Continuing on from my Tokkitron announcement last month, I did a new game jam project called Cult of Taal-zuz! I swear it’s just a coincidence that I’ve done two game jams in quick succession, and I’m not just planning to keep doing game jams forever. However for a while I’ve been wanting to make a lightweight management (or “tycoon”) game, and I saw another game jam that was a good excuse to finally make one.
So I was a big fan of A Dark Room back when that came out, and another game with a similar sort of influence for me is Urban Dead. These are both games with very simple graphics (mostly text-based in fact) whose gameplay leans on resource collection and management. Drugwars is yet another example I enjoy, and I hadn’t even considered it but one player brought up Oregon Trail. man I’m a sucker for all these sorts of games; if you’re wondering who plays incremental games, well this guy for one!
Given that games of this sort are relatively simple to develop (for a programmer anyway; the systems can be fairly in-depth to program, but the art needs are minimal) I’ve had such a project on my mind for a long time. In fact, I discussed developing one in this post from 2019. Well, while looking at the game jam calendar on itch.io I noticed the Gamedev.js Jam and decided, well these sorts of games work well as web games. Then the theme “Power” was announced for this jam, I decided to interpret the theme as a demon/cult’s power growing, and thus my cult management game was born!
Now that I’ve developed the framework for a simple management game, I may revisit the game described in my old post and actually make that. To be honest, I may make a whole bunch of these in quick succession, both because they are a lot of fun to make and because I can see what ideas resonate with players. I’m thinking I’ll just consult a few of those goofy game idea generators and actually implement the weird concepts they spit out.
Incidentally, I may release an updated version of my dungeon crawler as a tiny game on Steam! It did very mediocre in the jam voting, which technically doesn’t bode well for wider player reception, but I don’t really care. Players during the jam gave me useful feedback, so I’ve been making lots of big improvements to the game (even beyond the more obvious improvements I was already planning, like adding sounds/music). And I’ll only price it on Steam for like 3 or 4 dollars, so eh I’m obviously not aiming for a huge release anyway.
