Drought
Manage your farm to outlast the Drought. Balance water usage and fish production to meet the demand each day, all whilst battling the effects of the drought.
Created as part of a game jam amongst friends, the themes were "save yourself, not the world" and "one item, two actions". Downloads available for Mac, Windows, and Ubuntu, as well as a ROM version for playing in an emulator, and a Pocket version for the Analogue Pocket.
Controls
| UP | Up arrow/W |
| DOWN | Down arrow/S |
| LEFT | Left arrow/A |
| RIGHT | Right arrow/D |
| A | Alt/Z/J |
| B | Ctrl/K/X |
| START | Enter |
| SELECT | Shift |
Download
Click download now to get access to the following files:
Development log
- Drought v1.0.1Jul 04, 2022
Comments
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I made it to day 11 before game over. I don't know how intentional it is, but pretty quickly I reached a point where I couldn't buy the last plot without failing to meet demand, and just waited for multiple days to see what would happen.
Balancing is very tricky. Do you think that the demand should be decreased, or the ways to produce fish increased? Thank you so much for your feedback
I will add that the difficulty is intended, but I don't want it to feel impossible
Also, I'd be interested to know if you helped the person who appears at the gate every now and then
Sure, I'm happy to elaborate:
(1) In general I think there's not enough to do. It's weird though, because right at the start it's really slow, then in the middle of your first day you get to buy like 4 things. Then it tapers off until you can't buy anything for several days in a row.
(1.5) A related issue is that the game takes too long to progress while you're not doing anything. If you added the ability to skip forward in time, or a fast-forward button, it might not feel as much like there's nothing to do (although the first day would still seem really busy compared to the others).
(2) There's no going back on any decision. It's pretty clear what the fish tank fixes do, and those are pretty much always beneficial. But with the plots I think it's very easy to mistakenly make a suboptimal decision, especially because on first playthrough you don't know that the oxidizer only decreases fish water cost by 1, for example. A clearer description, maybe on the computer buy page, could help this.
(3) Replying to your question about the demand increase: I kind of assumed I was supposed to lose and the game went on forever? If there's a way to win, it's totally fine, it just means it's hard. (well, maybe not hard - I'm not generally very good at games) But if you want to make it hard, I'd suggest you make trial and error less painful, which I think is addressed by my previous items.
(4) I was not aware of a person appearing by the gate. I tried going through the gate a couple times. It never let me through, so I stopped trying. I also basically had no reason to ever leave the computer screen - or at least that's what I thought. If there is a whole game mechanic I'm missing then I apologize because everything I've written here might be completely irrelevant.
Thank you so much for your points! I had considered a time-skip functionality, and I'll have a look at adding one in. I have an idea of how it would work. I am gonna stick to the no change rule: Firstly, I like the idea of making every decision count, and secondly, I'm using GB Studio and I'm already making it jump through hoops to do what we have. The game can go on forever, though the story is finite. Adding the time-skip function will make it easier to fail faster and learn the game. The person at the gate is completely optional, unless they are broken. They should appear around midday every other day from day 5. If you didn't notice they were there, it's on the game to sign-post it better
On the topic of sign-posting: On the day where the person appears, if you put footprints on the ground in a place where it's visible from the house, that might work. Or if there was an incentive to scout the map every day, that might work too.
Selecting "No" when asked to repair a fish tank will still take your fish and double the cost of the next repair.
This is very much a bug. I will fix this ASAP, thank you for letting me know
I've discovered missing no.
Thanks for making me aware of this. I am unsure of what causes this graphical error, but I think it has something to do with the number of actors in the scene, although I will look for a work around