The Deific's Guide to Creating, Exploiting, and Destroying Pocket Worlds

endlessplumber 2017-05-02 03:28

I really like the concept of this game. I think the execution is a bit slow.

I spent about 20 minutes playing, and unlocked ~10 elements. I think the problem I'm having is that early on the spawn rates for elements are really low, combined with the very large play space. Since elements are scattered far off when they spawn, it takes a good while to get a high enough density of anything you care about to reliably run it all down in 1 go. This leads to lots of waiting for progress bars to fill up, and there are no other mechanics to distract me from the wait.

I think I might enjoy it more if the play size was smaller and the spawn rate a bit higher. In that setup, there would be a lot more elements about, and the challenge would be to run the course to get the specific elements you wanted for your planet.

I like the element refining mechanic, but the current execution's a bit off, and the only end goal are ones I set for myself. I think if you tweaked those two things you'd have an excellent game. I also really liked the guide styling for the early tutorial. I couldn't find a way to reference it after the real game started, which was a bummer.

Overall, a decent game based on a good concept.

connor-mcgrory 2017-05-02 18:42

Seemed cool, but couldn't figure it out. Maybe a little more instruction or speed up the game play

candlesan 2017-05-03 06:25

The setting and concept are cool. I like that the runes have very cool looking rune art on each of them that has them being relatively distinct from one another. The idea of combining lower-tier runes into higher tier runes is very compelling. I wonder if there is a way to introduce the concepts more gently by having the player combine some low-tier runes and providing feedback when they have combined successfully into a mid-tier rune?

Music and sound were solid for a compo entry.

nilead 2017-05-03 10:13

Very interesting concept, although it can get a little too overcomplicated. Some hard gameplay polishing and more visual variation and you can have a really promising prototipe here.

linus 2017-05-03 15:04

The game looks cool and the idea is interesting but I am unable to play the game because it doesn't run for me on Linux. I tried running through wine but the text is not rendered properly it seems. Maybe you can provide a Linux build.

spiteful-fox 2017-05-04 00:42

Really neat concept, but the element collection is kinda random and tedious. I really liked the humor, though.

galan 2017-05-04 00:50

The humor really grabbed me at the beginning, and the theme was excellently used. With all that going for it, I really wanted to like the game, but I just couldn't figure it out. The info dump at the beginning was just too dense. On top of that, the frame rate and input lag on my generally capable computer kept me from really being able to experiment and figure out what I was supposed to be doing. I'd love to see it again in a more polished form, though!

toonteamj 2017-05-04 20:50

Very fun, although the whole element thing is a little hard to understand. Other than that, the gameplay was good and the sound effects were very light-hearted.

doomshmuck 2017-05-05 03:38

As others are saying, the concept of the game is pretty interesting, but it was difficult to understand and felt pretty slow. I went for about 5 minutes before I ended up stopping. The presentation, graphics, and all that were really good, and the execution was solid, it just felt slow paced and didn't grip me for very long.

kleinzach 2017-05-06 00:36

Loved the writing in the tutorials. Overall it felt a little overcomplicated. Perhaps the same set of mechanics would be better suited to another perspective rather then first person. I also never much care for mechanics based on waiting for bars to fill, perhaps a more elegant solution to that would be beneficial. I liked the mood and the audio a lot!

grasswhopper 2017-05-06 04:00

nice game, the music is nice, it fits the tone and theme really well. it is an interesting game, but it gets complicated really really quickly sadly. as i said interesting concept, would be a fun play from time to time, with some better sound effects, and better pacing. good work, and a nice creative idea :)

remco 2017-05-06 09:18

I really liked the concept, but for me there was a bit of a difficulty spike in the beginning, since I could produce water and fire by combining the before-elements, but when I tried to make a few worlds with water and or fire, they basically just produced base-elements again, and maybe 0.01 :droplet: or :fire:.

Anyway, the manual is both clearly and humorously written, and I'd no difficulty to find out what to do in what could potentially have been confusing, altough I needed to look around for what I created for a (small) time, since my first run took me some ways of the spawning point. (Might want to leave out the word 'lame' though... it can be seen as a bit of an insult to handicapped people.)

