FoonLudum Dare ExplorerLD24 → Game Of City Life

Game Of City Life

By bitspace

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CategoryRankScoreCount
Coolness366
Innovation723.20
Mood992.96
Overall1053.20
Fun1073.00
Graphics1183.29
Audio1282.75
Theme1522.64
Humor1741.88

Comments

small-trouble 2012-08-28 13:21

The game was unclear even after reading the instructions, but from what I've played it seems like a good idea and could be expanded into a good game.

covebit 2012-08-28 13:23

i agree with Small trouble, cool concept.

zoomyzoom 2012-08-28 13:58

Im confused! lots of potential though!

kevincorrigan 2012-08-28 14:52

I could not get this to work, I just kept getting an unhandled exception message

lemontree 2012-08-28 15:05

Good idea but very poor implementation!

bitspace 2012-08-28 17:56

@kevincorrigan: the only unhandled exception I know of is if there are eiter some resources missing (ie. something not extracted from archive) OR if you have no OpenAL (but in that case, the message would say exactly that). Maybe it was one of those?

fhoenig 2012-08-29 05:34

Do you think this would easily be portable to compile on OSX? I wanna try it out. We did a city theme too.

mes 2012-08-29 06:07

Looks like it has lots of potential, but there is more explanation / clarity needed around what to do / what results to get. Maybe explain the mechanic more on the first load-in ?

Good work overall, I suggest spending more time with this.

raroadkill 2012-08-29 06:14

Very cool idea. took me awhile but I think I got most of it figured out. Would love to see this keep being worked on. Think it has a lot of potential

SethR 2012-08-29 11:44

Needs a bit more polish but kudos for digging into an ambitious idea like this

goerp 2012-08-29 11:49

It worked well, and played good. It looks a lot like SimCity though (but build in 48 hours, so impressive nonetheless).

bitspace 2012-08-29 14:12

The IRC-channel told me that was okay to do at this point, so... I have added a long description of how to play. I hope that clears things up.

Thanks for all the kind words :) Looks like we have little choice then... ;-)

We have been asked for a Linux version on another forum, so Bergmann is currently working on porting this thing over from Delphi to Lazarus. And now, he has a power outage in the middle of the day. So yeah, that's going to take some time, but we're working on it and if things pan out, we should be able to cross-compile to pretty much everything that has ogg/vorbis, OpenGL and OpenAL.

@goerp: I used to play SC4 hours on end, I guess that just *has* to show on a game like that (and some of that is even intentional) ;-)

//Martok

triliyn 2012-08-30 00:32

This sounds interesting, but I couldn't run it. When I double clicked the executable I got something like "Error: No OpenAL found" and a game window opened, but presented an error: "Zugriffsverletzung bei Adresse 0049601F in Modul 'CityLife.exe'. Lesen von Adresse 00000008."
Trying to close this error just pops it up again, so I had to kill it with Task Manager.

bitspace 2012-08-30 11:37

Uploaded a version that properly terminates if no OpenAL is found. Literally a two-line-change. //Martok

cipher 2012-09-01 09:32

This was nice, i got kinda addicted after a while just building things and gaining money :)

davedobson 2012-09-02 17:23

I was a little disturbed to see an 8/30 creation date for the game executable, but I guess that's the OpenAL bug fix? I'm not sure that's kosher with the competition (i.e. there are bugs in mine that I'd like to fix too but didn't). The game is a really cool idea though a little bit hard to figure out, since the impacts of the buildings aren't all obvious, and the effects of distance between them weren't clear to me. It may well be I didn't read deeply enough - the tips on the buildings referenced statistics I didn't really understand and didn't know the value of. I did really like how the screen looked, and how your buildings grew with more use. The interface worked well after I got used to it - I just didn't totally understand what I was doing or what would be valuable to accomplish. But a neat idea and well-executed. Nice work.

kayelgee 2012-09-02 19:15

good concept

juaxix 2012-09-02 19:47

I would like to know how to build the star buildings, i like the autoplay button , this game has a truly potential m8.
Check out my city!
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/89/gameofcitylifel.jpg/
I think there is a little bug with the height computation, sometimes the same building grows and then decrease in an infinite loop, other times the height is limitless XD
simple game? I dont think show but i see myself playing and enjoying this game ,thanks for your time

jedi 2012-09-02 22:40

Wow, a simcity simulator for a Jam game; what an achievement!
Sadly, there doesn't seem to be much challenge at all. Maybe I just got lucky.

bitspace 2012-09-03 12:29

@DaveDobson: the way I understand it, bugfixing is allowed to fix "application-breaking" bugs, ie. if it doesn't start at all, but nothing gameplay-related (of course). IMHO fixing what triliyn described falls into the first category... You can check up on us on the Github repo, here's the diff: https://github.com/martok/ld-24/compare/GOCL1...GOCL1_1

@Everyone else: Porting to other platforms turned out to be more of a challenge because of the libraries we used. At least one of them is not cross-platform at all, so I think there won't be any ports. We could do Win32+Win64, that works, but it's kinda pointless.
What I've been told is that it *does* work using wine on Linux.

As for it being kind of easy... let's just say "Balancing" never got crossed off on the to-do list ;-)

demonpants 2012-09-05 06:13

Looks very pretty. Is there a Mac version in the works?

mohammad 2012-09-06 02:14

F***
Cant even read the readme.
Can you include the OpenAL?

bitspace 2012-09-06 14:55

@mohammad: here you can download the latest OpenAL-Files: http://connect.creativelabs.com/openal/Downloads/Forms/AllItems.aspx

spunkmeyer 2012-09-06 20:14

crashes on win7 64 bit

pierrec 2012-09-08 14:33

It seems great but too much complicated to me...you should make a post compo version with a playable tutorial

jonathang 2012-09-09 14:14

I enjoyed this and played it for a few hours! I didn't quite understand all of the interactions, but it's fun to experiment and try things out. I really like the wireframe graphics and ambient music!

hgcummings 2012-09-11 18:18

I definitely like the idea (kind of a stripped-down SimCity) and thought it was well executed. It's a really impressive game for 72 hours. The controls were sometimes a bit clunky (a lot of clicks to add a single building) but my main problem was that nothing 'bad' seemed to happen: I could just go on autoplay and build a load of stuff, with the interactions of pollution and luxury not really presenting me any problems. I think with a bit more challenge and a bit more feedback to the player this would be a really fun game though.

kibertoad 2012-09-16 18:07

Nice idea, wish it got more polish :(.