Darwin's Apple - LD48 "evolution"

Showcase
#1

Here is my game for LD48 #24 for the theme “evolution.” 48 hours really is too little time to spend on such a big theme, and the 9 hours I had was especially too little. I built it all on top of an engine I already made which includes movement and pathfinding and such, so I saved some time there. This is written in Java. :point:

The game is called Darwin’s Apple and has very little to do with Darwin.
LD Page
Applet
JAR download

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/wp-content/compo2/163678/531-shot0.png

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/wp-content/compo2/163678/531-shot1.png

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/wp-content/compo2/163678/531-shot2.png

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/wp-content/compo2/163678/531-shot3.png

You are a renegade angel who has decided that man should have the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge in order to evolve from Homo Erectus to Homo Sapiens. The path to the fruit is fraught with dangers, however, and the lowly Homo Erectus are not strong enough to make it there alone. You must selectively breed the Homo Erectus until they are strong enough to fight off the feral creatures blocking the way to the apple.

TO MOVE, LEFT CLICK ANYWHERE on screen. You will automatically path find. In addition, HOLD SPACE to lure Homo Erectus after you, RIGHT CLICK OR SHIFT-CLICK a Homo Erectus to tell it to go breed, and HOLD SHIFT OR S to bring up a stats display for each Homo Erectus.

The forbidden fruit is at the bottom right of the map. The monsters get stronger as you go, and you may also find different types of Homo Erectus along different side paths.

TIPS:
A good strategy really is to just select for fertility first, and then when you have very high fertility start selecting for attack and defense. The game is not terribly well balanced so you can pretty quickly get a small army that can win you the day. Also, I erred on the side of easy so it’s very unlikely for a child to be worse than its parent in any way - if you keep breeding you’re golden. I also implemented but later removed an inbreeding function (inbred creatures are much much worse) but I didn’t have time to communicate this aspect at all so it’s removed.

------------>Known issues:
-Splash screen says go the bottom left. GO TO THE BOTTOM RIGHT ACTUALLY. Whoops.
-Game hangs momentarily at the start presumably due to some assets needing to load which I didn’t bother to do beforehand.

#2

nice game!, really enjoyed it :-*

#3

The sounds are somehow bugged. For me one sound froze so it sounded like a frog was hit by a car dozens of times. Also the sound did not stop playing after I closed the game. I had to kill the java process to make it stop.

Besides that I really like the look of your game.

#4

Looks cool. However sometimes I can’t see the homo erectuses under the trees.
My grammar is just cool like that 8)

#5

Hm, that’s odd. I guess it may be because I use AudioClip from Applet which really sucks. It wouldn’t even played my sounds until I made them 16 bit. I should switch my game framework over to Paulscode sound library, but I’ve been too lazy.

I think I have seen the infinite sound playing after quit glitch though. What OS are you on and were you playing Applet or JAR?

#6

Windows 7 Home Premium 64 Bit. I played the JAR version.