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A jam submission

Reclaim!View game page

Puzzle builder game to decontrust techno-buildings
Submitted by angeldustjdr, Vost, Belillart — 1 minute, 59 seconds before the deadline
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Reclaim!'s itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Theme#33.8973.897
Overall#33.7783.778
Graphics#44.1384.138
Audio#43.8973.897
Controls#63.7933.793
Originality#84.1034.103
Accessibility#103.1033.103
Fun#123.5173.517

Ranked from 29 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

Godot Version
Godot4

Wildcards Used
"Under pressure" with a limited number of actions, "Include a map" too if you are indulgent, with the city's layout :)

Game Description
A long time ago, technopriests made a pact with an unknown entity. The entity granted them advanced technologies to sustain their population. However, these structures are now crumbling, and the technopriests are no longer present. If you don't act quickly, resources will soon be scarce. Destroy seemingly useless buildings to free up space and replace them with low-tech resource providers before it's too late. #reversebuilder #reversepuzzle

How does your game tie into the theme?
You can't rebuild the high-tech buildings you have destroyed, because their secret has been lost a long time ago with the last technopriest. Destroying buildings have unforseen effects, because you don't know what they are for anymore. Also, while you have only three basic low-tech ressource providers, you can (re)discover how to improve them with hidden patterns!

Source(s)
N/A

Discord Username(s)
angeldustjdr

Participation Level (GWJ Only)
1

My game has an export for Linux, Windows, & Mac and/or is playable through HTML5

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Comments

Submitted(+2)

Nice work! I loved the music and the graphical style, and the grid of buildings moving around, plus the use of destruction over building made this game pretty unique! It took me a little while to figure out how the buildings interact with one another, and I don’t think I ended up understanding completely, but I enjoyed trying to figure it out.

One thing that I struggled with was remembering which tiles had effects on them from destroying the buildings - was that intentional? The particle effects only displayed after building stuff there (by which time it was too late). If the idea was to force me to remember, maybe an easy mode or extending the tutorial to show those tiles with their effects would have been helpful.

Very cool looking game with a unique mechanic, congratulations on the entry!

Submitted

Nice work! I loved the music and the graphical style, and the grid of buildings moving around, plus the use of destruction over building made this game pretty unique! It took me a little while to figure out how the buildings interact with one another, and I don’t think I ended up understanding completely, but I enjoyed trying to figure it out.

One thing that I struggled with was remembering which tiles had effects on them from destroying the buildings - was that intentional? The particle effects only displayed after building stuff there (by which time it was too late). If the idea was to force me to remember, maybe an easy mode or extending the tutorial to show those tiles with their effects would have been helpful.

Very cool looking game with a unique mechanic, congratulations on the entry!

Submitted(+2)

Idk how I feel about this game.  Half my people always die! 

Kidding, fun mechanic, took me a while to figure out the forms necessary to win, so maybe a hint into that would have been nice.
Music was SUPER epic.

Developer(+1)

Thanks! We are glad you enjoyed the game even if some mechanics were hidden :D
I'm happy you enjoyed the music choice too :3 <3 Took us a while to decide on it XD

Submitted(+2)

A nice entry! Once I’d figured out all the effects of the initially same-looking buildings, it was fun to think when to build and when to clear more territory, the map shuffling added some unpredictability, which made the process more interesting.

The learning process was quick and when I figured out all the rules and how to make building combinations (forests, farms, water canals), I’ve managed to save the people quite reliably.

Developer(+1)

Thank you very much for playing and taking the time to share your analysis! :)

We're very glad you liked the game and that your learning of the mechanics went smooth!

Submitted(+2)

Interesting game. Not sure I fully understand what I am trying to do as I never seem to get a good score. The sprites are lovely and the sound effects work well. Good use of the theme!

Developer (1 edit) (+1)

Thanks <3! You have to try to replace all your old high tech resources by new, low-tech ones before the timer of old buildings runs out. If any of your resources is not full (100%), people will start dying until you've completed the map.
In order to increase your resource production (and thus the score), you can try different patterns of constructions and test different interactions between them :D

Submitted(+2)

Very nice! No notes - I think this would work well as a level-based puzzle game similar to architecture simulator games, with a minimum population requirement and different goals for resource production. Great entry!

Developer (3 edits)

Thank you for checking out our game!

Submitted(+1)

original take on the theme, interesting gameplay mechanic! well done, and congrats on your first gwj participation!

score: 21000 :)

Developer(+1)

Thank you very much! We had fun participating, we are looking forward future Godot (wild) jams!

Submitted(+2)

Very nice game, the upgrading/proximity mechanic works very well. Difficulty seems really well balanced, it's hard to fill all bars before the old producers collapse,  and the changing Layout add to the challenge ( and forbid "optimal" layout, wich is extremely good for that kind of game).
I really loved it, ended up with 37050 points on my 2nd play.

Developer

Thanks for noticing so much stuff about our game and the very nice critics :3!
Congrats on your score too :D! Hope to meet in other Godot jams!

Submitted(+2)

Hi Team,

This is a really fun idea and great execution. You left a lot of mechanics to discover for the players but I believe that's part of the fun.

Overall really enjoyed it! :)

Developer

Thanks guladam! I'm glad you liked to discover the mechanics, we also believed it would be a nice surprise for the players :D

Submitted(+2)

Cool mechanics (I always love me a tile-based and round-based game) and creative use of the theme! Although I would have loved a little more clarification on how things work and interact but yeah I get it, it is forgotten :D

Very solid and enjoyable entry! I liked it! 

Developer(+1)

Glad that this type of game fit your tastes :D!
I agree with your feeling. While some mechanics were intentionally left to discover for the player, we should have improved clarifications on others... but well at some point you have to let it go and submit before the jam ends XD
Thanks for trying our game and commenting!

Submitted(+2)

A fun little puzzle-ish game! I liked the graphics, sounds and mechanics. It offers plenty of interesting choices with the collapsing buildings and a bit of deductive work with the hidden modifier buildings. That part felt a bit like minesweeper.

I wish there had been a tutorial about the "compound" buildings since I built them blindly on my first try. I did better the second go around though, getting a score of 50,400. Great work!

Developer

Glad you liked the game overall! Yeah, we wanted the discovery of the "compound" or "boosted" buildings to be a surprise, but we could have hinted in the tutorial that there could be hidden combinations :P Sadly we did the tutorial in a rush, like 20 mins before submission XD
We aimed for the kind of difficulty that make people fail on first try but win on second try (and then improve their scores on further tries), which seems to be your case and the case of many others, so I'm happy!
That's quite a high score! You probably managed to save everyone in your population :D Good job!

Submitted(+2)

Great game! I liked the mechanics and the style. I was a bit confused by some of the synergies between tiles … I managed to create some “water channels” but I had no idea how I did it. Overall an excellent entry though!

Developer (2 edits)

Thanks for trying our game and commenting!
Yeah I think it would have bit nice to add a sentence like "wow, you built a water channel with [this action]" in the dialog box, or something like this...
We'll try to do better in future games, but we are glad you enjoyed it anyway :D!!

Submitted(+2)

Super cool game, love the bio-mechanical look of buildings, and how they pulse and move. Very awesome!

My only gripe is as the others say, the unclear meaning of the bars.

Other than that, super fun! The building patterns kind of remind me of Loop Hero, which was awesome.

Well done!

Developer(+1)

I'm very glad you liked the game! :D

You're right, Loop Hero was an inspiration (at least for me) and, you're right again, it was awesome!

Yes, the readability of the bars seems to be one of our biggest issues... :/ I guess the solution would be to spend more time explaining how they work in the tutorial as Josephkhland suggested.

Thank you for your comment anyway!

Submitted (1 edit)

Oh, I meant to say that the way it reminded me of it was awesome, not that loop hero is (though it is).

Just needed to clear that up :)

Submitted(+2)

I like the use of the theme and that you're "unbuilding" the city. The controls are clear, but I would have liked a button to advance the intro text. Its good that you show the timer for the intro text advancing though. The music is good but it was loud for me initially and there isn't an in-game volume setting. It was cool to figure out where the buildings creating bad effects are and finding the special building patterns. Also the changing layout adds a layer of unpredictability to the game. It wasn't very clear why the game ended. I assume its because the population decreased too much, but I had 50 left so I thought then that wasn't the problem.

I got 21200 pts the 2nd time I won. Let's see if someone can do better. :)

Developer

Thank you for playing! :)

About intro texts, you can skip them either by using the button to skip the entire tutorial or by clicking on the dialogue box to skip only one text. Sorry if it wasn't clear enough... :/

About the end or game over, you are right, we have some issues with computations at end of turns, not really sure why... Sorry for the bad experience...

Anyways, thanks again for taking time to write a comment. :)

Submitted(+2)

I really liked the aesthetic and concept of the organic buildings (gives a lot of worldbuilding ideas). I loved how different structures you build could merge together and was positively surprised the first time it happened to me. I tried out placing things in different shapes to see if there were different things created. Also the interaction between buildings was neat. Getting more points from placing crops next to water and forests next to crops.

The first time I played I just lost, having no idea how my population died, thinking I was keeping my resources at a good level, but probably that was much clear. (As in I thought that as long as I had resources they would be fine but turns out I needed to have more than 100% at each resource).  

A lovely jam entry.   

Developer

Thank you for playing and taking time to leave a comment! :)

I was afraid that, as it is hidden, the pattern mechanic would be too hard to discover; I guess I worried to much. ;) I'm really glad you liked this feature in particular. We think of it as  second call to the theme because the player has to rediscover how to build farms, water channels, etc.

About the clarity of the gauges, that's a fair point. The idea was the following: you have to keep the production of each ressource at 100% because it represents the needs of your population (we didn't have the time to scale the needs to the population level). If you have less than 100% production, you don't meet the needs of your population, so it decreases.

Actually, we find particularly difficult to synthetize "you have to compensate that much techno-building production and you have that much low-tech production while the needs of your population are as much" in a simple graphical representation... We admit our choice may not be the clearest option so, if you have any suggestion, please feel free! :)

Submitted(+2)

Perhaps explaining how the bars themselves in the tutorial should be enough. Then something nice to have would be some kind of visible notification when the population goes down. 

Developer

Thank you for the feedback! :)

Submitted(+2)

A very unique game! I think it fits the theme of forgotten knowledge extremely well. I love the story behind the long forgotten technology and including the risk of replacing it is very clever. I got 16800 points! 

Developer(+2)

Thanks for testing out our game! I'm glad you liked it :D