itch.io

Haha, this was really clever! I really loved that when I was travelling somewhere I'd also inadvertently be casting random spells on the way there. XD

Thank you! Mac and Linux builds are coming soon. We have working builds, but performance wasn't there yet, so we're working on them some more to get more acceptable fps before releasing those too.

This was announced on earlier on Sunday on the MGSA discord, but I thought I'd post it here for visibility:

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We are a little late to the party because your entries were so great but...HERE ARE THE SA GAME JAM WINNERS

Overall Winner Welcome, Archer

Best Student Maxwell

Best Hobbyist Do-R-Over

Diversity dead ride me good

Best Art Timothee & Good boi, Puggo

Best Audio Maxwell

Technical Excellence Good boi, Puggo & Beneath the Grass

Best Narrative The Tree of Dreams & Messages into the Void

Best Physics Welcome, Archer

and a surprise category that we felt deserved merit...Best Theme Interpretation Animalgamation

Congratulations to all of you for entering, we really enjoyed this year's submissions ! To the winners, please email melissa[at]freelives[dot]net to arrange prizes. See you at SA GAME JAM 2022

I liked how whimsical and dreamy it was, especially the feeling of treading on clouds! It was also cool to see a callback to my munching on my almonds, to feel as if the game had remembered my previous choices.

I'm glad you enjoyed it! I very much want to get in some kind of hints system at some point, possibly this weekend!

The game is being developed in Unity, which prefers that one uses C#. It doesn't currently have mod support (at least, not officially), but this may be added in the future.

I'm glad you enjoyed it! :D

That's so kind of you!

We made the game in Unity3D. If there's something specific you'd like to know about, let me know. Otherwise it's too broad a question for me to get into.

@ChaosFarseer's absolutely right! :)

I think if you're coming at it from a programming background, you might (based on my observations of others) have a tendency to be in love with how smart a system is, how clean a back-end, how "clever" a technical solution was, even though none of these might be things that a player actually experiences. If you're really interested in game design, it would likely be helpful to keep circling back to what has the largest effects on a player's experience. Sometimes a technical solution is very much needed, but often it's not (at least not to test out whether your game idea's any good). If you ever take a game further than a jam, it's likely you'll want to do it over, better, anyway, so spending more time on exploring an idea and less time on techie stuff is usually best bang-for-time-spent.

That said, if you're doing it as a hobby, then just do what you enjoy! I'd suggest still trying to make things with the intention of showing your friends and having them play them, and keeping your projects small, but if what you're doing and what you're learning brings you joy, then keep going! And if you're not enjoying it any more, then find something else that excites you. :)

Sorry we overlooked this! Until an update's released that has better resolution-independent support, you can run the game using command line parameters to force a 16:9 (windowed?) aspect ratio.

(Whenever I do this for something I might use often, I make a shortcut to the executable and the command line parameters to the shortcut's properties.)

e.g. TerraNil.exe -screen-height 1920 -screen-width 1080

Sorry we overlooked this! Until an update's released that has better resolution-independent support, you can run the game using command line parameters to force a 16:9 (windowed?) aspect ratio.

(Whenever I do this for something I might use often, I make a shortcut to the executable and the command line parameters to the shortcut's properties.)

e.g. TerraNil.exe -screen-height 1920 -screen-width 1080

You only need a small piece of fynbos to start a fire, so if you plan your excavators so that they either just cut off one tree, or that a tree creates fynbos across a river, you can use that little piece as a firestarter for forests while keeping all of the rest of the fynbos for biodiversity.

This way you're not using up the existing trees for forests, and any new trees that you get from the Arboretum can also potentially be used for beehives.

I struggled with this too! After only just beating it, vfqd told me about a strategy that makes it significantly easier. I don't want to spoil it for you if you want to figure it out for yourself though!

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction! Looks like this'll take a little while, but I'll give it a bash. :)

Hello! This looks really nice, but I'm using two 4k monitors. At 200% the text looks blurry, and at 100% everything's really tiny. I don't know if higher-res UI is on the cards, but if it is then this is my throwing my vote in for one!

Thank you for your feedback! We've got an update we're working on that's reworking a lot of things (hopefully for the better!), that's coming out really soon.

A map editor is on the roadmap!

The UnityPlayer.dll should be in the same folder as the Second Earth.exe. I believe that error happens when it's not.

Thank you!

We have some ideas on how to do this, and will definitely want to get that done before we're done with the game!

I think the game would still run, but might get extremely slow. It makes use of GPU instancing to get so many things on screen, which to my knowledge is only available on DX11, Metal, Vulkan and other newer APIs.

Did you unzip all of the contents of the zip file into the same place, and then run the .exe?

OH. That narrows things down, thanks! I'll take a look when I get to work tomorrow. Do you mind joining our Discord and sending me a message, so that I can send you a Mac build and see if the menu is fixed?

Oh dear! Thanks for letting us know! We don't develop on Macs, so it's hard for us to test on that platform, but we'll figure something out!

Which platform are you trying to download it for? I've been able to download and unzip them all successfully. :/

Are you not able to click the download links at the bottom of the game post?

Robbie and Evan are travelling for the next couple of weeks, so updates will be slow until then, especially in terms of gameplay content. I've been working on some optimization and art, but it's not necessarily enough to warrant another update until they're back. I'm happy you've been enjoying it though! :D

We haven't discussed a map editor yet. We do have some internal tools that help with making maps a much easier task, but I imagine we'd still have to do quite a bit of work packaging that into something that saves and loads at runtime, rather than in the Unity editor, and giving it a usable UI. I'm sure we'll chat about it when we're all back together!

Rotating buildings currently isn't possible. (Afaik it was intentional, because it leads to having to plan road networks better, but it's not intuitive and we're open to changing that.)

Which platform do you want to play it on? I can give you a Dropbox link if the download links aren't appearing on Itch.

The game uses extensive use of mesh instancing, which requires a DX11-level graphics card.

(It may run on other graphics cards, but is likely to be very slow.)

We don't! If you want to support us, just being excited about the game and telling us about it is very motivating. Also if you've got friends that you think would enjoy it, telling them about it.

You can also check out Free Lives's previous games on Steam (though developed by different team members): Broforce, Genital Jousting and Gorn.

I'll make sure that there's a Linux build in the next update (though it'll be untested).

There isn't at the moment, but an endless mode does sound pretty great!

That's something we'd love to do, but it's not something we'll be adding in the immediate future. (It's a lot of work!)

Thank you for giving it a go! A road shows the stop sign when it's a dead end. To make a road connect to another road, you have to end the road (i.e. release your mouse button) on the same tile as an existing road. If you still struggle, maybe some of the Let's Play videos linked below can help you see it in action?

Erk! Next time we make a build, I'll try make a Linux one, though it will be untested.

There currently isn't. It's by design, in that it makes it more harder/more interesting to have to plan how your roads should be placed, and allows you to see all of the building entrances without having to rotate your camera all the time, but it's something we can revisit if a lot of people feel strongly otherwise!

There definitely should be a 1080p option (because that's how we run it here). Are you sure you had Full Screen selected instead of Windowed? I believe Unity gives you a different set of resolutions (that are smaller than your native one) if you're on Windowed.

I didn't implement the sandstorm code, but I believe that they're not actually random (they'll appear at the same timing each time you play a level). We could definitely do a better job of informing the player about this though, whether through some kind of weather forecasting or something so that you have some time to prepare for them. Thank you for playing! :)