Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD38 → The Last Colony
By hekst
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 744 | 2.52 | 23 | |
| Fun | 757 | 2.09 | 23 | |
| Innovation | 235 | 3.42 | 23 | |
| Theme | 360 | 3.47 | 23 | |
| Graphics | 656 | 2.61 | 23 | |
| Audio | 326 | 3.04 | 23 | |
| Humor | 647 | 1.70 | 22 | |
| Mood | 588 | 2.81 | 23 |
- What i like: - General game idea - Sound effects - Mechanics
- What i dislike: - Controls. First recomendation, Dock Key between move keys (ie Q W E), Second recomendation station 3 and 4 Keys UIO and JKL (Below U was the J not the H)
Good entry!
Very hard to control. Probably because I don't use a qwerty keyboard but also because I am never really sure that I can dock or not, and that I have succeeded or not. So a bit more feedback would have been great. And an easier beginning.
The idea is interesting, and the mood works really well (interface style, colors, music, sounds...). Mixing management and precision with the keyboard and with a quick loose condition is tough on the player. On a player like me anyway ! :wink: I guess the game become much easier once you get the keyboard timings.
Thank you guys! @jojocanard Different keyboard layout didn't occur to me until you mentioned it. Thanks for the input :)
It was real stressful in a good way, the control scheme is a little weird but it makes it kind of better. It was difficult to remember what buttons I meant to be pressing and added to the sense of urgency. The buzzing when something goes wrong added some real tension.
It's an interesting concept for a game as well, management with some precision presses and urgency. The music and art style worked well. I hadn't noticed the status bars at first, they definitely helped!
Good job!
Cool entry here! Controls was weird and the game was too difficult, but the general idea was really cool! Also music and visuals are ok! Good job!
The mood of the game was quite nice, but I had to concentrate so hard on the controls I couldn't actually get enjoyment out of this. The basic idea is quite nice and the game world teases you for more. The space-y soundtrack was nice (reminded me of mass effect somewhat).
Extremely difficult to control, also because I didn't know where exactly I had to stop to dock successfully. The space stations supplies decline a little too quickly for me, I could get maybe one shuttle to dock in the time it took one of the life meters to completely disappear... The sway of the station whenever I collided too hard was quite fun though. Music and sound effects were also pretty good :)
Mood was nice but controls are verry hard to master at least for me.
This was nice - a cool original idea with a lot of character.
There were some rough spots though, the 12 keys was overwhelming at the start. Even after I learned the basics I still was hitting the wrong keys, unfortunately. I wonder if there was some way to simplify the inputs.
Eventually I got the hang of it. First time I had four docked ships I thought I was doing well, but then I realized you have to undock them and get news ones coming in!
After I had that down too I was able to get to 53 days. I'm not sure if that's any good.
Tough controls and learning curve aside though, this was cool. The station's movement gave it a feeling like it really was in space, and the ambient sound and thrust sound were really great.
The mood was a cool mix of calm and panic!
Nice entry.
Cool concept.
I killed everyone.
:-(
I like the mood, it is a bleak universe.
A very creative idea and fun to play :D
To me the bad point itrs the control. Many separate keys, I would put them together to easily change from station 1 and 4 to 2 and 3.
The art and sound are fine. Great mood. Good job!
Is there windows build?
@sun-wokong Sorry, I didn't release it because I don't have any windows machine or VM setup and I wanted to test the build before I released. You could try the web version of it, which I know for sure that it works on Chrome and Firefox. Let me know if you encounter any issues there :)
I'm going to have to agree with everybody else on this one. The controls and difficulty ramp ruin this for me. Maybe I'm playing the game wrong? Smashing the ships into the planet was pretty fun (even though it causes you to lose pretty quickly).
Heh, yeah. If I made the game start easier and had players learn the interface first then increase the difficulty this could have been easier to approach :p
I _really_ like the concept here, but I do have to agree with the concerns other commenters expressed about the controls. Specifically, these are the three major problems I faced:
* The game was so fast paced enough that I didn't feel I had time to every look away from the 'action' to check the UI and get information about how I was doing. * As a consequence, it was not obvious when I had successfully docked, what the conditions were for docking, or even if the 'dock' keys did anything. When I did glance away from the action to look at the UI below, it didn't seem to tell me one way or the other. * It was very difficult to get the ships to glide in safely rather than slamming into the station at full speed (maybe intentional?)
