My first idea ballooned out of scope almost immediately, but I really liked it, so I went against my instincts and tried to go for it anyway. Bad idea! The idea was for a one man traveling Space Band that gets sent to space stations to restore sanity to engineers that have been isolated for too long. They idea was for a point and click like adventure where you'd have to find out what kind of music they like, macguyver parts of the ship into the necessary instruments, compose a song, and the perform it. It just became really art/music heavy, two of my weakest skills and especially dreadful as I am working solo.
So I've scrapped everything and I'm back in the game with a much simpler idea: a Mars Base Simulator. It will be a single screen game where you are the first human to Mars and you'll be responsible for building out the base. Unfortunately a Martian dust storm has thrust you into darkness, so all of your equipment which is solar powered has been disabled. It looks like you'll have to power the entire base with the manual charge button on the head console, time to get to clicking and switch over gear from solar to finger power!
At the moment, this game sounds very similar to cookie clicker, but hoping to add enough differences to make it feel like it's own thing. One idea is that the first thing you'll be able to power will be a 3D Printer that has just enough material to print a rover that can mine more material to build other components to make maintaining the base easier. Hoping that each component with have it's own mini-game mechanic, so it won't just be all clicking!
Here is a screenshot of what I have so far, very simple so far! I had to scrap all my Overlap 2D stuff because it caused a ton of issues with HTML build, which is the target platform for this game. Hope that get's fixed soon, because I was really looking forward to using Overlap 2D as it made it incredibly easy to layout ui elements, but oh well, have to make progress somehow and more importantly need to finish before the deadline!
Progress! Spent too much of the holidays partying and playing games rather, but determined to get something submitted by January 17th! Each section of the main screen will be a widget with it's own component mini game - the main one being clicking for more charge. The rover one I am still playing around with, but it'll probably be a whack a mole style game where the rover sensor will detect minerals that will pop up on the screen and you'll have pick them up manually.
I was tired of not knowing all the things, so I combined screens! Here is the new main screen (trying to figure out how to set areas to default sizes so everything doesn't shift places when you add a new item):
And here is the current state of the Rover minigame (currently a very slippery slidey rover, which is still something I need to fix):
Really got down to the wire, but I was able to put the finishing touches on Mars Base Sim and submit! A lot of stuff didn't make it in, but I really wanted to focus on making a complete game experience with win/loss conditions and in that I succeeded! My UI is pretty ugly, but hopefully Overlap2D figures out issues with HTML build so that I'll be able to use that for next time! :)
Here is a preview of the 1.0 version in all of it's button pushing glory!
