nkornek

[Release]Build The Nublar - A Game of Dinosaur Theme Parks and Hubris

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It's done! (mostly done, still a few little things to add).

 

Here's the itch link: https://nkornek.itch.io/build-the-nublar

 

Build The Nublar is a game about making your fantasy dinosaur theme park and watching it all fall apart as your dinosaurs escape their pens and rampage through crowds of innocent bystanders.

 

The design, programming, and art was all done by me, and the wonderful music was created by Patrick Ripoll (Patrick R on these here forums).

 

Here's some screenshots!

 

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It looks like Darwinia, but with dinosaurs. Darwinina was badly needing dinosaurs.

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Thanks guys! Can't wait to see the big stream of all the games. Every one that I've played so far has been great.

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So far my record is the park being open 33 days, though I must admit at a certain point I started destroying all the paddocks just so I could watch things fall apart.

 

I never did hear the other layers of music though. I wonder what kind of threshold of success/failure one has to hit to hear them.

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The music layers are definitely in there. I think they usually trigger when your hype meter is around +/- 50.

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UPDATE! v0.3

 

New Features:

-New Dinosaurs! Raptors! Triceratops!

-The menu now has a quit button

-Rebalanced the DNA costs of cloning dinos.

 

Fixed a bunch of minor bugs:

-You can no longer accitentally "click through" the UI and select a building underneath

-Dinosaurs limbs no longer get rendered over other dinos that are too close

-Security guards can no longer get stuck in their guard towers

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Ok, I started to do a little better and the music changed.

 

Then I realized I could just spawn T-Rexes everywhere and it became even better. Fun game!

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Yup, by no means do you need to actually place your dinos into a paddock, you can totally just drop a bunch of raptors next to your docks and watch them go wild on people

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This was so fun to play with! I loved all the little people running around, though I was pretty sucky at coaxing them out to my paddocks. They seemed weirdly interested in my excavators, though I think that was just building placement on my part (I'm bad at sim games).

 

This is incredibly for 2 weeks' worth of work, fantastic accomplishment!

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Gonna part the kimono for a moment and reveal how the visitor AI works (there's a lot of systems in this game that I intentially don't reveal because they direct the chaos.

 

Visitors arrive on a boat (the number of visitors is based on a random base number + a multiplier based on your hype level.

They immediately look for a visitor center to go to and head over there.

Once they've checked in at the visitor center they create their destination list. They'll grab a list of any dinosaur pens that actually have dinos in them, as well as visit your research lab and choose one dig site at random to visit.

It's also at this point that they start generating money for you, and will continue to do so until they've visited all of their destinations and head back to the docks to leave. You can actually use this to cheese the system a bit, since placing your buildings far apart will keep them in your park longer and thus have them generate more revenue (although having more people in your park can be a big risk if there's a dino breakout).

 

Also if a dinosaur escapes its pen they immediately go into panic mode and stop generating money, which is why whenever that happens your revenue immediately flips into the negatives due to all your building maintenance costs.

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That's a cool system! I think I wasn't thinking big enough: I only had a couple of buildings really close together, which was probably why I failed pretty hard pretty quick. Gotta go fast big! :D

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My guards, the did nothing! Very fun, I love how you actually realized the title. Good.

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Dev log thread

 

This is really slick - looks and sounds great, and an easy drag-n-drop interface. I felt like I wasn't strategising much though - perhaps communicating more of the visitors' thinking and having a target amount would help this?

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Dev log thread

 

This is really slick - looks and sounds great, and an easy drag-n-drop interface. I felt like I wasn't strategising much though - perhaps communicating more of the visitors' thinking and having a target amount would help this?

 

Yeah, I think I'm definitely going to keep working on it and try to add more strategy mechanics. I'm trying to find ways to give the player more info without revealing too much about the mechanics that drive a lot of the chaos.

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I would totally buy a finished version of this game.

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So because I felt like it, here's a Build the Nublar update, now up on itch.io

 

v0.4

- Improved visitor behavior to make them more consistent

- Fixed a bug where the wires from the dino pens wouldn't render when you were far away.

- Fixed a bug where the wires from the dino pens would sometimes be rendered crooked.

- Fixed a bug where Guard towers placed during a dinosaur break out wouldn't deploy guards properly.

- Fixed a bug where you could trap visitors on the island by destroying all your docks.

- Rebalanced economy: Days are now faster but amounts earned per day are lower. The total amount of money earned over time remains the same.

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