Life for a pioneer certainly isn't easy... as you will soon discover! In this strategy game, you must manage your resources and family members properly, or put everything at risk! What must you sacrifice to reach your destination?

Here's a new thought for you... as if pioneer life was already difficult, did they have to face trolls?

Your ultimate objective is to last for either 1, 2, or 3 weeks in the wilderness, while avoiding death by troll, starvation, or other events. Your final score is calculated by a combination of how many family members are left, how many days you lasted, the decisions you made, and your remaining supplies. My highest score is about 22,000... can you beat that?

I would personally recomend getting on your knees, right now, and praying to RNGesus. You're gonna need it.


HELP ('cause you probably need it)

The game is split up into days. Each day is 3 random events, and then a troll bridge.

At troll bridges, they will demand tribute from you. You can either pay it, make them another offer, or try and fight your way past. Even if you lose the fight, though, you can slip by as a family member sacrifices themselves.

After the bridge is nightfall. When it is night, you must decide which of your family members gets to eat and drink. Eating or drinking keeps their health level constant (indicated by red hearts next to their name), not doing either will make their health fall, and both eating and drinking will recover their health. If their health drops to 0 hearts, that member is dead. If you lose everybody, you lose the game.

On the other hand, if you happen to feed and water a family member who already is at the maximum 5 hearts... then they get to feel fantastic!! Which has its own benefits I won't go into detail here ;)

You run into random events as the rest of the game plays out. These events either grant you supplies, or require them to avoid losing health. Your family can't die from most random events, but there are some where you can lose them. You need to do your best to keep a steady stock of supplies, because you'll never know what you need, or when you need it!


You can play the game on one of three difficulties:

  • Easy: The game lasts for 1 week, or 7 days. You begin with 3 family members, each at 4 health. You also have 12 of each supply.
  • Normal: The game lasts for 2 weeks, or 14 days. You begin with 2 family members, each at 3 health. You also have 10 of each supply.

  • Hard: The game lasts for 3 weeks, or 21 days. You begin with 1 family member, at 2 health. You also have 7 of each supply.


Controls:

  • Mouse: Select event options.
  • F10: Hold to force-restart.
  • F11: Toggle fullscreen.
  • Escape: Hold to force-quit the game.

SOME SECRET STUFF

You'll notice that trolls have different sizes pretty quick. The size is dependent on their strength, which is the value your family has to beat to defeat the troll in battle. The outcome of the battle is also influenced a little bit by RNG, a bit by your health, and a bit by how fantastic your fighter feels.

Things heat up the longer you play for. You need and obtain more resources, and trolls become meaner and stronger. In addition to having a random demand for their tribute, they also have biases towards each of the other supplies. One troll might hate cloth, but love wood. You never know until you try to offer it.

Another fun tidbit, is that each day is either lucky or unlucky. You'll have mostly positive or negative events occur on each day, but not always. There are also some rare events, that you have to be more lucky to encounter. There are lucky uncommon events, and unlucky common events, etc. The only way you'll know the events is if you play the game!

I encourage you to download the source for the game and pick around in there. You'll discover a whole lot of inner workings that are very specific and hard to explain easily!

Good luck partner!
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  • BelowSeaLvL
    Lv. 7

    Really great story type game, lot of scenario's. Sacrificing yourself is kind of funny, for the greater good XD Trolls just keep getting bigger until crazy big was funny. They looked a little simple though. With some more story, pictures for the characters etc. it would be even better for emotional attachment.

    Like that the game was a bit more slow, gave me time to play more relaxed.

  • Jupiter Hadley
    Lv. 13

    Nice idle game, lovely graphics! I included it in my GM48: Sacrifice compilation video series, if you’d like to take a look. :) https://youtu.be/syYlrVk54P8

  • Problematicar
    Lv. 37

    This is an awesomely polished game, as expected from the winner of the last jam.

    The pixel art is great, and the music feels really appropriate, there are enough random encounters and rng that this is probably the game with the most replayability in the whole jam, not to mention the 3 different game modes!

    I loved most of the events, but the trolls felt kinda out of place and just put there to connect the game to the theme, so that's probably the only bad part about it.

    I hope this game gets the credit it deserves, really top notch quality all around.

    Shelfless
    Submitted

    Shelfless

    • Mcwequiesk
      Lv. 10

      Thank you! I'm very happy you liked it so much.

      I would agree that the trolls felt somewhat forced, however. They were actually the original idea, where you have to sacrifice something to get past, but as the events were added and developed, they became more interesting than the trolls and kinda overshadowed them. Then I decided to go for a more pioneer experience, and they seem strange. The pioneers didn't have to worry about trolls, after all...

      Plus, when the trolls are scaled up, they almost look like they belong to a different game. If I had more time, I would have gone back, used less saturated colors, and probably made two sizes of trolls so the scaling didn't look oddly pixelated and out of place.

      Other than the trolls, though, I tried to make most of the events incorporate sacrificing something, whether it be supplies, health, or family members. But despite my efforts, not all of the events turned out super interesting, or required you to make sacrifices.

  • Veralos
    Lv. 38

    Very nice game. It feels very polished. The presentation is top notch with some suitable visuals and audio. All the random events you can come across are pretty neat, too. This isn't really my type of game but it certainly seems quite well designed.

    • Mcwequiesk
      Lv. 10

      Thank you! I put a lot of time in to make the events diverse and entertaining, with a lot of options for them. Of course, not all of them wound up that way. I would actually say most of the time I spent during the jam was on the events, as well as polishing the game.

  • Peter 🌊 Jørgensen
    Organizer

    A solid entry to the game jam. I liked the immersion. I cared about my characters, and I ended up hating some of them, which was unexpected.

