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A Pyre Horizon's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Theme | #39 | 4.250 | 4.250 |
| Fun | #48 | 3.969 | 3.969 |
| Presentation | #81 | 4.281 | 4.281 |
| Originality | #105 | 4.000 | 4.000 |
Ranked from 34 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
How does your game represent "Power"?
This game spotlights burning fuel as a resource to power a city and defend against an overwhelming wildfire that threatens to burn down the whole world.
There is a thematic spin on power, as the player needs to use non-renewable energy sources. The sun has been stolen away, blocked by the monsters that keep the skies dark, ensuring our need for fire.
If you can't reach the end, no worries! But I hope you check out the ending as I explain it in this video:
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2372466238
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Comments
Oh man this game rules. I love the RTS genre and it's pretty wild you all were able to pull this off in such a short time. Strong work!
You mentioned that you have anime influences and I really see that in the ending, a little attack on titan or evangelion? Either way it's successful in being very cool. The scale of this game is also pretty wild. This game is inspiring and makes me really want to build an RTS next!
Cheers.
i started with kind of a moodboard of stuff that i collected to show off how i wanted it to go, the premise was a reference to the ramiel episode of evangelion where they charge a gun with the entirety of japan's power to shoot a gun twice! but the visual elements at the end were sort of a mixture of majora's mask, shin godzilla, that one shot of star wars episode 8 where they shoom through the big star fleet, and some music videos i like. :3 wish i coulda gone even harder on the ending cutscene and added some more narrative elements, but i threw that last cutscene together in the last day. ๐ฉ๐ฉ thank you so much for playing it through to the end though!!!! it means a lot
RAHHHHHHH I LOST THE ENTIRE COMMENT I TYPED OUT DAMNIT!
SUMMARY THEN:
RTS IS NOT MY TYPICAL CUP OF TEA BUT I ENJOYED THIS, ESPECIALLY TOWARDS THE END OF MY FIRST RUN WHEN I STARTED TO ENTER A FLOW STATE.
LIKED THE MODELS, MUSIC, AND GAMEPLAY.
DIED IN MY FIRST RUN BECAUSE I JUST BARELY COULDN'T REPAIR THE CANNON IN TIME. (FRUSTRATION!!!)
SECOND RUN WAS SCUFFED, BUT I BEAT IT (YIPPEE)
A FAST FORWARD BUTTON IS NEEDED IN A GAME LIKE THIS. STARTING OVER FROM THE BEGINNING WAS PAINFUL.
Slick ending cutscene btw.
ahhh thank you so much dude!!!! i'm glad u felt something from this
yea we'll probably drop a post-jam patch! i wanna make the ending cutscene even cooler too!!!!
I'll definitely check it out then!
I'm a sucker for an rts, very satisfying when you start seeing your resources exponentially tick up. I do think the start feels really slow, and it could be beneficial to have some sort of time speed up of some sort to help with the idling you do. I like the building and balancing with the resources, a nice readable art style, it's pulled together pretty well. Great job!
yeah, it'd be nice ๐ฉten day jam goldshots!!!!!! but ty :]
Increcible RTS tbh. I usually get bored by these types of games but this game had that perfect simplicity-complexity ratio that kept me hooked. I was honestly having a lot of fun trying to min-max my city planning and mining and power usage and stuff but the narrative events at the end were super cool. I thought it made for a satisfying conclusion that you have time to prepare for the final event and had a great payoff most games in this genre for game jams don't really have. The aesthetic reminded me of some other lowpoly horror like iron lung which i love. Final cutscene so well done too
thank you!!!!! mike was tuning the gameplay balance all the way to the end! and yeah, if there's anything i really personally want to make sure of, it's that the games i create have a narrative through-line that ends in a satisfying, memorable way.
RTS is a hard genre to create in such a small amount of time like this but this was done very well. I was not able to make it to the end myself but holy is that an awesome ending sequence!
yeah everyone thought we were insane, including us lol. worked ourselves to the brink. :'3 thanks so much! i'm glad it was a memorable experience for u.
This was a pretty cool rts to play through! I loved the vibes of the game, and I thought that the ending cutscene was really sick! Good job!
thanks so much! the whole thing was high intensity for our team. feels weird to compartmentalize our work, but as the creative director i'm glad i could wrap up mike's game systems with something memorable.
This was a great introduction to RTS for me. I love everything about this game: the gameplay, the graphics, and the music. The progression of my city sort of gave me a FF7 vibe. Looking forward to seeing yall expand on this!
hehe, less expansion and more that i'd like to just polish up some aspects. i think it's great where it is, but i'd love to just apply a lil more lacquer. but thanks so much! we were aiming initially for something kinda PS1-like.
