Song of the Hollow Mother
Song of the Hollow Mother is a resource management and village-building game set in a small, isolated community that survives thanks to a strange, ancient being the villagers simply call Mother.
You take the role of the village leader, guiding this fragile society as you decide what to build, what to improve, which technologies to pursue, and even the fate of your people. Your choices will shape the future of the village and determine how well the entity continues to grow and provide the energy your villagers depend on.
The more you give, the more she gives back.
The game can be played entirely with the mouse. Keyboard shortcuts are also available for convenience. For example, pressing B opens the building panel and R opens the research panel.
Most elements in the game include helpful descriptions. Simply hover your mouse over them to learn more.
This project, except for the audio files (listed below), was exclusively developed by me, CCadori, during the period of one week, as a submission for the Godot Wild Jam.
All game sounds can be found for free on the website https://pixabay.com/
Special thanks to geoffharvey for his always amazing music!
Comments
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Hey there! I played the game for an hour and wrote up a small report with some feedback.
Feel free to reach out to me if you want further testing!
Feedback:
- Nice art style. It's very unique! Which program did you use? Inkscape?
- The UI / UX is very easy to pick up and understand with little tutorial
- I was expecting the amount of land to build on to grow.
- Sometimes when levelling up buildings there is no perceived effect. (No stats update)
- After I purchase all the research is there anything else I can do? or is it tied to the mother level? I got to mother level 11 and nothing else happened.
- This is very solid for a game jam entry! curious what is going to come for this in the future!
Bugs:
- I honestly don't have many bugs to point out! I've done QA for some big projects and this game has no giant issues that I see within the hour of playing.
- The text is a bit small when describing the houses, mother, and the resources
- If you delete all your population housing, then feed all your villagers. You still gain stats like food, faith research, with no one in the city.
Suggestions:
- Could add some subtle ambient effects when hovering or selecting houses to upgrade (i.e. an Altar might have some subtle chanting, a bar (if one existed, could have a bunch of people talking with beers clinking)
- Throwing it out there! ... Earlier I thought I was able to place the kitchen garden on the farm house because I ran out of space quite early (this was before I knew I should delete buildings). Then I thought it might be neat to add deco items (signs, lamps, chimneys, etc.) on to the house to show it's been upgraded. (Think space engineer vehicle creation).
- Could be nicer to the player to also get a bit more money back when destroying upgraded building, maybe 25% or so.
- Could use bigger denominations of feeding as levels get higher. i.e. when you are level 9. Feeding 1 is not optimal haha. (Maybe percentage of current total population?)
- Some ideas for progression.
--> You could use the feeding to increase land size upto a point
--> Could add a vector to make scaling population harder. Pollution. And you buy things to combat pollution.
--> Maybe for building upgrades, you can do something substantial every X upgrades, also perhaps each building might provide something unique. As I see some buildings are just inherently better it might devolve the town into being only using the highest tier of buildings -- making all towns look the same in end game.
--> Could do with some decoration for those who enjoy it to make their towns look unique.
--> Tie more upgrades to mother level. Maybe each mother level will incrementally increase a stat (i.e. villagers inherently give +0.1 faith). It can be very miniscule, then at certain points, it can be housing, more research opportunities. etc..
- For production buildings. maybe it'd be good to group them by production type (from my current knowledge Farm is a clear upgrade to kitchen garden, but is 2 buildings apart from each other)
- When you level up buildings. Might be cool to see what the level up might entail (i.e. showing +2 on bonus generation)
Neat game, love the whole concept :D
Thanks for leaving a review 😊
Bit of an arse game
Has a 2 dimensional economy that keeps interest for all of 2 minutes
You spend a good while getting ready to send chains of sacrifices into the beast, pretty much everything in the game suggests there's an ending, and by stage 22 of 'The Mother', there is still nothing. On top of that your numbers needlessly balloon for no reason meaning it takes 6 weeks to even get there, let alone the delay in sacrificing, just to be not only disappointed but led on.
Music choice was nice. And it's the only nice thing I can say about this title.
Hey, thanks for the honest review, I hope you had at least a little fun, but yes, the game has no ending at this point, it was built with the idea of being a cult flavored resource manager.
Nice game! the graphics is just beautiful and the sounds also exceptional.
After mother level 10 it just became boring because i have infinity population but this delay on "feed +15" locks the progression rate, so i just stoped on level 15 because its just repetitive and boring for waiting this delay to feed mother.
but for a jam game! you nailed it! congrats
Hi Xand, thanks for leaving a review, that's pretty much the limitation of content the game have at the moment. After lvl 15-20 there are no more different content/skins, so you pretty much played all the game 😊! Congrats and thanks gain!