FoonLudum Dare ExplorerLD38 → Communitas

Communitas

By hbocao and oberynmartell

View on ldjam.com

CategoryRankScoreCount
Overall4613.2534
Fun6552.5833
Innovation1123.7534
Theme5103.1834

Comments

viperfish9 2017-05-03 01:44

Love the idea! Not a whole lot of game but I didn't see any bugs. Connected and could place things fine.

marjie 2017-05-03 02:32

Really cool idea, inspired by the reddit image thing I take it. The only criticisms I have are that some information is hard to discover or understand, such as how the score is calculated, and I wish the cities had names or something so that they were easier to track. I saw lots of other people editing cities as I was playing - awesome!

roberto-romao 2017-05-03 03:00

I like it good job! :D

jdmazz 2017-05-03 03:07

I think the game is cool but I think the quality of the city you are working on should influence the build times. It is cool that it is a collaborative city builder as you do not often see that.

epicface92 2017-05-03 03:34

I love the inspiration of place and a city-builder combined! Right up my alley! :D

qzqxq 2017-05-03 03:40

I played for about 10 minutes. This is definitely a cool idea and gets high innovation points from me, though I wish there was a more definite goal than just "make a cool city" since it feels more like a social experiment than a game right now, not that that's a bad thing of course. Right now the value of building any particular tile is pretty unclear (I can't tell the difference between churches, farms, water pumps, etc.), so I don't really feel like I'm influencing the city by building things. I think I'd feel more invested if I could tell how I'm improving the city so I could strategically think about where to place buildings, or if there were more concrete goals: for example, achievements for successfully collaborating with other people in some way could be cool.

One small nitpick: I wish I could drag the screen to move it as opposed to using arrow keys, as the scrolling was very slow and the map is huge (though I was playing on Mac, so maybe it's just an issue with that).

I have to say that this is really technically impressive, especially for a weekend of coding! The UI is very intuitive and organized well. Overall, good job! I think this could be really great with a few more "game-like" features.

candlesan 2017-05-03 03:44

I love the inspiration of a city builder and grats on incorporating something as culturally topical as /r/place. I hope to see many more games like this in the future. It's uncommon to see a Ludum Dare game also incorporate user accounts and online (massively) multiplayer. There's some significant engineering effort in that! Very impressive for a game jam. I wish I could better understand the effects of the buildings that I placed. Right now I read the descriptions and imagined it but trouble really observing the relationships once in game.

huitre 2017-05-03 03:55

Nice idea, maybe not quite a game but it's pretty neat nonetheless! Maybe building roads could be done several tiles at the time and it would multiply the cooldown!

_Edit: Had to force myself to quit and go to sleep! So each building has to touch a road to be part of the city?_

scornz 2017-05-03 10:45

I loved r/place! It *was* probably one of my favorite experiments they did. Props to you for making something similar, I love it!

iron-leonem 2017-05-03 13:55

What an interesting idea! I loved the concept, and it turned me on to a phenomenon I wish I hadn't totally missed out on. This idea is inspiring, and I'd love to see more done with it :)

hbocao 2017-05-03 15:52

@viperfish9 @marjie @roberto-romao @jdmazz @epicface92 @qzqxq @candlesan @huitre @scornz @iron-leonem

Thanks for the kind words, people!

Yeah, we ran out of time and we couldn't add more game mechanics. Well, we couldn't even explain properly what we put on the game. We had some many ideas, but we struggled with the server (to find a good server and free) and also a with the rendering. We tried HTML5 first, but it became too heavy and hard to work with.

We have plans to move this idea forward, but before that, we're going to wait to get all possible feedback. So far, so good.

Thanks again!

oberynmartell 2017-05-03 18:04

@huitre Yes, just build it right beside any road tile and it will count for the city.

kenrickrilee 2017-05-06 02:48

THIS IS SO COOL :D It would be super cool too if Sim-City style events happened in the game (i.e. natural disasters) and there were population mechanics. Then you'd have to have everyone work together to keep the city liveable!

powerspark 2017-05-06 03:36

Great idea! These types of community games are really interesting. Unfortunately in the time I played I didn't notice any changes in real-time. I also wish that the score impact of each building would be shown... and maybe something to show what aspects of the city (industry, food, housing) need improvement? Either way, you can really take this somewhere, looking good so far :)

ryte2byte 2017-05-07 08:46

I'm not sure that I get it. Actually, I'm pretty sure that I don't. Is this some kind of social experiment? There doesn't really seem to be any kind of actual city-builder mechanics because states other than score and population aren't shown.

sebbernery 2017-05-09 17:10

I'll check it in some days to see how it evolve ;-). It lacks some feedback (hard to see how useful was the industry I placed for example) but very original for a Ludum game !

cremmy 2017-05-09 19:02

...I've spent too long trying to make "XD" with road in city #4...

thedoodleguy 2017-05-10 12:53

Very original and well polished visually, I would have liked to of had some kind of goal as I was uncertain if what I was doing was of any benefit. :-)

pragmascript 2017-05-10 12:56

Doing a networked game in that kinda timeframe is already hard.

david-cookie 2017-05-10 17:45

Very ambitious experiment! It's quite hard to express an opinion on this but I agree 100% with @qzqxq. It's still unclear what is going on or what is our goal, we're just selecting a city and put a building without feedbacks or anything. Is it good? Does that help the city or not? Without these questions answered, it's not a game yet. But it's pretty impressive nonetheless. A multiplayer city builder with a clear interface was a real challenge and you managed it properly. Add some feedbacks, sounds/music and a faster scroll and you're good to go! Well done :)

thinkofname 2017-05-12 09:27

Really nice idea. I think this could have been improved if we could colour the buildings, it would have allowed for people to be more creative.

josh-riley 2017-05-14 01:05

Really like the idea of a collabrotive city builder, and it seems especially ambitious to build one in a game jam. I didn't have any network issues or bugs, but it also seemed like I might have been the only one playing. The graphics are fine, and the gameplay is really intuitive. Good work!

frodewin 2017-05-17 10:38

Creative joint city building, yeah! I like the concept, but the timeouts were annoying me. When I wanted to build a road, I had to wait between setting each single tile.