    The theme wasn't as apparent as I would have liked, and the game reminded me too much of Oregon Trail, where I thought it could have been more innovative in that area.

    • Mcwequiesk
      Lv. 10

      I agree, by the end I was wishing the theme had been more apparent. The Troll bridge idea was my main method of putting the theme in, but once I was done with the other events, it did seem forced, almost like an afterthought.

      Nonetheless, I tried to set it up so the player would need to sacrifice supplies either for a chance at more (as with most events), or as a means to keep the family healthy.

  • Kwis
    Lv. 67

    My higher score is 15 days and 13404 points! Tried my best, but the RNG can be pretty unfair sometimes (that was the case)...

    Still pretty fun, the game I spent the most time on so far! Pretty cool :)

    I see you referenced people too! I doubt my name is in it but I probably would never know; I noticed tehwave name was mentionned tho :p

    Munchun
    Submitted

    Munchun

    • Mcwequiesk
      Lv. 10

      Yeah I thought it would be kinda neat to add in a few references to the community here and there. And I agree, the RNG can either be very generous, or extremely cruel. Most of the events' outcomes depend on RNG, but I still did my best to give the player a lot of choices as to what they could do. But if RNGesus doesn't like you, the game becomes much harder.

      Anyways thanks! I'm glad you liked it.

  • Jean-Michel Bourget
    Lv. 1

    Fun linear game. Had a big "Oregon trail" feel to it.

  • JealousCrow
    Lv. 6

    25,020 is my score. I felt that hard mode was easier than easy. People gave me supplies and i was stacked to the brim with good stuff! Great little game reminiscent of The Oregon Trail.

  • Tero Hannula
    Patron

    I really liked this game, slow-paced and sweet with some simple graphics. Maybe some better ending (graphical-wise) would have been better, like arriving to the town. Also cart could have had horses infront, but those are just minor details.

    Edit. With second play-through I sacrificied beggars I took with me, and it was nice that in the end you can see the names of the people who were sacrificied :)

    So far, this was the best game I have played in this jam.

    • Mcwequiesk
      Lv. 10

      Thanks! I'm glad you enjoyed it.

      And yeah, a town at the end would have been a good idea, and if I had more time, I would've done it. And the same with horses in front of the wagon... I tried drawing them once and they looked horrible, so I told myself I'd get back to it... which I never did.

      My justification is that horses would also need food and water, which would be a pain to also balance. Cause then what happens if your animals die? I hadn't accounted for that in the gameplay. The wagon could stop, but making another whole set of events for people encountering you being broken down would have taken a lot more work.

      My official explanation is that the horses are not only immortal, but also invisible :P

Well, my experience this jam wasn't... horrible. It definitely could have been worse, but it could have been better as well.

I avoided doing any brainstorming before the jam, because I didn't feel like wasting creativity on anything that wouldn't be created. So when I saw the theme was "sacrifice," I just drew a massive blank and had no clue how to go about making a game.

I thought, maybe I could do a strange story-based game? Where you have a grandma and she sacrifices herself or something, to teach a moral to the player? I brainstormed for a while, and eventually thought of the Oregon Trail game and the pioneers, and decided I could make a game based off of traveling west and managing your supplies and family members. But I wanted to throw in a twist: you have to pass by troll bridges, and either pay or fight them.

So on the first day, from the start of the jam for about 7 hours, I worked on the infrastructure and HUD, mostly. I drew up the box, wrote a few scripts, and got the animation of the wagon moving. I drew the wagon, tried drawing horses for it, and gave up. I didn't want to waste time on horses, because then I'd have to account for them in the gameplay, too...

The entire first day, I was afraid I was biting off more than I could chew. I was hypocritical, because the previous day I had made a reddit post along the lines of "What to do to succeed in the gm48" and I wasn't following it very well myself. One of my points was to NOT make that super-complicated strategy defense RPG, and of course... that's what I ended up making.

My fear got so bad, that about nine hours in (after drawing some stuff and animating the wagon and the HUD) I went back to the drawing board and sat there, for about an hour. An hour of wasted time! I was trying to hard to think of something different, something fast-paced and exciting, something deep and replayable yet fun at the same time... and I was dumbfounded. I didn't want to make anything stereotypical, but I didn't feel so good about the pioneer idea either...

But then I thought about how much I had already made. I made the framework for events, the trolls, the bridges, the wagon... and I didn't want it to go to waste, so I kept working. I had made games this complicated in the gm48 before, like Floor 62, although I would say this one is considerably more complex. And like Floor 62, this game was just as heavy on the storytelling. But the event system, which I had never really made in a game before, took a lot of effort and thought to create it in a way that I would only have to add a new object and script for each event.

I eventually went to bed, and slept for too long. The next day, I got back to work. I made all the events now, and by the end I was so sick of doing it. I was super bored of making all these events, but I did my best to make them all as unique and fun as possible. I also made my sounds this day, which also made me nervous. It took a few tries to make the noise of the bugs at night, and hoo-ing for the owl, and the wagon sound is actually me shaking a box of candy, but it does sound like a wagon in context.

By the end of the second day I was very happy with how it was coming out, and realized there was no turning back and I had to submit it eventually. That was when it really got intense.

I woke up after too long (again) and got back to work, for about 7 hours on the last day. In this time, I made all the menus, the victory and game-over screens, the rest of the music and sounds and graphics, and I also made the event selector script, which took a lot of thought, because there are some events where you need more than 2 people, some that show up more depending on how healthy your family is, and how lucky you are that day. The final algorithm works pretty well, and avoids duplicate events in one day.

And then, I submitted my game literally 1 minute before the deadline, because I couldn't seem to zip it properly and spent a good 15 minutes in TOTAL PANIC. I got it in the end though, and I couldn't be happier with the final result.

Result 7th
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