see any way to get the wood to rebuild it...

Developer

Thanks for the response!

As of right now, wood can be obtained through all structures, but only in miniscule amounts from everything but the lumber mill. It's technically possible to proceed even if the starting lumber mill gets destroyed, but it definitely makes the game so much slower without it.

When I get the chance, I'm definitely going to tweak the progression of the game!

Thanks for the feedback!

Submitted (1 edit) (+1)

I liked the idea, it gets very satisfying, once you get your little village up and rolling. Though the start is very slow. Soo slow. Also I found the random placement of some resource gathering spots rather odd (especially if it's my lumbermill having a forest three zip codes away :D)

Also, mandatory: needs audio badly.

Developer(+1)

Thanks for the feedback! 

I initially planned on getting some juicy sound effects in; however, I ended up scrapping them after running out of time. Next time, I definitely want to improve on the audio aspects of development!

Also, I agree on random placement being totally broken at the moment! In the future, I'd like to tweak it where the structure spawns within a radius.

Thanks for playing! :D