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almostcthulhu 2017-08-01 01:28

There may be a slight issue with the WebGL version of the game in that it runs out of memory during the pipe minigame. I would rebuild it, but it's 2:30am UTC and I'm getting pretty tired; sorry about that.

If the game still interests you, I'd suggest you download one of the other builds of the game so that you can see KubaP's models in all their beautiful low-poly-ness. (And access the cheats that I may have accidentally left in...)

I might post the source code if this project gets enough interest, but for now we're leaving it out because we think this book should be judged by its cover. Or rather, its gameplay. *Please don't judge us by the pictures, we took them with 10 minutes to go until the deadline...*

If not, then leave a comment; what did and didn't you like? We're just 2 British college students looking to make good games and we'd find it helpful if you gave us some feedback

reizoukin 2017-08-01 12:43

Enjoyed it! The whole game looks and feels very clean. Got about $1000 on my first run. Wish there was a bit more of a guide, and it felt like I very quickly ran out of power, but my only real gripe is that the pipe game portions repeated themselves. I think I played the same one three times with the same solution! Other than that, I think this could be really fun after some more work--it was calm and exciting at the same time.

theflyingkeyboard 2017-08-01 12:43

Nice game, neat graphics and interesting idea.

mr-houdini 2017-08-01 12:45

(I got the error from the browser version as you said. No problem, win version) I made 600$! (More than in real life, aw yeah!) I loved the overall experience. The resource management, the flux minigame, and the idea. I would given some more obvious feedback about what is every building doing (some +3 polution flying from a factory, for example). I've lost so quick! I'm not good at games, so I won't count that as a problem! haha Great game, and good luck!

articnet 2017-08-01 12:51

I got up to the mission and it gave me the memory error :(

juin 2017-08-01 12:52

The pipe matching game felt a bit frustrating to me, i think because some of the pipes don't reach another so you end up in dead ends a lot of the time.

timps 2017-08-01 12:52

This was a lot of fun. But it counted down very quickly. First run through I found myself suddenly out of cash and not earning much in response.

The puzzles were a little glitchy, parts wouldn't rotate every time when clicked. And I ran out of time on about 3/4 of them. And I normally do ok at pipe matching games.

All in all it had a lot of personality.

Middle mouse to scroll around was odd, and I would have liked it more if the menus showed up near what I clicked on instead of off to the side.

It was a lot of fun though, I've had 4 games so far. Keep it up!

ferran-benavente 2017-08-01 13:20

Loved the art style and the idea! I made about 1000$ on my second play. I think the game need a more clear feedback, but it's very positive experience! :)

tyler-miller 2017-08-01 13:35

Clicked here for the graphics, really liked the style! Game play mechanics were cool but I found that it was kinda confusing for me at least. Good to see some other college students making games, good job!

almostcthulhu 2017-08-01 14:20

Thanks everyone for the positive feedback, we’re glad to hear that you enjoyed playing our game as much as we enjoyed making it; it was fun, but slightly confusing.

@reizoukin, we were going to add a tutorial level, but we only had 4 hours left and decided to add an extra music track instead. Also, the pipe game isn’t randomly generated, so you do end up playing the same levels a few times. I tried to implement some random generation, but my knowledge of pathing algorithms isn’t quite good enough yet. Good to hear that you found it fun though; I’ll definitely be expanding it a bit in the future.

@mr-houdini, I will admit that the pollution mechanic doesn’t quite work properly. It acts as a small modifier to reputation, which modifier the amount of money you make per second. We think a tutorial level would have helped with this, but we lacked the time to make one.

@articnet, was this on a standalone version or the WebGL version? We know this happens in the WebGL version (I blame @KubaP for not configuring the build), but this shouldn’t happen in a standalone.

@juin, all the pipe game levels do have solutions as we didn’t randomly generated in the end. Sorry that it felt frustrating, but we thought it added a nice extra layer of difficulty to the game

@timps, we’re happy to hear that you found it fun. We would have added a tutorial level, but we ran out of time; sorry. The puzzle game wasn’t the best programming ever done, so this does happen sometimes. I think the collision boxes may need some adjustment. The camera controls were something that we added last minute, so they’re not perfect either. In terms of menus, we would have had them floating above the tiles, but this is our first Jam, and our time management went out of the window a bit towards the end when we were doing the UI.

@ferran-benavente, thanks! I know @KubaP worked really hard on the graphics. We do regret that we weren’t able to implement some tooltips or something which explained what various things did, but we’re happy to know that you enjoyed playing it.

@tyler-miller, I will say that @KubaP‘s models are very nice in my opinion. We do think that the game could have done with a bit more explaining, and the pollution mechanic probably should have been removed because it doesn’t work properly, but we think its great that you found our game good.

mr-houdini 2017-08-01 18:48

@almostcthulhu Allright! Nice work :)

2017-08-01 21:08

It's compulsive. Love the pipe game to get more power. Love the fact it's quick to play as well. Good work.

wareification 2017-08-02 00:18

720$!

I don't think I fully understood the strategy behind the macro level stuff with plotting buildings, but I did like the pipe minigame! Although I failed the first time, I quickly got the hang of it.

