Prototype

I was hoping I can finish creating power grids and production/consumption loops so you could see batteries charging and discharging but I had a lot of work during the prototype sprint and then had to travel so I haven't accomplished everything I wanted.

But I still think the scope is reasonable and the next Friday is a bank holiday, so that's more time for me to work on the game :).

The good thing is that I did some experiments with Godot's TileMap nodes before this gamejam. If I didn't, I'm sure I'd get stuck and wouldn't do much interesting things.

The Big Picture

There’s only one game where I spent over 100h last year. It’s called “Surviving Mars” and it’s a game about building a colony on Mars. One of its core mechanics is providing your buildings with electricity, water and oxygen by connecting them using wires and pipes. All excess resources can be stored in battery packs, water tanks or oxygen tanks. Since there are many random events in the game that can damage your production buildings or create leaks, you’re basically forced to design your base in such a way that you can disconnect damaged grids and live only on your stored resources.

I liked this game mechanic a lot and for me this was the main reason why I played this game. Replaying the same map and optimizing my base is the type of difficulty I enjoy.

Idea For This Game Jam

I want to create a strategy game that takes place in the future when the Earth is already uninhabitable after a climate apocalypse. Humankind became a multi-planetary species and is working in re-terraforming Earth by dropping prefabricated sealed domes containing plants from space.

The player represents an AI that is responsible for building a base and providing the dome with electricity and clean water for a period of time while the plants inside the dome are bred to survive outside the dome one day (thus Change the Story).

Gameplay

The player can build a couple of buildings on an isometric tiled map and connect them using wires/pipes and switches/valves. The challenge is to provide a stable supply of electricity and water to the dome despite the day/night cycle, rains, storms and earthquakes. The strategy part is designing the base in a way that I can always recover after an outage of any of my systems.

Buildings

• The Dome - Has a pre-set location on the map. Needs to be constantly supplied with water and electricity. If not, the game ends.
• AI center - Represents the player. When not supplied with electricity, the player can’t build or control anything.
• Solar panel - Generates electricity during daytime, needs to be connected to the power grid.
• Wire/Wire switch - Connects buildings and transfers electricity. The player can use switches to split the electric grid.
• Battery - Stores excess electric power and returns it back to the grid when electric power consumption is larger than production.
• Rain collector - Collects contaminated rain water during storms.
• Water purifier - Cleans contaminated water
• Water tank - Stores clean or contaminated water. Supplies a grid with water when water consumption is larger than production.
• Pipes/Valves - Connects buildings and transfers clean or contaminated water. The player can open/close valves and also dump water from the water grid (to get rid of contaminated water for example). When clean water is mixed with contaminated water, all water in the same grid becomes contaminated.

The player will have a limited amount of resources at the beginning of the game and for the initial prototype there will be no way to get more.

Challenges

In terms of implementation the most complicated part will be the mechanics of power/water grids and production/consumption when splitting/joining grids. For this reason this will be my main target during the prototyping phase.

I’m planning to work on graphics and to implement weather and random disasters in the second phase.

My second concern is whether only this game mechanic is going to be fun to play. My first idea about this game was to create a tower defense strategy game but that’s absolutely out of scope for this jam.

Technical notes

Game engine: Godot 4.2 (maybe 4.3) with its TileMap node.

Graphics: isometric pixel art made with Aseprite