I don't play any rts games but the tutorial did a great job of walking me through the gameplay. Good job guys!
yeah lmao, a lot of the concepts in it were foreign to me when i first tried it out. my jam partner twanglingblimp did a pretty good job at explaining the basics. always be recruiting ๐ค
I finally came around to play this and I had a great time :) This kinda feels really polished!
ty :3 maybe playground politics protag could convince the world to combat the extinction event
What an excellent atmosphere and theme, I loved the mechanic of expanding the area of influence with the lights, expanding into the dark scary unkown! Normally I'm not an RTS gamer, but this game actually hooked me since I just love concepts surrounding human extinction or big cosmic horrors. The ending was awesome, especially loved the modeling done for this. Amazing entry!
thanks so much!!!!! yeah i had no idea i'd be this deep in the blender mines. we weren't exactly going for looking like you're in a cavern, but i think i'm kinda down for the look, bc we associate living in caves with a primitive time in human history, so the juxtaposition of having an advanced city built inside of a cave sort of contributes to the theming that our use of non-renewable "fire" is primitive and keeps us from advancing, a sign of barbarism. it was my first time making hair and applying shaders the way i did to the model. like for instance, at the end with the burning hole, that burning parts had many different particles layered on of course, but the texture had a mesh displacement shader that caused the burning parts to look like they were undulating with heat distortion. i wasn't confident in my ability to make something humanoid, but it really came together, especially with the particles.
and the cosmic horror thing, yea! like a lot of that stuff involves unearthing some dark terror from an ancient civilization or something. especially with lovecraft-inspired work. but the funny thing is that fossils are often underground, but so are fossil fuels. the pieces all mesh really cohesively together. humanity unearthed something of unimaginable power, but may soon be destroyed by it. fossil fuels are kind of cosmic horror in that regard. it'd be fine if they didn't cause ecological collapse and climate catastrophe, but we unfortunately unearthed extinction from the earth. been really feeling it on the themes, which the RTS gameplay expresses really well.
Very very nice gameplay, coming from StarCraft2 i felt home, trading workers for military felt really awesome (and horrifying) and the game made me focus when i realized power requires constant fire supply. Arts are incredible, ending is cinema. Would love to see a post-jam version with keybind shortcuts and speed settings (like in sc2). Also procedural map generation was always so incredible to me, crazy you made it work so well in 10 days!
Thanks for the comment :D
There is actually no procedural generation. That's one of the features we didn't manage to fit in.
But I will probably do the key shortcuts if I have the time.
we discussed having noisemaps generate the map, but we didn't get around to it in time ๐ฉ yea we were talking about making the resource burn feel really urgent. having to peel workers off the mining rigs for combat units is pretty grim yeah lmao. i can't speak much to the gameplay side of things, but i did want to dress up the main gameplay to be really stressful. like bordering on unbearably stressful. >:3c
Alright team, I know that the screenshots show a city with 1700 people, and that our city has 12. Yes, I know only 6 of you still have mining jobs after our heavy military recruitment drive. But I believe it is precisely this tightknit bond that will allow us to stop the horrific entity approaching from the horizon.
[๐๐ฑ๐ถ๐๐ผ๐ฟ'๐ ๐ป๐ผ๐๐ฒ: ๐ง๐ต๐ฒ๐ ๐ฑ๐ถ๐ฑ ๐ป๐ผ๐ ๐๐๐ผ๐ฝ ๐๐ต๐ฒ ๐ต๐ผ๐ฟ๐ฟ๐ถ๐ณ๐ถ๐ฐ ๐ฒ๐ป๐๐ถ๐๐ ๐ฎ๐ฝ๐ฝ๐ฟ๐ผ๐ฎ๐ฐ๐ต๐ถ๐ป๐ด ๐ณ๐ฟ๐ผ๐บ ๐๐ต๐ฒ ๐ต๐ผ๐ฟ๐ถ๐๐ผ๐ป]
Very fun game.
damb, the attaboy timeline doomed asf :'3 why weren't u producing a city with a population of 1700 in the year 20XX? too busy being a CHILD?
In the year 20XX I was too busy playing Teleco, like the rest of the world
yako_oho
I was excited to sit down and play this one from the second I even saw it pop up in the list of submissions. Well made RTS are my jam, and this one's focus on expansion and protecting as opposed to just eradicating and storming opponent bases hits just right. I wish there were better ways to keep track of your citizens and their whereabouts, especially as your city becomes a sprawling nightmare to manage. The usage of units for combat didn't fully click either until I had been playing for a minute.
