npexception 2016-04-19 12:03
Am I doing something wrong? I connected two towns, and clicked on the "Hire Traders" Button and hired a trader. But I don't get any money and I don't know where the trader is. How exactly do I start in this game?
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD35 → Continental Trade Route Association
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mood | 533 | 3.12 | ||
| Innovation | 575 | 3.00 | ||
| Graphics | 598 | 3.22 | ||
| Fun | 629 | 3.00 | ||
| Overall | 751 | 3.00 | ||
| Theme | 1065 | 2.27 | ||
| Coolness | 1712 | 35 |
Am I doing something wrong? I connected two towns, and clicked on the "Hire Traders" Button and hired a trader. But I don't get any money and I don't know where the trader is. How exactly do I start in this game?
I figured out that the best way is to create a trader first to see where it ends up and then create the trade route from where the trader was. I had over 200 hundred traders and made lots of cash. :) There is no end goal I believe?
I like these kinds of games a lot. It was fun watching the traders travel the routes. It was hard to be able to see the information tags on the traders, since they moved rather fast. There was neither a clear goal, nor an end game that I could see.
@NPException In this version of the game your hired traders will spawn in a random town. So to make it work properly you should first hire a trader and see where it ends up before building your first trade route (as pointed out by dreadzilla). Sorry for not being very thourogh with this.
As you said on description the game needs to be polished, but I encourage you to finish because I think is a good inital point to make a game. Congrats!
All in all a nice idea. There was a bit of quirky behavior with how to do the trade routes, or maybe I misunderstood it- I did manage to get several merchants trading and a good profit rolling. Games like these are awesome, but hard to add lots of content in such a small amount of time. I'll look forward to seeing a post compo version of this.
It was definitely relaxing, almost hypnotic, to play until all the towns are connected. Pixel terrain was well done, gameplay and camera were smooth. Had a quirk where it seemed to draw the pink line from the wrong town. Can see the underlying potential of the game, with more time to develop complexity and a risk/loss factor to the gameplay, it should be a fun management game.
I had a blast playing this game! The only thing that really bothered me was the inability to destroy/undo roads, and perhaps that there wasn't so much of a competition. Some thoughts:
- Showing statistics of usage of the roads would be nice, so you can see how you could re-arrange roads.
- Being able to click on a merchant to see status would also be nice, instead of following with the mouse.
- Statistics or maybe sprites to see where goods come from and where they're going.
- Ability to see supply and demand for each town.
Well, I could go on, but I think that you have ideas for yourself's. I just wanted to show that I really appreciated your game :)
As a bonus, here is a video of what happens when hiring 3000 merchants (mapping the scroll wheel to send left clicks). Note the hickups every merchant-update loop (?) https://vid.me/G1x8
@johnbrynte Thanks for the feedback! Yes those were things we planned for but really didn't have time to implement. Maybe in the future we'll make a more playable version of the game, but right now we are going to rest and play the other entries.
Haha, can't believe you actually got 3000 merchants. All those merchants look like a snake. We're so happy that you all appriciated our game. Seeing this really makes us want to push on and create more content. Thank you all!
Marcus "Fundo" Karåker
@johnbrynte Yeah, those hiccups are what we call: super bad panic mode ludum dare "it works" code.
It's checking event probability for every trader every second, and that code isn't very optimized...
The game is good to play, I guess I like the idea of making profit :-) But i think you have to add more content because it gets too repetitive very soon.
nice !
Looks good! I really liked the map and the mechanic of linking together cities was fun to build up in the initial stages of the game.
After a while though, there wasn't much challenge to the game, since there wasn't anything draining on my money as far as I could tell. I could kinda build whatever trade routes and it'd all be good. I guess there would have been a maintenance cost per-mile of trade route and/or cost to keep the traders supplied? I only later worked out you could hover over the traders. Being able to click on them any maybe micro-manage them a bit would have been good as well. Likewise for the cities, and for areas on the map, some better indication of what goods were in supply/demand.
I'm guessing that then, it'd be all about carefully adjusting the roads to, say, avoid hidden robber hotspots or make the most of going through certain areas to maximise the amount of goods acquired versus not using up too many supplies and having the merchant train starve?
There were a few odd things as well, such as the bug with where the road placement started. That got me really confused before I figured it out. Highlighting the city where the road starts would have also been good. And so many times I tried to right-click to cancel placement. This seems to have been trained into me subconsciously from playing so many strategy games over the years, so might be worth putting in as well. Also, it seemed like sometimes the water/mountains were blocking my route but not other times? Again I'm guessing that was a bug and the idea was to make mountains impassible or affect the trade route so you had to think carefully about not just drawing a straight line through a mountain range or over a desert or across the oceans.
Overall though, I liked the direction it's headed!
Very nice concept! I'd love to see more to this later too! It still needs something to be against you of course, and someway to make the merchant stats important, I didn't see what they were affecting really...
Oh I had the same effect of @Imperial Unit, The pink line always started with my first city, or some other when I did something like clicking twice the same city of something...
Anyways great entry!
This is a really cool idea. the balance is way off but thats not much of an issue. I loved watching all my traders mass around the map.
Well done! It is simple but entertaining, and as you say, a good starting point :)