Things We Left Behind

"Civilizations are fragile, impermanent things." 

        – Joseph Tainter

In Things We Left Behind, you control a civilization burgeoning beyond its available resources. Expand, extract, construct and produce according to your needs, but keep in mind the limited resources on the island you have settled on.

Things We Left Behind is our submission for Ludum Dare 49 built around its theme, "Unstable". Its central premise is based on prominent, sometimes repeated societal collapses throughout history.

You begin by placing a single house, around which you must build structures. As you expand, your society will require increasing amounts of natural resources and drain the land, eroding fields and fertile soil. Further growth leads to additional actions, which your society must take as it can't afford to rest on its laurels. Drag and drop building tiles onto the hex grid to build them, but keep an eye on their area of influence so they don't waste resources and make your people go hungry. You can also drag a building onto a tile with a pre-existing building of the same type to upgrade it for more efficiency – but more demanding upkeep!

"A society that has reached this point cannot simply rest on its accomplishments." 

        – Joseph Tainter

Don't be alarmed by the rules. You can always go back to the tutorial screen in-game by pressing H. Take your time to make the choices your society's fate depends on, as there is no timer. The game is made with replayability in mind, featuring a relaxing and adaptive soundtrack as well as randomized quotes from scholars of collapsed cultures both past and future.

There is no game over, nor can you "beat" the game: your final score is the number of monuments you erect to remember your once-prosperous people by before you run out of resources permanently. All civilizations fall eventually.

Change Log

The original jam versions of the game are downloadable as the unpatched versions.

Patch 1.1 - October 5, 2021

- Modified the tutorial window to be more clear about the rules of tile placement and made the text layout easier to follow

- Changed font colors of two UI elements to be easier read due to dark background.

Patch 1.2 - October 6, 2021

- Upgraded houses adjacent to single field now have their food requirement shown properly

- Fixed food surplus not updating properly after erosion occurs

- Upgraded Mines now need to be adjacent to 3 houses instead of 2, as stated in the rules

- The game now stops you from performing actions during production phase properly

- Distance evaluation should now be accurate for all tiles, disallowing placement further away than stated in the rules

Patch 1.3 - October 7, 2021

- Fixed era 4 not ending after building houses due to small indexing error.

Patch 1.4 - October 7, 2021

- Fixed an issue where starting the game over didn't reset the upgraded value of tiles.

Created by:

Mirella Baas

Niko Finnilä

Jonas Haverinen

Ville Jantunen

Johannes Metsälampi

Toomas Pentala

Ilmo Salmenperä

Featuring quotes from:

C. F. Volney: The Ruins: Or a Survey of the Revolutions of Empires, 1796

Joseph Tainter: The Collapse of Complex Societies, 1988

Jared Diamond: Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, 2005

"Once the island got into trouble, there was no way they could get free." 

        – Jared Diamond

IMPORTANT

If playing the unpatched version, please restart the game each time you lose, as the resetting the game is very broken