Spore Valley is a bite-sized resource management puzzle in which you grow an alien slime mold over a hex-based grid while carefully managing a turn-based metabolic resource system.
Will you starve and dry out, or will you complete your slime's life cycle, casting off spores into the wind to give rise to the next generation?
Your home planet is an arid, sun-blasted planet baking under a youthful star. But here and there, underground rivers dart to the surface, carving the desert into narrow, habitable valleys.
Your slime germinates in just such a valley, and you must steward it through its lifecycle. It is a complex sci-fi organism inspired by real-life examples of modern and fossil fungi, slime molds, and lichen, and is among the first complex organisms to make a living on this harsh young world.
Spore Valley blends a turn-based town-builder with a resource management puzzle. Your world is a map of hex tiles across which you must grow your alien slime, choosing from a variety of different biological forms to grow, each with their own unique requirements, constraints, and contributions to the puzzle of your survival.
Resource Management Puzzle
There are 5 core metabolites, which are resources critical to your slime's biological functioning. Different forms of your slime produce and consume different metabolites each time you progress to the next turn.
Running out of any of these resources can cause your slime to lose portions of its body or completely starve to death, so it's important to produce enough metabolites. But beware: if you produce too many, metabolites can build up to toxic levels, which can also cause your slime to suffer.
Metabolites depend on interacting with the slime's environment, and not all resources are infinite, so you will need to balance your rates of growth, production, and consumption carefully if you want to grow complex enough to complete your slime's life cycle.
Features
5 metabolites to manage
15 biological forms for your slime to use
Turn-based growth and resource management
Procedurally generated maps
A quirky 2.5D art style
Charmingly eccentric music
Support for mouse & keyboard, keyboard only, and mouse-only controls
Difficulty & tutorial settings
Developer cats in the credits
Spore Valley is a short game, meant to provide a complete experience of puzzling play in a single extended sitting. Still, random maps can add variety to replays, and you can use difficulty settings to challenge yourself to become a more efficient slime grower, whether for your own satisfaction or in pursuit of achievements.
Spore Valley first germinated as an solo developer entry in the Ludum Dare 54 game jam. It has since been rebuilt from the ground up with new mechanics, a new 2.5D art style, a new UI paradigm, and professional art and music. It was developed primarily using open-source tools, including the Godot game engine, Inkscape, Gimp, and Audacity.
This is Lystrosaurus Studio's first commercial game project. The studio is committed to understanding players' experiences, learning to make better and better games, and delivering quirky games to quirky people. Please to share your issues and your feedback with the developer!
