Mother Ship

Ludum dare 42 submission.

Intro

The galaxy is collapsing. A giant, nightmarish black hole is slowly growing, consuming everything in its path. And on this path is our own solar system.
 
You are an highly advanced A.I operating the Ark, the first faster-than-light colony ship, fitted with hundreds of millions of cryogenic pods to carry humans through the depths of space. Yet, it is not enough to carry the entirety of  Earth's growing population, and building the Ark has mostly depleted the solar system of its resources. You must colonize other star systems and exploit them in order to upgrade the Ark and further improve its capacity, while fleeing from the ever growing black hole.

You're running out of time. And out of space.

Current features

• Probe and colonize nearby systems to gather the minerals you will need to upgrade the Ark. The mining speed depends on the population and the mines level, which can also be improved by spending minerals.

• Population will grow over time, depending on the system’s habitability. If it is under 40%, population will instead decline exponentially. You can terraform the system’s planets by spending minerals to increase its habitability.

• After some time, the black hole will arrive. When it approaches a system, it will slowly decrease its habitability until it reaches 0, so evacuate it quickly !

• The systems stats are always randomized, so you will require a different strategy at each restart. However, Sol will always have 100% habitability and 0 minerals, so pop left there will grow fast but be utterly useless.

• You only have one ship, so it might be difficult to handle the increasing
population. You may have to leave some of them behind to save the rest…

• Keep fleeing upward. You may or may not find a way to escape.

Controls :

• Use the MOUSE to interact.

• WASD or ARROW KEYS to move the camera.

• Don't forget to press SPACE or E anytime to pause the game. It will give you more time to plan ahead and navigate through the messy UI.

• You can press F to toggle fullscreen, but I heavily advise you AGAINST it. I didn't have enough time to properly scale the UI, it will mess it even more. The text won't be correctly centered either.

About :

Mother Ship is freely inspired by games like Seedship, an awesome text based mobile game, Icarus, a 2013 ludum dare entry, and Stellaris, a space 4x with a deep focus on exploration.

It was made in around 30 hours (sleep included :^) ) for Ludum Dare 42.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/mother-ship

This was my first game jam, and I just can't believe this made it to the top 100 !

Planned features :

• Events : Some random, some not. They are meant to spice up the game and/or provide you with moral choices, as well as providing a narrative element. May include population protests, miners' strikes, revolts, space anomalies, alien ruins... and more.
• Research : For example, you could develop androids, able to work endlessly in even the most dangerous systems, without having to bother terraforming. Plus, they're disposable. Just like humans.
• Different endings : Currently, the only way to "win" is to reach the wormhole at the top of the map, so there is no real replayability other than trying to save more humans. But I'd like to change that.
• More in depth population : Scientists, miners, workers, artists, politicians, rich, poor, all of them with different ideas, different thrives, different needs and different strenghts. And as you can't save everyone, you will have to make choices, which could lead to interesting moral situations and events, like class struggles, discrimination, or one group thinking they deserve their place on the Ark more than an other...

Changelog :

13/08/2018 : Added a Linux and Mac OSX release (didn't test, tell me if it doesn't work). Made some bugfixing : sound not properly playing, menu not showing when clicking on another system, black hole danger radius not growing with the hole itself. Fixed pop growth rate. Changed pause key from SPACE to E because of some weird engine bug with the SPACE key.

13/08/2018 : Added back SPACE as a pause key, but you still can use E if you prefer. Fixed a bug where the menus wouldn't close properly.

14/08/2018 : Quickly fixed a game breaking bug where under certain conditions, you could withdraw more population from a system than you actually had there, effectively “spawning” free new humans.

05/09/2018 : First post-jam update (I will still leave links for the original ludum dare version).

Fixed the slider. Made some changes to the way menus work in order to make the UI more readable. Unavailable options no longer appear. Added the "Hide intel" and "Show intel" options to toggle the system's informations.

If you see any bug, don't hesitate to report it in the comments !

Made with

- Engine : Godot

- Graphics : Aseprite

- Sound : sfxr