Godspeed Mankind

morrilet 2017-05-01 23:16

This was a really interesting game. I enjoyed thinking up a strategy to try to beat the system. I thought I had a handle on it, then my towns rapidly died off... The sound and art worked well together, and my only major problem is that I'm still a little dizzy from it. I think that giving a bit of a bigger camera view could've been helpful for that, but then you'd be able to see the status of all the towns/farms/rivers at the same time and some of the challenge would be lost. Dizziness aside, this was a great first entry. Nice work.

martenscedric 2017-05-02 02:20

Interesting game,kind of dizzy since you need to spin alot to have a decent idea on what is going around. It is quite challenging. Good first entry it would be nice with a bit more building types

poffle 2017-05-02 09:54

Nice idea and with a few more building types adding to the challenge of resource management I can see this turning into a pretty addictive game. Good work for your first entry!

stending 2017-05-02 15:13

Great idea! It's a good basic for something bigger in my opinion. It's fun to play but we don't have much to do. That's absolutely not a problem, that's already great for a LD entry, especially for a first entry!

Loved the audio and the visuals. The sfx were a bit high, I got surprised multiple times when my cursor got on a farm building x)

Nice work guys, good luck for the next!

somethinboutgames 2017-05-02 16:09

A little repetitive, I found that the winning tactic was spinning from mountains to farm to city all the time and just always taking the maximum amount of resources to the next stop. That of course can make one really dizzy :smile: Could be an entertaining experience, if expanded a tad further...

2017-05-02 17:21

Good idea, sticks to the theme and is strangely satisfying. I kept playing until I lost despite its simplicity. Only thing that stuck out was that it seemed to take a while before the difficulty ramped up.

joseph-matson 2017-05-02 18:23

Simple game, maybe a bit too slow-paced, but it looks slick and it's surprisingly fun to play!

stuntddude 2017-05-02 22:44

Interesting concept and nice visuals, but the core gameplay isn't especially interesting. The winning strategy seems to be the least interesting one (spin around the planet counter-clockwise and transport the maximum amount of each resource each time), and it's not very clear to see how strategy even affects the outcome. It's pretty much a matter of just spinning around the planet until everyone dies. Still, I think an interesting strategy game could be built on this premise, but the mechanics and game balance would have to be changed or expanded upon.

Nitpicks: the sound effects cut each other off, when it seems like it would make more sense for multiple sounds to be able to play at once. Also, you can't use `cmd+q` or the menu bar to quit the game on OSX, and it seems to trap the mouse for a random amount of time when you first start the game.

glimaleite 2017-05-02 22:58

Resource management is hard to get it right. I think you guys did a good job, specially for a first jam. I think that having some HUD that displays all states and resources would be very helpful. Also, I got confused on my first playthrough. I thought that there was only 1 town, so I just kept feeding that one, lol. The other one soon died.

kleinzach 2017-05-03 00:12

Got pretty repetitive. I could basically win by just spinning in one direction and unload or load as soon as I reached a place which had resources or needed some. I feel its a little hard to make engaging strategy when I can't see the whole picture. I would have liked to have events or something to break it up and make me think on my feet. I like the art and sound, and it fits the theme well.

abhimonk 2017-05-03 00:43

Nice work. I liked the simplicity of the game. It felt a little repetitive after a little while, once I figured out a strategy (rotate from water to farm to city to water to farm to city), but I liked the concept a lot. I think that the surplus wastage mechanic was really cool. It made me more conscious of how much of a resource I harvested before moving on. The art and sounds were very well done. The resource harvesting and use sound effects were particularly satisfying. Great first entry.

notiiivan 2017-05-03 00:49

The presentation was really good, and the game mechanics were easy to grasp. I was left kind of hoping that the (three?) different sets of each structure were differently coloured or otherwise marked, because I got pretty confused as to where I was on the globe. But overall, I enjoyed it. :)

hbocao 2017-05-03 00:55

First of all, congratulations on completing your first LD. Isn't it a great feeling?

So, let's go to what it matters. I found the game pretty easy to get to and to actually manage. Resource management is a pain to balance, so I was just hitting all the building like crazy. The only thing that bothered me was two keys for action (UP and DOWN), I think that just one key would be enough.

Overall, you did a very good job, guys. Looking forward to see your next entries ;)

lenon-kramer 2017-05-03 02:18

It is an interesting concept, and a quite interesting take on the resource management idea, if I got it right. There seems to be no winning condition, you go on serving the resources until it all die, or you get bored. Whatever comes first. And, as the consumption of resources is regular and stable, and its production only comes on cyclic intervals, it just doesn't matter how good is your strategy: you WILL lose. It is bleak. And realistic. And depicts very well the struggle we are facing on our own planet. And if I'm really not wrong about that analysis, then you deserve a whole 5 out of 5 on mood. :)

Aside that, I think the pacing builds up too slowly... if there was a population growth mechanic that would speed things it would be great. Also, as you can only take resources if you don't have any one on hand, there is no real necessity for you to have separated controls to gather and deliver resources, one button would do the job as well, making gameplay easier.

