FoonLudum Dare ExplorerLD26 → 50 years

50 years

By echa

View on Wayback Machine

CategoryRankScoreCount
Coolness279
Theme3133.79
Innovation7732.85
Fun8952.62
Overall9142.83
Humor9611.67
Mood10112.39
Graphics13271.52

Comments

bobo72a 2013-04-29 02:38

It was hard to learn which buildings were which key. A guide would be helpful.

tahooey 2013-04-29 08:14

Quirky little game, would of been nice with some visuals, but nice idea

solokix334 2013-04-29 08:29

Quite a fun game really(once i worked out what to do) You should probably add a guide or something or at least a list of all the buildings.

joekinley 2013-05-02 11:21

Nice effort you did there. But it was really hard to play.
I had 3 Swordsmen but never was I able to send them to war, i was only asked peasants. So one time there were a lot of folks attacking, I was smashed and everything was over.

It was hard to see what the main goal in this game was. What was the point of playing? What was the purpose of the stuff I built? Nothing seemed to do anything.

Should have been easy to at least add a little graphics so I could see what was happening.

echa 2013-05-02 19:17

You need to survive for 50 years. )
Unfortunately, game is too hard. If you can't win on normal (like me), try to play on "easy".
(I'm making post-compo version now.)

thecze 2013-05-02 21:17

A list of buildings would be very helpful. Besides that I really like old school strategy games like that!

the-jack 2013-05-02 21:25

There's a nice core concept here. I'm trying to imagine it with graphics & more design, it would be pretty interesting I think.

madballneek 2013-05-02 21:26

I like this (even though it is pretty challenging! But 48 hours doesn't lend itself to fine tune design all that much). Great use of the theme.

davidemo89 2013-05-02 21:36

Very minimal and retro =)

mildmojo 2013-05-03 17:13

It took me three tries to beat it in easy mode. =)

Year 33 I got hit with 3 swordsmen, 3 archers, 1 knight, 1 ballista, 5 (!!!) champions, and 1 mage. I fought back with 15 swordsmen and sent the whole village of 27 peasants to back them up. I lost 13 swordsmen and lived to tell about it. That was the second game that I hit a wall around level 32-33.

There's something really charming about Lemonade Stand style games that are all about min/maxing a simple simulation. I do wish the role of each building was clearer; I never figured out what Town Halls did, and I was never prompted to build more of them. As such, it would've been nice if I lost those to raiders before I lost by blessed chicken farms. =P

I think the game could've used a touch more polish. It would've been nice if it allowed me to back up and make a different choice when I did something invalid (like trying to buy 18 peasants when I only had 400 gold). Likewise, most games I've played like this give you sane defaults at each prompt so you can just hit Enter to get through them; using Esc was a touch awkward. I would've liked descriptions of the special game modes, too. I tried mad peasants, which seemed to make all attacks be 100% peasants. That was cute.

ashdnazg 2013-05-03 17:33

Became much better after looking in the code and understanding what buildings are available and what they're doing...

prelucid 2013-05-04 23:04

Great game. I got massacred!

superdisk 2013-05-05 00:23

Hey there. I'd like to know: what font did you use?

lafolie 2013-05-05 00:40

Really needs some way to list the build commands. Fun, always good to see text games on here.

avidgamernino 2013-05-05 00:52

I got peasants, but got no gold.. Lazy peasants in my game.

christina-nordlander 2013-05-05 21:03

Tough (even on Easy mode), but pretty fun. Reminded me of a stripped-down "Age of Empires". I might be coming back to this one to see if I can do better.

Typo: on the Game Over screen, it says "Restar".

mildmojo 2013-05-06 20:55

I tried the post-compo version, but normal mode is still really unforgiving. I think you need a 5-year attack-free window at the start of the game before the random number generator takes over. Even in easy mode, I played multiple games where my 2 peasants couldn't take on a swordsman who attacked in the first year!

The building explanations were nice, but didn't help a lot. I *think* the barracks are the limit of how many swordsmen you can train in a single year, right? The barracks also mentions it can train archers and knights, but that feature doesn't seem to be in the game yet.

The Town Hall says something about training peasants and getting upgraded to a keep, but I don't know what it means to train peasants and there doesn't seem to be a Keep upgrade feature.

Experience-related rewards are great. Since you can effectively only get 3 per game and you've built 9 of them, it takes a while to figure out what they are. One powerup referenced mages, but I never found a way to get mages. One affected knights, but knights only seemed to be available through one of the other perks and it was unlikely he'd survive until you leveled up again.

echa 2013-05-06 23:04

Uh, barracks. You can train archers and knights, but you need other buildings for that. Barracks increase maximum units/year that can be trainded.

anjack 2013-05-06 23:21

Text-based civ-type world-building! Awesome idea! I really enjoyed this game. You should make it multi-player!

brookman 2013-05-07 12:53

Very cool timesink ;) had a time to get used to the game... One one side, a building list would be nice, on the other side it's somehow part of the game, that you have to find out what buildings there are. The hard mode is definitely to hard for me ;)

floko 2013-05-07 12:55

Interesting system and nice idea! Damn swordsman coming in year one keept defeating me D:

This game is yet raw, but very promissing!

You could add a list of all buildings, a /? or so. Not having one frustrated me a little bit, since I lost some turns guessing (and losing) D:

kunonooni 2013-05-07 22:07

Wow! That took me back to my BBS days. Very good use of theme.

martin_monosys 2013-05-08 22:28

Not bad, but also not for me... I'm more of a graphics man ... :)

susanthecat 2013-05-08 23:05

ditto on the building guide.

Loved the game tho' once I got the hang of it.

Susan

mildmojo 2013-05-09 05:41

Wait, there are buildings other than the three listed? Whoa.

swizzcheez 2013-05-14 16:58

Nice game. I like the idea but couldn't get past year 10.

captainkraft 2013-05-14 17:10

I like this style of game; however, I think there needs to be more depth. Good start to a cool game

jacic 2013-05-15 21:33

Nice idea, but it is pretty hard!