Grid Land

How to play:

Creatures generate Essences automatically. Click a creature to see its abilities. Click it while selected to move it. Use the UI on the right side of the screen to organize resources for summoning. Sacrifice creatures to improve chances of successful summoning. While you wait for more essence, reorganize your grid for an optimal strategic layout.

Goals:

Goal 1: Try to collect every creature! (There are 56 total) Goal 2: Try to maximize your essence production! Go full optimization game!

Mechanics explanation: (this section is not required to read, but offers clarification if you get confused. Feel free to ask in the comments as well!)

Essence: Essence is the currency of this game. Each creature by default generates 1 essence from one of their types (chosen randomly) every 60 seconds. The first waiting period is 4 seconds, and all subsequent waits are 2 seconds longer, until it reaches 60. This is to make it so you don’t get as stuck in the early game and hopefully doesn’t make the late game too easy.

Abilities: Each creature also has a unique ability. These can trigger when producing essence, trigger before the creature is sacrificed, or be a static effect. Ability execution order during essence production is left to right, bottom to top.

Summoning: To summon a creature, load some essences into the UI. The success of your summoning attempt depends on how many essences you put in, as well as any sacrifice you add. When you summon a creature, each essence you choose has a chance of being included in the creature you summon. This chance depends on the total number of elements you use, the number of essence used, and the elements of the sacrifice used. When calculating the chance of success for an element, you start at the base chance, and for each additional essence: add the base chance divided by the remaining percent. So 50% with 1 would mean 75% with 2, 87.5% with 3, etc.

Base chances for : Single-type summon: 50% double-type summon: 25% triple-type summon: 10% quadruple-type summon: 5%

sacrificing: when you choose to sacrifice a creature, you double the effect of essences for any types included in the sacrificed creature’s type-combo. For example, doing a summon attempt with 2 essence and a sacrifice that matches that type will effectively be the same as a summon attempt with 4 essence of that type and no sacrifice. Sacrificed creatures are removed from the grid after being sacrificed. Creatures with abilities that trigger on sacrifice trigger before the creature is removed from the grid.

This game was originally made for the Ludum Dare 55 game jam. The link to that page is here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/grid-land