atavistic

Atavistic is a casual card-based "farming" simulator made in 2 months for UTGDDC's Game Making Deathmatch. The only things not made during these two months were a few utility scripts and a handful of sprites.

In this game, you play as an unnamed creature bound beneath the arctic wastes. A party of overenthusiastic miners hailing from the Hyperion Mining Company has made landfall on your little home, and are ripe for the harvest!

I suggest you relax and play this game without trying too hard to win. It is pretty hard to lose, since you'd need to let all your units die and they have a lot of HP. This game is first and foremost a simulation, with a little interactivity and rickety game mechanics added in, so you should just watch the colony evolve and survive (or not).

Please read the tutorial prompts as they come up, but you can find a guide below on how to win the game.

Controls

Input	Effect
W/A/S/D	Pan camera up / left / down / right
Q/E	Zoom camera in/out
TAB	Open Card Shop
Left Click on Card	Use hovered card (read top of screen for instructions)
Right Click on Card	Discard hovered card
(secret) Left/Right Bracket [ / ]	Changes game speed. Not recommended, I think it plays best at timescale of 1 but if you want to skip early game you can use this.

Game Guide

1. Use W/A/S/D + Q/E to navigate the map. Observe points where penguins cluster.

2. Wait until you have a harvest card, and use it on a man near a penguin cluster. This should surface a Tether, one of three binding you in place.

3. Use <Tab> to open up the Card Shop, and purchase a few cards with the Myth points you've earned through harvest. Notice some synergies - smite + vortex, multiply + multiply, etc. 

4. Allow the game to progress, using smite and other cards to clear away threats as the mining colony develops. Use Regrowth occasionally to ensure you don't run out of trees. Continue harvesting until you've located all three tethers (tethers may be found where penguins cluster, and units will naturally gravitate around 3 points on the map!)

5. Harvest around the tethers - you'll see a skull floating from the player to the tether if you're in range, and hear a chime and visual effect when you've broken them. It takes 10 harvests near a tether to break it - you'll also notice the particle effect turn black when it's done.

Technical Details

This game is primarily a world simulator, a sandbox where you play god with some limited powers. There are many convoluted interlocking systems and AIs talking to each other, in hopes that some interesting emergent dynamics will present themselves. Lots of custom shaders, heavy use of particle effects and other graphics tricks, hopefully make a coherent art style. The music was "composed" over a few days, but I threw away most of my previous attempts...I may post them at a later date.

I've recorded probably 10h of footage making this game, and will be working on a devlog for the next while for my Youtube Channel - Wintermute Digital

The idea for this game has been in my head for several years, and you can see my attempts at creating it in the other games I've made, primarily "The Last Lighthouse" and "Maelstrom.exe". I don't think the idea has quite matured yet but this is good progress towards something playable.