All of those really come down to an issue of speed: in the micro, the actual gameplay moves to fast, and in the macro, the difficulty ramps up too quickly for the player to effectively learn (this second one is a pretty common problem for non-trivial Jam games, in my experience).
Anyway, all those things being said, I do see a lot of promise here, it seems like this could grow into something really cool!
Haha I also killed everyone! But also fun ! I need two more hands and another pair of eyes to play game.
@philomory Funny story, I actually increased the difficulty (ship control sensitivity and frequency of supplies and resource dissipation rate) right before I published because I thought it maybe too easy. It may have been true, but I think I couldn't find the sweet spot. I also didn't realized that I got good at the game while trying it out for 2~3 days :p @gurkenlabs made me realize that people wouldn't have time to look around the screen because I setup the game to start with low resources, on top of the fast paced gameplay.
About whether you've docked or not. Erm,, yeah, I realized that my UI for 'docked' light on the control panel may not be as visible and was hoping sound effect will help. (The DOCKED key changes its color) No indicator on the station itself aside, players may not have had time to look at the control panel for such status.
To be honest, I intended this game to be difficult. The concept of having to control four ships with all different sets of controls come from the flash game Multitask (http://www.kongregate.com/games/icylime/multitask). What @pkenney described is exactly how I wanted people to feel :D I would say I needed to increase the difficulty slowly (starting with fewer stations available? generous amount of resources at the start?), show people to see what's around and how the controls are, then get to the current difficulty. This way, I would have implemented the game how I wanted to, and introduced the game better to players. Thank you for your feedback :)
I liked the game idea though the controls were a bit complicated to me. I don't know for sure but maybe it would work better if you'd select the docking station you want to operate with the arrow keys and always use the same buttons for thrust in/out and dock.
So the concept was good, I had some huge issues with the control scheme. They were frustrating to use and I ended up looking at my keyboard more than the screen... 12 Button Controls likely isn't the solution I would personally recommend. Maybe swap to allow us to control them one at a time, and use something more conventional, like [Z],[X],[SPACE], and let us cycle thru them? Thanks for making it!
This was a really interesting game. As many others have pointed out the controls make it more difficult than it needs to be. Once I got a bit of a feel for the controls, I was able to survive for longer but then it was too hard to see what each supply ship had because of the small text. Maybe some color coding on them would have made it easier to know which crates to dock first. The music set a nice tone for the game, and overall it was a nice experience.
Interesting game! I really like the idea, but as a rookie operator, I would really have liked my job to start out a bit easier. Say you could have that many slots but not as high need for docking stuff and then because the people don't know what is in their best interests they would have kids and waste resources and over time the docking operation would become more complex. Because you need to manage more quickly to dock things.
I would also really have liked to have an orange warning on 0 in the container like there was for negative.
And finally, you could have the game support touch and you swipe in and out containers.
Aaand more finally, you could test auto-docking if velocity is low enough, game is hard/fun as it is without it.
But again, really good game.
I actually think the controls are fine, since I see this as a multilayer party game. There is a lot of not-so-subtle humor in bumping into space stations killing countless millions of civilians.
What prevents this from working as a party game is that the resources drain to fast and difficult ramps up to quickly. There should be more room to realize how terrible your party is at doing this before obviously unavoidable "game over". A new set of players should at least get a few minutes on their first try, to learn the controls properly.
Sound design was pretty good, the resources do drain pretty quickly as mentioned earlier. It really depends on what you want out of this game; if you want a single-player hectic experience, then perhaps have more resource to manage but a slower rate of drain. Also, it would be very helpful if you were to flash some kind of red-light on a "bad" cargo load; for example, one that is infected with aliens. It may be too easy if you mark every cargo load that is not meant to be docked with red (including ones that have no cargo to transfer), but I think it would make the game much nicer to play. Trying to manage the keys as well as the UI at the bottom of the screen is really what makes this game difficult.
If it is meant to be a game you play with friends, keys will need to be switched around to allow multiple people to comfortably interact with the keys (unless you want some sort of twister scenario), but in that case, keeping track of one line of that UI element is probably much more manageable than keeping track of all the cargo spaces.