A solid entry for a first jam, though.

rixud 2017-05-03 19:56

really like the idea! my only suggestion is making the cities more differents, colors or something visible, my first city die because i think i only need to worry for 2 of them jejejejjejeje

cvetk0 2017-05-04 19:25

First I would like to thank everyone for all the positive feedback and constructive critics so far, you're great! :relieved:

We're aware that some mechanics may not be as polished as they could be and that it may be hard at first to orientate because all interactive locations of same type are exactly the same so there's really no way to distinguish between them. We did want to put a mini map in the game that would at least indicate which Town location is low on food resource but scrapped the idea somewhere during day two because we wanted to be sure we can implement all the main logic in the game. Also some location randomization would probably be good because as some of you already noted, just rotating counter clockwise is pretty much the way to ensure you can last as long as possible.

Since our third day which was work day only allowed us few afternoon hours of work after already being behind computer screens for about 8 hours we didn't really have much energy left to polish things more than we managed. The difficulty was mostly tuned by lowering the chance of rain over the River locations and increasing water consumption on farm Locations. Difficulty also dynamically increases when town dies and refuges flee to other cities (after 1st and 3rd) town dying.

Scoring was also subject to debate and eventually we went to scoring one point each second for each town surviving. I still think it would better to score points based on food resources delivered to Towns (without wasted surplus) as it would probably offer more strategic options on how many towns the player wants to try to keep up but again, time limit prevented us from testing this and we went with initial method.

Thanks again for feedback and keep playing and enjoying other peoples games!!! :metal:

yyam 2017-05-05 00:49

Nice game! I like the intense resource management concept, made for fast paced play :)

svarttand 2017-05-06 10:56

A nice game but it got boring quite fast when you just had to traverse the planet over and over again until the water run out and you cities died one by one. It didn't feel like I did something wrong when the water ran out because it was based on rng. So i would suggest not having the rng element in this type of game when it is all about resources gathering and everything is just based on when it rains.

The graphics fit well with the audio and that crated a nice cartoony feel.

chaseplays 2017-05-06 18:25

Wow! This was much more fun than I was expecting. It was really fun trying to juggle all 3 types of places at once. I liked the graphics, and everything was pretty clear to me visually. If you could have had scrolling between places as more of a menu system, it could have worked better, and by that, I mean that by pressing "left", you would immediately pan to the place to the left, instead of having to wait to pan between them. It could have made everything feel faster and more fun. Great job! I had a lot of fun with this, and ended up with 776 points.

realitycheck 2017-05-07 21:10

I like the idea of the game, and it was fun to play. However, I feel that there wasn't much strategy to it. I just kept going in circles in the same direction, picking up the water, dropping it in the farm, taking its food and dropping it in the town. It all boiled down to how much rainfall you got.

There is definitely something here, and it's an interesting concept. But, in it's current state it is only fun for a few minutes.

Nice music, and a good entry for a bunch of coworkers with little experience programming. Keep up the good work!

nvrskipgameday 2017-05-08 21:57

Really cool idea once I got the hang of it. I think it glitched once over the farm - I could put water in but wasn't able to take corn out, then my town died because I am bad at being a god and it was a sad day for all humanity. I liked the music as well, I think you could really play up the darker theme for this one - the music is already sullen, failing is sad, a more dismal color palette could have pushed this one even farther. Overall though, well done, I enjoyed it.

jackass 2017-05-10 15:06

I really like your concept and the game was pretty fun to play as well.

pikopik 2017-05-10 22:30

with proper balance this could be pretty enjoyable as a mobile game. just improve balance and slow down the gameplay enough that you only have to check on your world a few times a day.

conk 2017-05-13 15:33

This is great! As others have stated, with a few more buildings this would increase the difficulty and fun quite a bit, but it works fine without them. Everything is really solid, it's a good interpretation of the theme and the game-play is quite different. The audio was good but the farm noises got a bit annoying after a while.

The only thing I can think to improve the play-ability of the game would be to add an indicator on the HUD to show exactly how many cities there are. The landmarks were cool but it was hard to keep track of them all when trying to shift resources around.

Overall, really enjoyed it, good job :grin:

gama-croma 2017-05-18 09:18

Godot crashes when launching.

cvetk0 2017-05-18 16:32

@gama-croma strange, worked for us when we tested different platforms. Which OS are you using?