Wasn't able to sit through a long enough game just yet to see the ending, but hopefully I'll have a second before the end of the jam to bust through it and witness it in all its glory.
Great atmosphere, good game play, good difficulty scaling for each mode of play, and perfect resource management.
that's really cool to hear ๐ญ i did not have much confidence in our jam page for the first few days lmao, so i'm glad it caught your eye. glad you like the atmosphere and difficulty! mike worked real hard to tune the numbers on resource management so i'm sure he's stoked to hear it.
Impressively fleshed out mechanics given the timeframe we had! I sunk countless hours of my childhood into the Command & Conquer games of the 2000's, and this brought me right back. The music, atmosphere, and resource mechanics were exactly what I want from an RTS. I loved how the power plant periodically consumed fire rather than constantly eating it up, that adds another layer of strategy to the mix.
Great job! :)
ya thx! if u check the boneyard server, our thread on it was full of comments like "omg you know we only have 10 days right" and yea we were run ragged lmao.
Pretty solid little game! I'm incredibly bad at RTS, so I struggled for sure. Ended up losing, even on Easy which speaks volumes of my abilities. I kept recruiting more people and I wouldn't have any to work with, not sure where they went... They probably went somewhere, but I just didn't see where?
I feel like I'd have a much better go a second time around with a firmer grasp on how it worked; Even starting with the tutorial, I felt rather lost but again I think that's more on my complete lack of any experience in this genre of game.
The music was nice, the setting has potential to look really cool, for me it was very dark (again a skill issue. :P), and even kept me interested and kept my attention in a type of game I typically avoid at all costs. Nice work!
nice, very cool. i hope u finish it eventually ๐ฉi grinded the last day of the jam to put a nice cutscene in. but it's not my wheelhouse either so i understand ur pain. hot tip: always keep citizens recruiting, and build into iron early. >:3 it is a shame how little u can see the details on the assets but c'est la vie. if we were gonna do a postjam patch i think i'd try and make it so u can zoom in way further and perhaps light the small assets better.
I'll probably give it another try on the weekend, I definitely don't want your last day of work to go to waste! I definitely tried to keep up with recruiting, but again in the late game I feel like I recruited 4 or 5 people and they just vanished. Do they automatically go somewhere if they're needed, like can the soldiers running defense die and need to be replaced?
the combat units have a replenishing tickbox that's automatically checked :3 ty though! tell me what u think when u get around to it
Very atmospheric city builder! The gamemechanics are quite easy to understand and the resource management didn't get overwhelming. I really liked the atmosphere and the music, but I had to turn off my desklamp to see the game properly. The ending was also a noce addition to the game. By the way, what caliber is that bullet in the cannon? Awesome job on the game!
yo ozmaister! it's been awhile!! i'm glad you enjoyed the game, idk what caliber it is, i just searched up "sniper bullet" and made the first thing i saw haha. but the gun itself is a bastard combination of a lot of things, particularly an archaic turret rifle.
yo! I just found it funny that the cannon uses a normal looking gunpowder propelled bullet that is the size of four houses. Seems a bit overkill. Truly a bastard cannon. Nice to see you could join the jam this year.
mike also thought it was weird and wanted it to be just a rounded slug or smth, but i was like nah, i like the blend of contradictory elements. besides, a railgun will shoot whatever metal you put into it. :p
I really like the resource management component also that the tutorial is very clear and I was not confused after it. the gameplay loop was a lot of fun. great job!
thank u! hope u got to see the ending >:3 tried to wrap it up in a neat little package
that was super fun! really nice gameplay loop and really well balanced resource prioritization. I love that the exponential growth of the city ends with the climax of the narrative too! really really great job!
thanks bagel >:3 yeah i wanted the city to expand even more, but apparently balancing that in was difficult. it is though, as they say, ~ludonarrative~ and i really enjoy that. now that i'm thinking about it though i should've had the enemies that come in at least be on fire or something. not that you could really see it that well to begin with.
Wow, I'm honestly blown away. The gameplay loop is solid, similar to single player Age of Empires II in a lot of ways. And the ending was epic! Reminded me of the moon coming down in Majora's Mask, muy epico
yea! imminent apocalypse scenarios are very cool, i also recently watched the evangelion rebuilds and shin godzilla so it was on my mind. Mike, my jam partner, recently got into age of empires so you hit it right on the head. idr if you were there, but check out my explanation of the ending and themes from the twitch link in the description!
Man, this is a good game! Really enjoying the City Builders in this jam. The vibes, worldbuilding are great, and that ending!!!
ty travis!!!! yeah it's funny that there's more than one but ig with the power theming it's more likely than "mode" lmao