Alpha Honey, I Joined a Cult

Flashpants

Member
About

Honey, I Joined a Cult is a top-down management style game where you aim to create and run and your own 1970s cult.

Summary

There’s lots you need to do to make your cult work: attract new followers and keep them indoctrinated, hire full time staff to take care of the day-to-day running of things, expand your HQ, steer clear of the authorities and avoid being infiltrated, manage your finances and keep your leader happy (you wouldn’t like him when he’s angry).

Cult Game Mechanics Overview

Your main source of income is by recruiting new followers and getting as much money out of them as possible. To get more money from the followers you’ll have to level them up (you get more money the higher the rank they reach, so you’ll want to really look after the higher members, unless they’ve run out of money, in which case you might want to ignore them).

There’s a number of things you can do get the most out of your followers. For example you could send them to the Hypno Chamber which will increase their indoctrination, or perhaps collect some incriminating evidence about them so that if they ever do leave they’re less likely to go to the authorities with their horror stories (and therefore generate less heat for you).

Customisation of your Cult

We’re working on implementing a number of ways to customise your cult, which includes the obvious things such as choosing a name for it and your leader, but you can also name your divine entity, your holy book and relic, and choose a number of different uniforms and physically different assets for certain items.

Most customisation is purely aesthetic but we think it’s quite cool for your cultists to be uttering things like “All hail [custom divine entity]!” every now and again, or reading from the Book of [Zorb] (or whatever). We’re also hoping to have different worshipping styles, so for example, if you chose a cult style based on glam rock, when your worshippers are in your holy room, they would all start headbanging as the congregation are whipped into a frenzy (this is just an example, but sounds kind of good actually!).

Links

www.solesurvivorgames.com

https://twitter.com/solesurvivorgms

If you want to stay updated then follow us on twitter as we’ll be updating that most regularly. You can also sign-up for our mailing list on the website if you’re not into all this twitter malarkey.

If you’ve got any feedback, ideas, criticism (constructive), then let us know! Besides a couple of twitter posts yesterday you’re amongst the first people to know about HIJAC, so definitely let us know what you’re thinking.

Screenshots









 

Flashpants

Member
Cheers for the the feedback on the graphics, glad you like it!

After much consideration we've decided to keep our original name! :)
 
F

FROGANUS

Guest
wow great idea. nice characters- love the mustaches!
hopefully there will be plenty of groovy interior design options.
has it got shag carpet yet???
 

Flashpants

Member
wow great idea. nice characters- love the mustaches!
hopefully there will be plenty of groovy interior design options.
has it got shag carpet yet???
Thanks, that's the best feedback we've had. Shagpile carpet is actually already on our list of things to add! We're also going to have some 70s vehicles for outside the base, a fondue set for the canteen (they only eat burgers at the moment), and some awful 70s style brown patterns (perhaps in the menus or as wallpaper in the game), so should be pretty 70s by the time we finish.

At the moment our main focus is trying to get the core game mechanics sorted so that in the near(ish) future we can post up a demo or at least some videos of a cult in operation. We've just finished the save-game system which was a real challenge and took an absolute age to get working...
 
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Flashpants

Member

It’s been a pretty productive 9 months since we first posted here. In that time, as well as continuing with the dev of HIJAC, we’ve set up our steam page (here), gone to our first expo at Insomnia 62 in Birmingham and had a feature written on the game by Rock, Paper, Shotgun (here)!


Given our inexperience when we started making the game, we’ve had to replace pretty much all of the early code that we put in. These forums have been invaluable source of information for us as well as the numerous youtube tutorials out there. We’ve also had a major rethink of the game mechanics as our original design didn’t provide the depth or longevity in game play that we wanted before – we’ve now added in a number of new resources, character traits and stats that will have to consider t if you’re doing to succeed. We’ve also added in:

Mission system and world map

You can now send your Cultists on missions at various locations to do the bidding of your cult. You might be rounding up vagrants at the local homeless shelter, you might be poisoning the water supply. Missions will allow you to wield your cults power in the outside world – perhaps you’ll take a particularly aggressive stance towards external threats, or perhaps you’ll keep your head down, slowly infiltrating the political system and focussing on your cults image.


For your mission to be successful, you’ll need to make sure you send the best Cultists out to do the job. Traits and skills play an important role in the outcome, as does planning the mission in advance in your cult HQ.

Custom room size building

Nobody was happy with pre-set room sizes so now you can drag build whatever size rooms you want. You can see this being used in the trailer.




User Interface

We’ve also been updating the UI to make it a bit more intuitive and attractive. This is still a WiP but we’re getting there. In general the feedback at Insomnia 62 (our first expo) was that all of the UI needed to be bigger, so we’ve improved the scale of everything.

Check our steam page (linked above) if you want to see some more screenshots or some further information.
 
S

Sam (Deleted User)

Guest
Just hearing the word "cult" I think of a classic episode of 'Everybody Loves Raymond". XD This game looks interesting. I'm not too big on simulator games, but I appreciate the artwork and all the effort that went into the customization of this game. I hope you're proud of yourself - you ought to be! :)
 

Flashpants

Member
I'm not too big on simulator games, but I appreciate the artwork and all the effort that went into the customization of this game. I hope you're proud of yourself - you ought to be!
Thanks Samuel. It's been very rewarding to see it slowly come together and we're pretty pleased with the response it's got. We're looking to have a playable release in the not too distant future and then release on Steam sometime after that.
 

Flashpants

Member
Realised that we hadn't posted an update here for quite some time. To cut a long story short, Honey, I Joined a Cult turned in to something much more ambitious that we had anticipated so we decided to get some help on the development and signed with Team17! They're not only helping with the publishing but also giving us lots of support on the development including design, art, UI etc. Rather than repeat what we've said elsewhere there's more info on why we decided to go down the publisher route and with Team17 in particular here:

Steam announcement - why we signed with Team17

We've started to update many things in the game but the visuals were one of the first things we looked at. We've improved these in numerous different ways since signing and there's a summary of the changes we put in here:

Steam announcement - Art improvement

I've included a few screenshots below.









Any questions/comments then let us know!
 
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