There is an annoying issue with renaming worlds, in that, if I had previously renamed a world, then approached another one without clicking the mouse, the textbox of the next world would accept input, leading to a lot of worlds eventually named 'wwwww wsssssasww' and the like :grin:

With a bit of polish (maybe add a landscape and some jumping) I think you could get this to work quite well.

aeveis 2017-05-06 15:59

Really cool idea! I think it took a while to get, but after awhile was able to figure out there's a collecting phase. Played full screen at first, but the movement was kind of laggy making it hard to collect things so I just played in a window. Was able to get around 10 elements after playing around 30 min. I had collected a lot of the body element so I had an abundance of that, which in turn made it harder to get things like soul since I had less of that and was much easier to walk into body elements. I think I would play it again differently where I might get a lot of the base three elements first before slowly stacking on the new elements, the walking around and just randomly collecting things might actually end up making the play longer (though you have to do that for figuring out possible combinations). Would there be any loss in grouping elements together for the discovery? Anyway nice job!

smiling-cat-entertainment 2017-05-06 16:10

Thanks for all of the great feedback so far. I do agree that the game needs a lot more balancing, tweaking, and polishing, and based on what I am hearing here I may consider moving forward with this game once my current project completes.

I wanted to have the aether repeat when the edge is reached, which would resolve some of the issues with getting too far away from the center, but I ran out of time to implement that.

Based on my limited knowledge of Wine and Linux, I would guess that the text rendering problems are due to the Arial font not being installed. I just have too little experience in Linux to confidently support a Linux build of the game.

As for performance, I tried this out on my 5-year-old laptop (that has an old Nvidia mobile chipset) and it seems to perform well, at least in the earlier stages of the game. The game probably at least needs a dedicated GPU; integrated graphics don't cut it for much that I create these days.

Since the guide is not available in-game after viewing the first time (another thing I would have liked to have implemented if I had more time), I added a reference poster above showing all of the element creation possibilities.

ryte2byte 2017-05-06 17:12

Conceptually, I like this a lot! Execution wise... eh. Something about the collection of elements being done in 1st person and just kinda waiting and hoping that what you need happens to drift into a small enough area doesn't feel appropriate to the style. It was a good experiment, but IMO, not a successful one.

I really love that concept and scene you set up. The book and the element system are both fantastic! Glad I'm not the only one talking into a mic to make his sound effects for LD, lol!

tex-killer 2017-05-06 18:53

Ok, this one took a long time to properly go through.

First off, it is a nice concept, and well executed to a point. There are, however, very serious problems you need to address if you plan on turning this into a full game.

- First and most important: It is nearly impossible to find out what the formulas are just by playing. You MUST help the player with that in some way. For now, I strongly suggest you link this image I made into the description, so people can use it: http://i64.tinypic.com/2011ts.png (I had to look at the code to make this, it was very tedious and time consuming) But for the final game, one possible way to address this would be to have something like a "journal" of formulas, that lists all the formulas the player has already discovered. That way you won't spoil the fun of finding the unknown elements, but the game can be less "random smashing of whatever elements you find" and more "let me make a world for this specific goal".

- The second thing I believe should be addressed in order to make this into a full game would be the motivation. Just discovering elements is fine, but maybe you could make more goals, like custom pocket world tournaments (even if without multiplayer, as some sort of campaign the player has to complete), or maybe make up some kind of story that you can progress through by creating specific worlds or having specific elements, etc. Achievements are also a possibility.

- After a long time the game world gets quite crowded. I did notice that the same element merges with another when they touch, but the world still gets very crowded later on, and it gets very hard to spot specific elements, specially if said elements are rare. Maybe there could be another way to spot elements from afar, or some sort of element search or map. You could also try to create some upper limit on the quantities of each element, to aleviate the crowding issue.

- Don't make Esc openning the menu and then that same Esc closing the game! Just don't. My first playthrough was unintentionaly closed because I tried to close the menu with Esc and ended up killing the game.

Now, onto the bugs.

- The "world naming" box itself is very buggy. It sometimes opens itself for editing spontaneously, without the "3" key ever being pressed. As a consequence to that, since I walk around using WASD, it is very common to look at the name box and see it full of random walking letters. That means "world names" are completely broken and unusable. After fixing that, you may want to lock the player's actions while the box is being edited: it is weird to unintentionaly walk and do random things while typing names, and writing 1 into the name may create another world by accident.

- After some time, there were some elements I could not collect. I think they were too high up for me to reach. I don't know how to reproduce that, but it was happening.

- I think this may have been intentional, but destroying worlds breaks their materials into many parts. I think it would be nice if a broken world returned elements already grouped in big balls, without breaking them (you can even still reduce the amount of returned elements the way it is, but leave them grouped). It would make the task of scavanging for a specific element much easier, since you would be able to make a world, destroy it and most of the elements you had scavanged would be all in one place for you to get them and continue scavanging.

I think that is about all I have to say. By the way, it took me 2 hours of gameplay time to collect every element, and I did that using the image I made since the beginning of the playthrough! I can only imagine how hard and slow it would be to do the same without it.

Those problems aside, I did like the concept, and it is kind of impressive that you made this for the Compo. Good luck developing it if you do continue, and thanks for rating my Little Scout! :)

tex-killer 2017-05-06 18:56

Oh, damn, you already made the image... xD

Too bad I didn't come here after you made the image, it would have saved me some hours creating my hacked together version.

gundatsch 2017-05-07 00:22

I think most of the things have been said already. The concept is cool but most of the time i'm just waiting (and i don't event know why). Then i collect things for 15 seconds or so again and then i'm waiting again. I couldn't figure out what to do other than that :D.

I would like to collect all the time ... i mean it just doesn't feel right that you see the stuff and your character just collects it in a small time frame.

I pay my respects for doing all that in compo time though ... i know how hard it is to get anything done in that time :D

saiodin 2017-05-07 13:02

After the like 5th world it clicked for me. I really enjoyed the music, the concept is interesting. As others mentioned, I agree the game pace is a bit slow. I know the game is about experimenting, but I think it would help to hint at combinations, maybe highlighting fitting elements during the collection phase. I also would have liked to select my older worlds again, maybe I missed something there (I just noticed you can walk very close. Would b cool to just select them from afar). I definetly think tho that this could be an addictive game.

prototyke 2017-05-08 23:26

The game is very slow and the method for making the planets is a bit intuitive and poorly explained. Once it clicked, it was considerably more fun, but it took a few minutes. I feel speeding the game up by having more orbs or a faster speed, plus a faster production rate on the planets could help. More detailed in-game instructions would be helpful too, as well as a way to see the initial book again. I didn't get very far, but a few other small things: The renaming is very buggy. The pause is escape, but quit is too. Without a autosave, this is very frustrating, as you instantly lose everything if you accidentally press escape twice. Simply walking over orbs made it difficult to make specific formulas, particularly if there was a crowded section or if they were far away. Making it so you had to click when facing the orb to collect and then show which orbs were currently collected (or even what it would do) might help as well. It did fit your idea well, and seemed a fun concept with some revision.

wheffle 2017-05-09 01:02

Very ambitious project! I really like it. It's a bit confusing to get into and it takes a bit of patience, a "hold your breath and jump in" attitude. After you figure it out it's fun, interesting, and chill to play. Nice work!

slash-random 2017-05-09 08:56

Very astounding game. Unfortunately I had some really bad performance issues on my crappy computer even with graphic settings set to "fastest", so I haven't finished it and stopped after discovering only 8 different elements.

One question came to my mind: Is there a way to open up the manual again, while playing? There should be a way, because the last page with the table of elements would be very handy at the start, especially when you already have created three of the basic elements (fire, earth, air) and you want to create the one that's missing.

Anyway, graphics, sound and especially the interesting crafting mechanic works well and would have made me play your game much longer, if my framerate wouldn't have broken down.

Very good game that you created in the short time of a compo!

rockhoppergames 2017-05-09 17:25

I hope you don't mind me being harsh here, but I want to give you the best advice I can.

First of all, while I've seen a few games in the "mix elements together" micro-genre before, I've never seen one in 3D, so full points for Innovation. Of course, straying so far from the path is risky, and the execution here has somewhat fallen through because of it. As other commenters have said, adding goals and closing in the place space could help, but I think you should also consider why it should be in 3D.

One reason I saw suggested above was adding a landscape to navigate instead of a white void. Another I could think of could be if you could manipulate how the elements moved. My thought was it could be interesting if you could cash in worlds with certain elements for objects to place around the play space (fire and mud for a statue that attracts orbs of a certain type, wind and action for a fan that blows elements in a direction, sand and water for a pit that traps elements in it, stuff like that). Perhaps something like that could help provide a reason for the players to gather these elements too?

