Title: Save da People!

Description: You are a firefighter venturing into a building in flames to save as many people as you can before the building collapses! Unfortunately, you can not save everyone, so you must choose who are you going to save wisely!

This is our entry for the Ludum Dare 43.

Our initial idea was creating a game where you could only save a certain number of people, but not everyone. So some people would need to be sacrificed in order for others to be saved.

For platform, we went with Pico-8.

• Multi-storey building for the player to navigate
• Different types of victions (children, adults, elderly) → different rescuing times
• Fire and/or debris limiting walkable tiles
• Always at least one person would have to die
• Victims names and background generated procedurally
• Death toll list at the end, reinforcing sense of guilt

Unfortunately, a lot of things were not implemented due to time limitations (specially the procedural generation bits). We did succeed in aiming for a small game, but it became a very limited/short experience. The game has almost no replay value after the first match. Also, balancing victim types was also quite tough, and although we do have the three types implemented, they didn't provide any noticeable changes in game mechanics — which ended up being quite shallow.

The main lessons to take away are aiming at making good use of the mechanics and creating more complete experience for game.

Licensed under the MIT License.