spaceman 2017-05-02 01:14
This was really cool. I liked that it encouraged me to decide between climbing up a short slope right away or waiting and climbing a taller one. The length of the menu animations was too high though.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD38 → Higher Ground
By landosystems, Doug Graham, MeCubed, moshen and bainerd
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 78 | 3.95 | 26 | |
| Fun | 90 | 3.83 | 26 | |
| Innovation | 130 | 3.69 | 25 | |
| Theme | 29 | 4.29 | 26 | |
| Graphics | 337 | 3.65 | 25 | |
| Audio | 169 | 3.56 | 25 | |
| Humor | 493 | 2.27 | 20 | |
| Mood | 214 | 3.59 | 24 |
This was really cool. I liked that it encouraged me to decide between climbing up a short slope right away or waiting and climbing a taller one. The length of the menu animations was too high though.
I really loved this game. Very well done everyone.
I have only 3 small issues.
1. What is the point of gold? 2. I never saw a reason to build more settlers (more mouths to feed) (is that what the gold was for?) 3. It would have been great if the window was bigger. I felt like I was playing on an index card.
Other than that, I loved the art, the sound, and pretty much everything else about it. I'm glad I took the time to install Java to play it.
Nice sounds like I'm not the only one using LibGDX! The game is fun, I kind of got stressed when one of my girls almost died but she barely made it! Good job! The audio is good, the game is fun and the graphics are nice!
@spaceman Good point about the menu animations, we should have probably made those a bit zippier. There are hotkeys though for pretty much all the actions, so you can use the keyboard to set actions more quickly.
@archimagus Glad you liked it! You're right that the gold is used for getting more people (building huts requires gold). The reasons to build more settlers are to increase the amount of resources you can gather, or for safety if you are worried that you're losing too many people. Also bragging rights :grin: As for the window size, if you play on the web you can zoom the page and that zooms the game too. We ran out of time to support window resizing on desktop, sorry!
Hey, really fun! I didn't lose any natives but even if it wasn't very challenging in that regard, it was engaging and kept me till the end.
Really good game. I finished a round in about 25 minutes and it was worth it! I didn't build any rafts or sandbags because I didn't feel like I need them. But I can see myself trying to finish the game with self set goals like finishing with 10 tribe members and then these things might get handy :P
I had much fun and with different levels, higher difficulty and different objectives I can see this game beeing very addictive. :)
I really liked this game. I finished in 47 turns without losing anyone. The game did seem a little easy, but this could easily be a starting level with difficulty ramping up from there.
A couple points of feedback: * It would be nice to have a larger window (I played on the Web, so maybe the desktop version is bigger?) * There did not seem much point in adding settlers, so I never did. Perhaps this could also be part of the difficulty ramp-up? * I never did anything but harvest trees and cows, build ladders, and move. What is the point in the other items and actions?
I really like the graphics and the audio ambience. Every piece of sound fit well within your theme and added to the mood greatly. Well done!
The game plays very nice, the visuals are gorgeous. With moving up being the only goal, many of the options one has are kind of useless. Maybe add a secondary win condition:
1. reach the snow 2. have 6 or more natives
This would require you to add natives which in turn requires more resources which in turn makes the tool upgrades more interesting.
But even without that, I had a really fun time playing it.
Impressive work! I love the strategy involved with this game. The hex tile and the sprites look very good. The game play is very smooth. The audio and music are also very well done and enhance the game play experience.
It would be nice to see some more game play mechanics, like predators that can eat your villagers. Other than that I don't have too much. This game is pretty solid as far as everything else goes.
Wow. Very impressive for a jam game. Turn-based strategy is one of my (lofty) goals for a jam at some point when I git gud at Ludum Dare. Good mix of planning for resources and keeping moving. I will play this game again, really well done guys.
Fun little game, a little slow though. I'll get my criticisms out of the way first.
On web, I thought the window size was way too small. I use a 1440p monitor, and the play area was postcard size at best, with way too much fine detail for that size. A larger play area would make it more comfortable to play and maybe could have allowed you to zoom the view out a bit, reducing the scrolling needed.
Menus animated too slow, which was annoying and made action selection feel buggy. I would often click an action and click a location before the animations finished, which had the effect of selecting the tile I clicked instead applying the action to that tile.
The tile heights and sea level rise per turn were not clear. I lost one villager because he was harvesting in the first plateau area, and he had moved into an area that was marginally lower than the surrounding tiles. I had no way of gauging that tiles' height relative to the water level. Also, it wasn't easy to tell how many turns you had until the water would rise above a given tile. That information is really important if you're trying to optimize villager moves. Perhaps some different tile sprites for high water and cresting water (foam and light flooding?) would have made it very apparent if 1 or a few turns were left.
All right, with that out of the way, now to the fun stuff. The action economy was well balanced, if simple, and the distribution of goods on the map encouraged you to split your workers to be effective. I feel like multiple playstyles are viable, and I was able to plan ahead for things like when to build tools and how much food/wood to bring to the mountains.
The forage mechanic was a nice way to prevent players from bricking themselves, although I think its powerful enough that it may be viable to straight up forage your way up the mountain. Also, distributing the iron higher up made me want to rush a scout up ahead to upgrade tools so I could harvest wood more effectively. All-in-all, a fun little strategic experience. Thanks for making it!
Really neat little flood survival simulation! I really love the art style - 8-bit characters/tiles blended with semi-realistic water/SFX. The drum sound ambience also did a great job to set the tone/atmosphere! Another thing I enjoyed was the procedurally generated maps/characters (I assume they are?), they add a lot of replay-ability to the game. I agree with some of the comments above that I wish there were more variation to strategies needed to reach the end (I reached the end by just building ladders and foraging/tree cutting/cow shooting). Overall, I really enjoyed the game! Hope theres more post-jam.
I really enjoyed it ! higher ground.png
fun little game, art style is really cool, rules were nice and simple so I could pick it up pretty quick.
Nice job!
I first though I lose because of the "Game Over" title of the end game message box :P. Very nice game, I really enjoy playing it. The tutorial is a bit long and I almost didn't playing the game at all for that. It would be nicer to learn on the run IMO. Wanna learn libgdx now :P Thanks for this entry :)
This is a great game, impressively unique! The tutorial starts off a little heavy, and honestly most of the features don't feel that necessary; i survived with two natives and only ever built ladders, harvesting food and wood was all i needed. If you were to extend this, i'd suggest adding the additional buildings and resources over time with different levels, instead of having them all at once, and perhaps being more clear when the water level is going to rise. Great job!