Dark Forest Village
A resource-management incremental in which you are tasked with maintaining and growing your village. The Universe is dark and full of dangers, however, and many external forces will want to force your submission or destruction. Evade the attacks, develop and prosper, and perhaps eventually leave your home and go for the other stars!
Made for Summer Incremental Game Jam 2024.
Comments
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Nice game, lots of complex interactions with the dice and breeding available early on.
Prestige, however, needs some work. I was able to reach end-of-content on my third play through (plus two failed attempts). For that, I get 25 prestige, nothing close to the 128/512 I need to access the true end-game. So rather than being a continuation mechanic, prestige does nothing but hold me back. Why can't I play to the end if I'm successful so far? Do I have to grind now, even though I haven't had to so far? Why isn't there a "bad" ending, even a one-screen congratz, with a restart adding something new to play with from the beginning? This game doesn't actually need any of the repeatables, except one or two that could be one-offs.
I did like the main game, though, so maybe i'll grind to see end-game content. It's just a pain to be forced to play a game a certain way, especially when the presented challenge is to get as far as you can. If you want people to fail (and prestige) a lot, you have to make the challenge harder but also more compelling.
My end-game (second alien attack):
Thanks for playing the game!
The grind should be pretty fast, since the top row of upgrades provides a bunch of multipliers to the Prestige gain. You will probably need one more prestige, maybe two, to get to 512.
It is true there are not that many Prestige unlocks, and the base stuff can already go pretty crazy. I will think about what I can do here.
Anyone else got problems with producing oil?
Even though I have filled up the Oil Derrick several times already, the refinery and Oil Powerplant aren't producing anything.
You need to put workers at both simultaneously (one filling the Oil Derrick, the other manning the other building) in order to produce anything. If you did things correctly, there will be an income shown on the building card.
That is a weird mechanic. Wouldn't it be better to have oil as a resource?
When the bar on Oil Derrick fills you get 1 oil as a resource (shown in the resource bar at the top). Then it gets used by the refinery and powerplant.
No, because that is the gimmick of oil here: new technologies are more complicated to use, but potentially offer greater returns.
Love the game so far, the dice crafting / combining / breeding is such a fun mechanism. Would be very nice to have some customizations for your dice (custom border color, favorite-icon, naming or anything) to faster identify which ones you want to use for what things.
would love for this to go on to be a full game with modes and deeper gameplay
I'm thinking about that, but no promises because I don't really have ideas how to expand from here, as it was supposed to be pretty self-contained. I will probably start making updates next week with various fixes (like adding villager names) and think on how to deepen the gameplay.
A few idea to help with a full game concept. Moving the Jobs around, being able to move jobs so that you have easy access to more used jobs instead of having to go up, then down then up then down. and if not moving, at least hiding jobs that aren't planed on being used often. as for a full game, second prestige layer, challenges that give bonuses after being beaten, just ever increasing endless bigger and better numbers. even if its slow having this game as an incremental game has been so great, and ive played this for dozens of hours this week alone
Very fun game and idea. The only thing that is annoying me that the citiziens gets resorted constantly based on the dice roll, so if i have three laborers that i want to train on a farm, quarry, lumberjack i have to constantly check what their other dice values are. It would be nice if you could name them, give them some icons or somehow mark them. Or maybe lock them in certain slot at the bottom. Or add some kind of automation/ ability to place unit in a building in a waiting state, so they generate resources as idle citizens and dont get thrown back in the village, but if there is a hammer to be changed in that year they function as normal(maybe with an option to ignore certain dice values)
After getting retraining I now understand why cat breeds can be so inbred
Interesting game!
I love the gameplay, growing your engine by breeding dice. The first time I reached Socialism I spent hours making my dice more powerful.
I think the pacing is off though. I had multiple runs where I built up my dice, unlocked technologies, lasted 200 turns and fought off the attack only to get an impossible attack next and barely more Prestige than if I had rushed building the wall.
The first Prestige gameplay upgrade, Government, is also completely out of pace. You can unlock it right away, but reaching it requires a lot of investment that does not translate to Prestige gains at this point in the game
I'm not a fan of the Prestige upgrades that increase Prestige gain. I feel bad spending currency and getting nothing for it, it feels like it's artificially making me spend a couple more runs just for the sake of grind. The various upgrades based on unspent Prestige make it worse, you can't easily tell how much you can spend before the Prestige loss outweighs the upgrade you bought.
A couple of suggestions:
- Make more events similar to turn 101 and add a Prestige upgrade that make those events happen less frequently. The goal is to force the first few runs to end quickly, in line with the Prestige rewards
- Make the Prestige upgrades scale on Total Prestige Earned rather than Unspent Prestige.
Thanks for your review!
Yeah, the pacing is not great, others said as well that spamming short runs is better than doing deep ones - probably should have increased the exponent in the Prestige gain formula or added a term based on years survived.
Note that there is a Prestige upgrade that reduces the chance of negative events, and it does work on the year 101 one.
This was incredibly painful to put so much time into a really clever game only to be locked from finishing the game because priests can not get any form of training so I can not get the cog icon and the rest of the icons for the generation ship. How in the world can I possibly win with that condition and only one slot? Not even socialism will help with the bottleneck due to specialists still being needed to get energy marker.
Overall, great concept, I love the events and programming. I hate the impossible ending though.
I actually finished the game as a priest during testing! It is a cool challenge.
You can get hammers through socialism, and energy with plastic through autocracy. The latter is kinda slow, so you would want to downsize your population to get it faster.
I would expect most people to put the cog onto the Specialist instead through autocracy, which is way faster.
Thanks for the advice. I had barely tested any of the laws before now.
Im enjoying it but it's very annoying having to reset for 0 points because you ran out of food, I guess if I bought first strike I could avoid that.
Comment about the ingame government balance:
Socialism is OP in this game. It turns this game into a critter breeding game. Always aim for it first, the other 2 types of economy are completely useless.
Suppose you have 2 parent cards, A and B, then use them to breed C. Put C in that representative to boost A and B, then discard C after an empty draw. Rinse and repeat. This is exponential growth until it hits the 999 hardcap. It should be able to reach all 999 stats with around 150~200 turns.
For political system, totalitarianism is the most useful. With it, you can increase influence of a card from 1 to 2 in academia, then reduce to 0. This allows you to reduce influence production of everything to 0, greatly easing management.
None of the 3 tribal systems are important. Caste system could be useful if you have "Workplace shift" prestige upgrade.
Yes, Socialism and Totalitarianism are definitely strong, but I tried to make the alternatives to them viable as well.
Capitalism is a more idle and relaxed version of Socialist growth - if you get a money symbol on all sides, you can stop worrying about having hammers. Feudalism also does not require you to recycle population constantly, but it does require to keep it employed in Farms. I guess those alternatives are worse because they are only linear, though.
While Totalitarianism is great at reducing the influence gain, once you achieve that, you can explore other options. Democracy provides the only way to get the government symbol on a die, while Autocracy lets you get symbols into strange places and opens up options in there.
Social systems are indeed not really important. Caste System is great but hurts you at one specific point in the game, and Egalitarianism can be situationally useful, but they are not as strong as the other categories.
This really needs a tutorial or more understandable UI.
I did try to write some basic tutorial in the Help section. Do you have any ideas on how to improve it?
nvm I'm apparently blind, didn't see the help section. What I would change in the UI is the tooltip/overlay from the dice, it's going right over where you would drag the dice to.
Very Addictive Once You Figure Out What To Do