Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD38 → Dean's World
By laguna, Thunraz and BloodyOrange
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 228 | 3.63 | 24 | |
| Fun | 351 | 3.22 | 24 | |
| Innovation | 548 | 2.81 | 24 | |
| Theme | 325 | 3.54 | 24 | |
| Graphics | 247 | 3.86 | 24 | |
| Humor | 291 | 2.85 | 22 | |
| Mood | 161 | 3.71 | 23 |
Wow, this game is really fun, even that I die so fast. Graphics is nice, discovering effect, fog of war. And it's nice to see your source code. I would change that crafting requires specific position for ingredients. But game is really nice!
A very nice game, with good sounds. It was like a 2d minecraft. The game was a bit too hard to survive, even after I read your guide. It is pretty much only one route to take in resource gathering. Any other path and you die... The art style was very nice and I really enjoyed the look of the fog disappearing. The crafting could have shown you when you got something right before you made it and it would also have been nice to have one button to move everything back to your inventory. The world could have been an island instead of a world with a black edge (as an island the world would seem more endless).
But all in all a very solid entry!
It's a promising start, but seems unfinished. The inventory system is obviously inspired by Minecraft, and would benefit from some of its features, such as placing one stack onto another to swap them, or being able to place down one item from a stack at a time. Placing down half the stack instead doesn't seem to have any benefit, and just serves to make crafting frustrating. Also, because there's no way to drop items out of your inventory, there's a genuine risk of running out of inventory space and making it impossible to complete the game because you collected too much stuff.
The game makes no attempt to teach the player, and the only way to progress is to follow the guide step by step, at which point it's less of a game and more of an exercise in following instructions. Even just adding tooltips to the items would do a lot to improve this. Some items are easy to discern (logs, pickaxe), but others are completely baffling (a green lowercase cursive letter 'b'? oh, that's used to make cloth) and impossible to guess what they're used for without reading the guide. Additionally, I think the difficulty curve of the game is too steep, and bad RNG in the world generation (i.e. not finding fiber right away, because bushes don't visually indicate what they drop) can make it virtually impossible to survive past the first minute or so, leaving you in a position where you're essentially standing around waiting to die so you can generate another world and try again. It's a race to craft the first few items in time, but after you have a tent and campfire, there's no more challenge, and the rest of the game essentially turns into a fetch quest.
I noticed a few things that seem like bugs. First, the character's center seems to be slightly to the east, meaning they can only interact with things to the right. Not a big deal but kind of weird. Two rocks generated in the same square in one of my worlds. And it's possible to use the stone pickaxe from anywhere in the inventory without degrading its durability.
The way tiles appear as you wander around looks great, but unfortunately you don't see it much, because the game's systems discourage exploring any farther than you have to. The winding patches of stone, the variety of trees, patches of water, and the particles hanging in the air all make for a good-looking landscape, but also suffer from not being seen very much. That said, because exploration is somewhat discouraged anyway, I think you could have pushed the theme a bit by making the world even smaller without affecting gameplay much. The visual effects on the fatigue, hunger, and warmth bars as you approach death are a great way to create a sense of urgency. The patches of light and dark in the screenshots look cool, but aren't present in the game.
Really well made game given the time. Well done!
Hope you keep working on it! Very cool game, especially considering the time given!
A really nice game. The graphics are very nice and the sounds fit very good. not too loud and it matches to the scenery. Also the vanishing of the shadows is very smooth. I like it. The game overall is very hard. You have to be lucky to manage health, warmth and fatigue at the same time at the beginning. A very big plus for playability would be if you could interact with the environment from every side instead of only standing left from it. Overall a very good game, which I like a lot!
Cool concept but really really tough. Even using the guide I had trouble crafting things - I like the hard difficulty but when you don't know what to do it's really frustrating. I had very little opportunity to experiment with crafting without dying. Starting out with a higher fatigue/warmth level would probably help there, since those are the more difficult stats to raise. Would be cool to have at least labels for the items too.
Not bad! One of better 2D Minecraft clones. Loved the graphics. Really fun. Sadly, still a Minecraft clone.
I can't believe how complete this concept is. Great job, especially on the fog of war/tile appearing effect. I think this is one of the hidden gems of this Ludum Dare
Nice game, really enjoyed the explorative part, and the rest was quite tight too. Had some trouble getting the hang of how to manage the resources (without reading the detailed guide here). The mechanics could perhaps be a bit more streamlined? Nevertheless, it was a nice experience, well done :)
Nice game, the exploring part is really well done, the tile flipping is really a small effect that's really impressive in a jam. Good work overall I enjoyed quite alot!
Looks cool and I'm sure it would be even cooler if I could get my head around it. Died pretty quickly because I couldn't figure out how to eat the berries I had. Would've also been nice if it told you you gathered new items and now they're in your inventory.
Hey not bad! Very old school feel that I really like. Nice job!
I played this on Livestream Today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wr-ZBj_dJa4
My big complaints revolved around not really understanding the interface, which I think could stand to be a tad more intuitive. I think some time spent in Minecraft studying how their crafting system unfolds might be a good thing for your game. I also had some trouble getting the character to mine and gather resources from any direction other than from immediately to the left.
Love the graphics, and the overall gameplay was fun! Good job!
I'm really impressed by the game. I will definitly play it some more!
Love the survival aspect with the crafting system. Somehow reminds me of this super-unknown indie-game.. I think it's called Mindcraft ;) Implemented really well!
Well done in making a procedurally generated world! (However I must say, that sometimes the fruit/fiber bushes are a bit too spread-out, making surviving the first day impossible)
Did I mention that I love the crafting system? :D Really love the minecraft-like blueprints. Thanks for posting the recepices in the description! One thing I dont like: left click places the entire stack, while right click places half the stack. How do I place only one item? I would really need that to craft. In minecraft it's right click.
Sometimes it's not quite clear which tile I will be interacting with. Especially with the bushes and the trees. Somehow I can only interact with the bushes from the top (?). And if there is a tree near by (even if it's two blocks away) it gets priority? I had two ocasions where I just could not interact with a bush. It would be nice if there was some kind of preview showing which tile you will be interacting with.
The animations when the world is uncovered are gorgeous!!! Really well done! :P
Realy nice and complex game! I hope these votes help you! I would also appreciate it if you take a look at my game!
This game looks and sounds nice, and the idea is solid, but there's some problems with the design, specifically as regards to crafting. Crafting recipes are basically impossible to discover on your own: even if you know that a pie is made from 4 berries, there are 126 different ways to arrange 4 items in a grid of 9 spaces; and that's if the four items are all the same, when there's four different items it's 3024 possible arrangements. How is the player supposed to discern which patterns make anything?
This can be fine, in a way, if the player is given room to explore and experiment, but because the fatigue, hunger and warmth timers continue to tick down while you're crafting, the player will likely die before they discover a single crafting recipe.
My recommendation would be to take one of two routes. Either: * *Horadric Cube Route* - Make positioning irrelevant, so that only quantity and item type matters; you already need to discover that 4 berries makes a pie, no need to exacerbate it by having it matter how you arrange the berries. * *MasterMind Route* - Have the game _inform_ you when you're partway to completing a recipe; the correct item in the correct spot should highlight in one color, while the correct item in the wrong spot highlights a different color (and an incorrect item doesn't highlight at all). Of course, unlike the game MasterMind, there's more than one possible recipe, so you'd need some way of deciding which one to display the highlighting for.
Either way, time should pause while at the crafting table
Beyond that, there's really nothing to complain about; as I said, the game looks and sounds nice, and the controls are mostly fine. But the crafting system is frustrating instead of engaging, because it doesn't reward experimentation.