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By frenchie
View on ldjam.com
| Category | Rank | Score | Count |
|
|---|
| Overall | 31 | 4.04 | 23 | |
| Fun | 19 | 4.09 | 23 | |
| Innovation | 139 | 3.50 | 22 | |
| Theme | 23 | 4.25 | 22 | |
| Graphics | 101 | 3.95 | 22 | |
| Audio | 48 | 3.80 | 22 | |
| Humor | 54 | 3.63 | 21 | |
| Mood | 100 | 3.63 | 21 | |
Comments
Wow! I love this game! Of all the games I have played so far, this is the most complete and polished. The art style is fantastic. The gameplay is simple and rewarding. The difficulty is perhaps just a touch too easy (I only had to retry about 3 times to get to the end). I LOVE the sounds - they remind me of a game called "Mega-lo-mania" on the Amiga.
As soon as we can rate games - you will be rated very highly by me!
(I watched your timelapse video and it's interesting - watching you work reminds me of how I work.)
frenchie
2017-04-28 05:29
@richard-michael-smith thanks for the glowing review! I feel kind of the same about the difficulty going back through the game after publishing. I made all of the levels in a rush on the last day so I just wanted to make sure I didn't make one that was unbeatable by accident. I'm waiting for the judging to start before playing games but yours is at the top of my list! :D
@frenchie My pleasure! I just stopped by to give my ratings. Having played quite a few games so far - this is still one of my favourites!
kreur
2017-05-01 14:14
Amazing game, the most polished and complete I have seen this LD so far. And most important: playing it is a pleasure! great job!
Quite a clever minimalist RTS, enjoyed the audio work also which worked well in giving the whole game a lighter atmosphere. As you've mentioned it was a bit too easy but for a quick jam always better to allow people to play through quickly and see more then get stuck. Also the look was nicely polished and made it enjoyable just to rotate around the planet and check it all out. Nice job.
Very polished, simple to pick up and understand. Using left click to move was a bit awkward at first, but right clicking is an unexpected control scheme for a web game.
Really enjoyed the overall look and feel.
This game is fun, and the sound effects/victory music make me very happy! ^_^
Awesome game! One of my favourites so far. The art is neat, the gameplay is fluent and I love the music.
shockeye
2017-05-04 12:42
Great job. Theme song is stuck in my head. Visual style good. Game mechanic is simple to understand, and difficulty ramps up with each level.
This game is brilliant! Looks good, controls are tight, AI is surprisingly good (just doesn't respond until you issue a command). Easily one of my favorites to come out of the Compo. Great job!
I like the low poly art. The gameplay is simple but interesting enough. The song was a bit too repetitive for my tastes but all the sound effects were nice. Cool game.
piscythe
2017-05-05 20:41
The spherical map adds a lot to what otherwise would be a pretty basic design. The levels I saw did a good job of emphasizing that. Having left-mouse only controls on an RTS felt awkward to me, but the voice-acted unit responses really made the control scheme more satisfying. However, it appears that the bug with units dying for no apparent reason is still active in the web build (I used LinuxMint/Firefox). This came to a head in Level 6, where I got stuck because all the units died before they could do anything. The day/night cycle was neat, but I had a hard time seeing what I was doing at night. The AI is well done considering the circumstances. Good work!
frenchie
2017-05-06 04:07
@piscythe there is no day/night cycle in the game! D: Seems like you hit a bug with Linux/Firefox. If you see this comment and want a Linux build let me know!
Love the art, love the sounds/music, love the gameplay. Great condensation of core RTS gameplay.
There were a couple levels where the winner was determined within the first couple of seconds and there was no way to come back. That's more of a complaint with the whole RTS genre, but it was more obvious here since matches were so short.
Every time I beat a level, the music would crack me up yet again. Great game, love the light mood.
piscythe
2017-05-06 21:02
@frenchie Right now there's a known bug with Unity where Linux builds have non-functioning mouse input, so I don't think I'd actually be able to play a Linux build even if you made one.
frenchie
2017-05-06 22:49
@piscythe well that's unfortunate. It might also depend on your particular flavor of Linux. I made a Linux build anyways just to try it out. I tested it on my Ubuntu 16.04 VM and while mouse input was working, all that rendered was a blueish-black screen. Anyways, if you're feeling particularly adventurous I added the build. Don't forget to `chmod +x` the executable!
frenchie
2017-05-06 23:50
@davidthelazar re:level design. Definitely. This is actually something I felt early on when designing the levels and I wanted to go back and iterate but I didn't have time. One thing I thought about doing was making it so that each base could only spawn up to a certain number of units at a time. That way if one player got ahead in bases they couldn't snowball to victory as easily
freyby
2017-05-07 11:01
This is truly a masterpiece, it was so much fun to play, graphics are looking amazing, really liked those silly sounds. Amazing job! Gonna play the post-compo edition right now.
A little complicated but very interesting game! super!
the idea is brilliant , its the simplification of a whole genere and i love it. the controllers get in the way in cornucopia though and that was a bummer (after other plays i found the problem is that sometimes the drag gets stuck). a frustrating bummer that could have been less of a bummer if the option to restart the level was there. overall a terrific entry .(family reunion = 5 star humor=)
frenchie
2017-05-09 22:56
@alexandr-rum can you describe in a little more detail what you found to be complicated or confusing? I tried to make the RTS as simple as possible so I want to know where I messed up :)
@pyokoanarogue sorry you hit a bug with unit selection! I definitely think it's the most awkward part of this game. I wish I'd taken just a couple minutes to think about what I was doing when implementing it. If I had, I would have done the standard "left click select, right click dispatch" RTS controls
Such a good quick game, simple to understand, great to play. I played the Jam version so some of these comments may be improved upon since, I'll be playing the new version afterwards!
GOOD
-I found the simplification appealing, reminding me of games like eufloria -Good amount of levels -Music and sounds were pretty charming -Fast paced gameplay is a huge bonus to me
IMPROVEMENTS
-A restart button would have been nice -Some kind of indicator on how well you're doing, something akin to starcraft graphs, or a bar at the top filled with whatever percentage colour is winning. -I feel like the shadows don't suit the style. -Unit selection/deployment is weird Overall a great full featured entry, controls might be wonky sometimes but there is a good game here! Well done!
I really enjoyed the game thoroughly. I found the gameplay and graphics style very fun. I did find that some parts were a bit frustrating, as it seemed the enemies could control much faster than I could. The AI was of an appropriate difficulty to not make this troublesome, but I would rather see smarter AI with more human-like reactions.
I found that the music, while fun, got stale sort of fast. I didn't mind the silly style, but I wish the loop would be a bit longer, or there would be variety between levels.
I also found a bug. On the second to last level, after a few minutes of play, the game got very slow. During this time, all units stopped spawning, and it became very hard to control mine. This happened again on the last level, but with a lesser performance drop.
Something else that I noticed was that when you try to select units on the edge of the planet, they often aren't selected. I don't know if this is intended, but I would like to see it changed.
These issues, aside from the unit spawning bug, didn't detract much from the game. It was definitely one of the funnest games of LD38!
frenchie
2017-05-10 21:54
@dink_dunk Thanks for the detailed feedback. I'm curious about the shadows because I haven't heard that feedback before. What particularly did you think was strange? An indicator would have been nice - my quick hack was to try to make it easier to see when a base outside your field of view got captured with the tall particle effect.
@nardandas I agree on the AI. I didn't have time to try to make it behave as "human-like" as I had wanted so as a quick hack at the end I reduced the unit movement speed so that the AI's instant controls wouldn't be as advantageous. Interesting bug, I don't know what would have caused it. I did spend a little bit of time optimizing the game and could get 500 units on screen before hitting 30 fps. What's your setup (CPU, GPU, RAM) and which build did you use? As for the unit selection bug, it's a known issue. When I check to see if a unit is in sight (you don't want to select units on the other side of the planet!) I do a raycast from the camera to the unit. After implementing controls I switched from a perspective camera to an orthographic camera. This meant that some units would be on the rendered screen but the camera wouldn't actually have line of sight to them. Fix is simple - just need to tweak the raycast. Didn't have time though :(
avavt
2017-05-12 00:53
Wonderful entry! I'm not a RTS fan but still I'm hooked.
The game play was fun and thrilling. It was hard enough for me to lose once or twice, but not too hard so a RTS newbie like me can still manage to clear.
The sfx and music was especially funny and cute. I can say the audio is what made my good impression of this game. The graphic might not be the best but the board game-like appearance is charming in its own way.
My only problem is that I prefer a more traditional control method: left click/drag to select, right click to move. Left click serving dual purpose is not really to my liking and caused confusion.
Despite that I still think the game's worth a 5 star overall. Great work!
lipsch
2017-05-12 19:40
Very nice Game! Loved the graphics, as well as the neat sounds :p The gameplay was pretty easy as I thought but still very fun to play.
Very nice entry!