Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD38 → Ark Initiative
By teslov, Best Marshmallow and Medu
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 461 | 3.25 | 30 | |
| Fun | 668 | 2.53 | 30 | |
| Innovation | 247 | 3.39 | 30 | |
| Theme | 84 | 4.03 | 30 | |
| Graphics | 288 | 3.78 | 30 | |
| Audio | 2.00 | 3 | ||
| Humor | 445 | 2.40 | 24 | |
| Mood | 528 | 2.95 | 26 |
Looks great! Simple (but complex enough) idea from what I see, neatly packed, well animated, has a professional yet indie vibe to it.
Downsides: UI doesn't support my current resolution (1366x768), even after going fullscreen in browser (f11) I can't see or click the lowest animal or food icon (the lowest I see is the fox and the carrot, which I discovered only after carefully viewing the screenshots), so I can't play it properly.
Game jolt doesn't want to load for me. How about uploading it to ich.io or a zip of the game files? A shame cos I was looking forward to playing this one.
@takusan Updated it to include Fullscreen button and made default resolution smaller.
@spinaljack Added itch.io link.
Would it be hard to make the planet spin around slowly so that I'd eventually see everything on the planet without zooming out or moving camera?
(btw on finnish keyboard ö opens the command prompt)
@teslov yes, works great, thank you. I'll give it a try again after I'm done with work ;)
@unentokku it seems like it was easy enough to implement in few minutes. Thank you for your suggestion. Game is updated on both itch.io and GameJolt.
It's a cute toy, I really love the graphical style. A lot can be done with those concentric tiles. It's definitely something you should continue working on!
There's not much actual gameplay, though. It's fun to deploy animals and watch them frolic for sume time, yes. But checking their hunger levels is hard because of how they jump around and how fast the world spins. It seems that the animals don't breed, act according to their presumed place in the food chain (why don't herbivores graze on the grass? Why can't I feed bores with meat? Why aren't tigers feeding on other animals?) or stick to their biomes (why do all the animals go for lengthy swims?) - without that, there's not much of an ecosystem to maintain. Then again, I don't think so many features could have been added in 72 hours!
While at it's current state, the game is a zoo simulator or a tamagochi and not an ecosystem sim, I hope it will be one someday! It's a good foundation.
@shodanon Thank you very much for the lengthy feedback! I'll slow the planet down in an update very soon.
You can feed carnivores with meat. And if there's not enough food, the animals will attack each other. And eat they prey. Boars should eat meat and attack when hungry. I know it worked before, I have to check it again. Last time I've checked was before I've added food items.
You can use "spawn greenBoar" command. It spawn a test animal which is an always hungry carnivore. He'll attack all of your animals without mercy.
@teslov Well then, it seems your concept is exactly what I would love to see - it just needs to be executed better and the ecological effects/laws/educational content should be better visible. With enough work and dedication, it can become a new sim hit, Maxis style!
Thanks, I played it and pretty much agree with the above comments. Nice art and concept.
Since the voting is up, I've added rating to my earlier feedback. Cheers!
Resource Management games are my favoutite kind. Gameplay is very simple and easy to learn. May be it's a little slow, but it's cute to wait and see what animals do!
Nice!
Please come back and rate [Llama's World](https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/llamas-world) ;) you left a comment a while ago
Cool game! Nice art and idea.
I left you a rating. Good luck!
The game feels slow at first, then I tried the AddMoney to make myself rich. Then I spawned lots of tigers. Game over.
Joking aside, I like this game a lot, even though it's unfinished. You asked for improvement/future advice, so here goes:
- Make terrain larger (not by a large margin, but with 20+ animals it already feels a little cramped) - Make behaviors. For example, the boar never ran from tigers. This felt unnatural. Yeah, I know that steaks fall from the sky and that all the tigers are full, but I supposed tiger's teeth are still tiger's teeth :) So, make them fear one another. - Make them reproduce (maybe this is already implemented with a large enough population, but I haven't noticed) if they encounter eachother while not hungry or something.
I guess that's something I'd like to see in a game like this. Other than that I'm impressed with games made in Javascript :) It would be interesting to look at the code :)
Good luck.
Thank you all for feedback!
@kaisean-games I want to rewrite the game using my own engine in the future ( it's using Construct 2 now ) to render the world properly. I'll then be able to add more planets the player is able to manage at once and make them bigger.
