Suitable Hosts

You've come to earth from beyond the stars, and you think you've found a home.

They're fragile, but if you're careful, you can live inside them without causing too much disruption.

However, there are others like you. That will certainly complicate things.

Suitable Hosts is a simulation game with light strategy elements. You play as an alien symbiote who breeds inside the brains of helpless human beings. Your goal is to remain in a state of equilibrium with these new hosts while also expanding your dominion over them.

Other alien species have the same idea, though, but you have an advantage: you can learn their xenogenetics, mimic them, and absorb their population as your own! What fun!

Fair warning: This game is a buggy disaster.

Suitable Hosts was created in the spring of 2020 for Team Dogpit's Sim Jam.

Gameplay Basics

All actions cost members of your ever-replenishing population as well as some amount of time.

As a species, you have the power to mutate resistances off and on.

Click on a Region to open up an information panel. From there, you can perform the following actions:

• Examine: Check a region for the presence of other alien symbiote species.
• Absorb: If a region is home to another alien symbiote species, this action allows you to attempt to absorb that species into your own. The close your xenogenome matches that of neighbouring species, the easier it is to absorb.
• Assess: Learn about the human population in this region.
• Infest: Take surplus symbiotes from one region and make an effort to infest the humans in this region.

Caveats

Known Issues / Pitfalls:

• This is a jam game, and very much a prototype. Shit ain't perfect. Bugs abound.
• The Enable/Disable buttons for the Mutation menu don't update properly.
• Some stats don't really do anything.
• We had to produce a lot more GUI elements than I had imagined when designing this game, so there is a lot of information obscured from the player unintentionally. We just didn't have the time.
• There isn't...much gameplay...oops.
• It crashes randomly. :)

Controls

• WASD - move the camera around
• QE - rotate camera
• M - toggle mutation menu
• Space Bar - pause simulation

Team

Christopher Chellew - Concept, Game Design, Systems Design, Programming, Music, Sound Effects

Colt Morrell - 3D Models, UI Assets

Nick Lemmon - UI Programming, Additional Programming