If you do decide to continue with this game, I think there's a lot of room for you to explore, so hopefully you could make something real interesting!

mar3k 2017-05-10 12:44

I would like to start by saying that I really like the concept, the overall idea is pretty cool!

The graphics were okay, there was not much of the of course so there is as well not much to say about it, but you did a good job with the book, I like that the tutorial was actually me reading a manual (and it included jokes, which is a big plus (from me at least)).

The music was nice, it was fitting and wasn't distracting at all and the sound effects were a bit "funny", but I guess you aimed for that feel (judging because also from the text in the book).

One thing I didn't really like, was speed of the game. It was a bit slow for me, but nothing too bad.

So yeah, overall a nice entry! Good job!

PS: You commented and rated my game (so thanks for that), but there was a bug and you said that you would like to see more of it, so if you want you can now, I fixed the bug. Cheers!

japes 2017-05-10 22:16

Interesting idea and well presented, but I found the running around and collecting boring, when all i wanted to do was experiment with element combinations.

mcjammydodger 2017-05-11 14:34

The game took me a while to understand even with the tutorials, which I think could have been presented a bit better with less on the screen at once and waiting for the player to perform specific tasks before showing the next part of the tutorial.

It was an interesting game which could have been more fun if the play area wasn't so big. It took me too long to find specific elements and it took too long to produce others, I got 10 minutes in and had only produced earth, air and sand. If it was quicker to get new elements it may have made it more fun.

I do like the concept however and with a few tweaks it could be very fun. Good job.

david-cookie 2017-05-11 22:00

Reading previous comments, I feel kinda dumb :/ Am I the only one that didn't understand anything? I managed to create 4 planets but didn't know how or what is the goal of all this.. Maybe I'm dumb, or too tired after trying many entries. The tutorial was kinda clear though (and roleplay :p) but it was just too much info to handle.

I feel sad cause it's the 1st game of the jam that didn't click for me.. Well, I guess I won't rate a game I can't understand, it's not really the point.

Well done though, it looks quite impressing for a compo!

tuomo 2017-05-12 18:23

My main concern with this game is that the learning curve is really steep at beginning. Player is presented so much information about the elements and worlds and everything so it becomes really confusing. Maybe it’s just me but I prefer seeing an example gameplay or something like that in games rather than reading a chapter of text. Maybe break down the tutorial into even smaller pieces and give player time to take information in.

Visuals in this game are interesting. One suggestion is toning down saturation on colors. Currently they are really bright (and hard on eyes).

rjhelms 2017-05-13 03:16

This has a lot of charm, and is a really unique and interesting take on the the theme. Great job on those fronts - music is pretty decent, too.

To echo a lot of the other commenters, I think this could do well to be more "discoverable" - the interaction between different elements is interesting, but it's a slow burn and the game is pretty daunting at the start. Especially in a Ludum Dare game, it's really valuable to grab the player *right away* - the opening is great, but when I got into the game play I felt a bit lost.

There's some great ideas in here; with some polish and balancing they could really shine.

mewsoul 2017-05-13 15:01

That's definitely an interesting experience!

At first when I looked at the screenshots and then started to play it felt a bit complicated. But after spending some time in game, I understood better what needed to be done.

I really do like when you create the world that the appearance of it is a mix of what you collected, props for that!

As some others already pointed it, the pace felt a bit slow. I don't know if it's because the movement are a bit slow, or if the map is too big, or the collecting time kinda quick, but I guess there is something around that could be change to provide a better a felling.

Something that would be nice, would be the ability to cycle between the different worlds you created to check faster what you are producing at the moment, or maybe a scoreboard displaying those kind of information.

In the end, I think you came up with a nice idea!

harry-alissavakis 2017-05-20 00:25

How is it possible for one person to do something like that in 48 hours? HOW? There are sooo much stuff going on that I don't think I could discover if I just *played* for 48 hours! The whole game idea was also amazingly interesting, and it's really nice how you combined the whole element-matching with the first-person controller. I really liked the music too, it was calm and nice and really fitted the whole aesthetic you had going on. This game is really great in both a technical and a gameplay aspect. You did a fantastic job, well done! :D