I'll have to make animals act a lot more intelligent. For example, hungry foxes will now attack boars. Chance for a fox to kill a boar is near 0% ( I think it's possible if the boar rolls smallest possible attack and fox highest for every attack but I would have to look into config to be sure ).
Reproduction was supposed to be implemented as "Happy animal #1 and happy animal #2 ( not hungry and not thirsty ) collide with each other and boom pregnacy". It's completely configured, amount of babies for each animal, time they need to produce offspring and time between pregnacies but I hadn't got enough time.
The game would look totally different if I had time on Sunday :/
Nice game haha! Javascript ftw! Yeah, it starts pretty slow. Hard to get money lol. I noticed animals don't really like to jump when they are REALLY close to the food, so they'll lock there and starve to death. That can only be solved if you drop food right on them. Nice entry overall!
Great game with solid mechanics. Nice aesthetic and enjoyable gameplay. Maybe you could improve some behaviors. However I am surprised to see what you were able to do in les than 72 hours. Bravo ++
This was a cool idea. I actually really liked that. My big issue with it is that it's hard to tell what's going on with the animals and what the visitors want. I'm never sure when to invest in food for the animals. I also think it'd be cool if there was some way to terraform the planet, as well as some bonus for if the visitors see the animals in their preferred biome. Overall I'd say that this was a really interesting game, but it needs to be a little more clear about what the animals need and what the visitors want. Nice work.
- Only two that i want to say - background music would be nice if you put it . - secondly Start of the game is very slow (i think if you speed up the amount then it would be great ) - i have played like half an hour know and enjoying it
Hey, I enjoyed your game and could really see the amount of effort that you put in.
**What you did well**
Really nice visuals, the sprites were good and I actually quite liked the space background.
Gameplay wise, the animals didn't have any clipping issues and moved around freely. The new game, save and load buttons were nice additions to the game as well.
**What you could improve on**
Some music could have really made this game better. I would've also liked to see a shorter waiting time for cash. I felt like I was waiting forever to afford an animal. Lower waiting times and music paired together could make this game very engaging.
Sometimes when I purchased an animal, the game would mistake that for a click to place an item and will throw meat onto the ground. It didn't majorly affect gameplay but it is just something to watch out for.
Overall, nice game and really nice concept.
(Btw, I took some time writing this review and would really appreciate it if you could review mine [here](https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/planet-dominion))
I've never been a huge fan of sim games, and the other comments really cover the flaws and the lack of content, but I do want to say that I really like the art and the planet design. The whole thing was really cool to play even if it didn't keep my attention very long.
I'm not really good at these sorta sim/strategy games and i don't want to leave a negative rating, but i will say that it still looks professional in the presentation. good stuff.
The graphical style and the procedural generation are very nice. However, there are virtually no instructions which makes playing the game somewhat challenging. I wasn't sure what the objective was, but I figure if that was made more obvious it would be a pretty nice little game.
Good graphics and a good concept (tourism), but these sim games... They're all over the place! I would have liked to see some audio in there, and a time speed button or something to speed up the process. Certainly a great start to a game. Good job!
Cool visual effect, very well put together
I really like the presentation here, as others have said. It's unfortunate you weren't able to add more gameplay during the jam, but thats how game jams go sometimes. Also, animals are *really* expensive compared to the speed at which you gain currency. In the beginning it's very hard to get started, you need to work on the cost curve some, I think.
Speaking of curves, the one presentational thing I really missed was the ability to rotate the camera. I realize it doesn't matter much with the zoom options available, but it would have been nice none-the-less.
I also discovered an undocumented feature: if you use the arrow keys, for some reason you can make the food items run and jump around the map as if they were platformer characters. Which I can't imagine being useful, but it was pretty amusing anyway :-p
Thank you all for ratings and comments!
I've already changed money-making and it'll go live in 0.3.
As for speed-changing, I'll think about it, it's not hard to implement.
If you want to test the game now ( check all animals, see carnivores hunting etc. feel free to use cheat codes! Just press " ` " and type "addmoney 1000000". Have fun!
There are a lot of good things here. Unfortunatly, a game like that need lot of work (UI -- damn, this animals go fast, how to see there stats, and I would like a fast button to make money faster! -- , graphics -- camera is weird -- and content -- more interaction with the fields type...). But it's an impossible type of game to perfect for a jam...
Anyway, that is a really good and impressive job for a ludum dare, and a good start for a fun game! (and the space ships with smileys are a great feedback, love them!)
Really cool concept. I included it in my Ludum Dare 38 compilation video series, if you’d like to take a look :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMCwacAGwrA