Meep in the Woods

Meep in the Woods is a...

...Survival/Idle/Atmospheric Strategy-lite game created for the Fireside Jam 2023.

You play as a guiding presence to 3 Meep. The meep are simple yet mysterious creatures that you bestow with new knowledge and guide towards fuel for their fire.

Controls

Camera WASD for movement, Q and E for rotation.
Mouse LMB to interact with meep
Z - toggle torch

Tutorial

A meep explodes if it is in the darkness for 6 consecutive seconds. If the campfire runs out of firewood, the chances of survival lower significantly. Keep the campfire alive by teaching the meep how to refuel it, and how to restock the pile of firewood. While the campfire burns, you gain points over time.

Firewood can be discovered using the torch


Click on the meep to access a small menu where you can use your points to bestow knowledge of a new task. Either 5 points for refueling a fire, or 15 for gathering firewood.

Credits

Programming, Art and Audio created by Rooksy.

The game is written in the Godot Engine. v. 3.5.2

Audio is all created with Beepbox.

Art drawn in Aseprite.

External Public Assets used:

SFX: Stormy Wind In Forest / personal license under www.epidemicsound.com
SFX: Campfire Crackling  / courtesy of www.pixabay.com

dev corner

initial concept art

The game was originally meant to be made in 2d isometric, but the programming overhead proved itself to be too time costly. Godot 4 was initially used for the 3D version of the game, but HTML5 web builds aren't supported yet for this sort of project.
The core gameplay loop was not found until late in development. The first half of the week was spent tinkering with the visual and auditory experience. Once the genre of gameplay and core loop was picked, it became difficult to scope small enough for a realistic timeframe. Given more time there could have been many more additions to the game, such as modifying the meeps more, perks, meep interaction and teamwork, and the creation of new meep that could be customly sculpted.
The theme Guide was in theory very fitting, but in practice it became difficult to balance how much autonomy you wanted to give the meep compared to how much "control" the player could have. Should you be able to directly move them? Tell them what to do? I feel the game could have leaned more onto the strategy Rimworld-esque genre with task priorities and more control over the meep. The game could also have moved more over to the horror genre, given some scarier sounds, and perhaps hostile entities the meep would have to be defended from.

In the end, the resulting game became a cute prototype.