Not sure why, but I enjoy the song playing in the background too. Something about high synth during the second part of the song that caught my attention.

littlelegend 2017-08-02 00:44

Looks like a great game with much potential :D Unfortunately i got the WebGL error :(

filippy 2017-08-02 01:30

yes, webGL error, win version works fine thou, if you want a quick and dirty way to procedurally generate the pipes game you might be interested in looking up tsuro tiles: you can place them randomly to make a 6x6 grid that always has a solution for any given start/finish if you allow to rotate the individual tiles

arkthalohs 2017-08-02 01:37

Neat game! The art and music were really good and fit the low-stress strategy of the game. I wasn't a huge fan of the pipe minigame at first since it seemed to only have one (or a few) possible solutions, making it more like solving a maze and hitting dead ends instead of just connecting a path. Once I got used to how it worked and tried to solve it differently, I did end up liking it.

demi 2017-08-02 11:11

Arf i need long to get that i can build only on grey paths. And it would be good to see how much money a building produce, so its more puzzle to build the right buildings.

It has an interesting gamemechanic and nice artwork.

huvaakoodia 2017-08-02 14:55

The graphics are neat and they sure did a great job at luring me in promising city building, strategical thinking or at least some solid resource management fun. What I got is none of those things. I'm gravely disappointed and here is why:

I get the idea, there's no way to get more power because of the theme, but it makes absolutely no sense that a nuclear reactor, ** *a nuclear reactor* **, would only reduce the amount of power other buildings use. That's not how a reactor works, it could power the *whole bloody city*!

The power generators could instead be high tech labs researching power efficiency solutions or employee training centers, something like that. Sure this is just a visual thing, but don't underestimate believability. It is a very important aspect of immersion.

I have a bigger issue with the pipe fixing puzzle. It happens constantly and it is not interesting, thus it gets annoying quick. On top of this it too makes no sense. It's not my job to fix the power lines. I'm the company CEO, I can pay some mechanics to do it for me. You already have these random events popping up all the time, the electrical fault should be just one of them.

Talking about the events. They are random and there is no way to deal with them. No choices to take, no decision to make. Why are they there at all? You could have made them interactive, e.g. There are riots here. Do you yield, bribe them, scatter the rioters with force? Now that would be something.

That's about it. Nothing personal, I just had to get this off my mind. *Cheers!*

almostcthulhu 2017-08-02 17:55

@pdg Good, glad you liked it. The pipe game doesn't give you money, however, as it's designed to make play faster.

@wareification, sorry that the game is a bit confusing, we would have added a tutorial level but we ran out of time. I'm happy to hear that you like a music, though. As someone who's primarily a programmer, I'm surprised that the music I made is any good at all.

@littlelegend, we do know this is an issue. @kubap has said that he'll try to rebuild it at some point later today. If you're still interested in playing our game, there are also standalones available.

@filippy, that's not actually a bad idea, thanks. We were originally going to go for filling the grid with pipes, but that was too easy. Tiles, however, look like a nice alternative.

@arkthalohs, it is true that the pipe game only has one solution per map, but we tried to make them relatively easy to solve. It's good to hear that you like the art and mechanics though because we quite liked them too.

@huvaakoodia, we will admit that we took a lot of creative liberties with the game, and the lore at the top of the page doesn't really fit too well into it. This is our first Jam and we're still trying to find out what works and what doesn't, so thanks for the feedback. In regards to the nuclear reactor, it is true that one could power an entire city, but we chose to use it anyway as we thought the shape of one was quite distinct and recognisable. We would have use wind farms, but any models that were produced didn't fit into the style. As for the power generators, labs were an idea we toyed with, but we ultimately decided against it because we wanted to keep the game simple. In retrospect, it may be a bit too simple, but we also didn't have time to implement a tutorial, which I think would have been required to add more complicated aspects such as research to the game. Immersion wasn't too much of a concern for us however, and the game isn't meant to be realistic, although it is a fair point that it likely would have gone a long way. The timings of the pipe puzzle do need some adjustment, or we are considering integrating it into the event system. The pipe puzzle is something that we implemented much later to help the game progress faster though, so we didn't have time for proper integration. Events are random, and the code is there such that when you reach certain milestones like 10 low-tech factories, an event will trigger. We didn't use this though as we felt that, given the length of a game, the player would never reach them; if they were adjusted, they'd likely be too soon as well, and slow down the game. We would have liked to have added some decisions to the events, but like many things in our game, this was last minute addition we didn't put a lot of thought into aside from the prerequisites. We added them to add a bit of random factor to the game. Either way, we're not taking this personally, this is good feedback and we've found it quite useful, thanks.

activated-onion 2017-08-04 01:24

Played the Linux build.

I'm not much of a strategy game person, and I found it overwhelming. I played two pipe missions and they both timed out before I could solve them - I've played those kind of puzzles before but the perspective seemed confusing.

A lot of stuff happened, I expected that clicking the "Low tech" would activate a tool like in SimCity, but instead it instantly built the building in a random location. (Maybe I had clicked on a tile without knowing it?)

I gave up after maybe 2 or 3 minutes. The graphics are great but it needs a tutorial.

2017-08-06 20:13

Really like the game and graphics, think the whole concept is great especially for 3 days work! Got a bit confused as to what to do at first but soon got the hang of it - I'm bad at the pipe games anyway so it's not like I'd be any better at this one! As many others said, it would be good for a tutorial but I've read replies in regards to this saying you didn't have time so fair enough. Overall good game, would be interesting to see how much better it could get if you had longer.

bombjack 2017-08-06 20:23

nice game. I had some fun playing it. I really like the 2 differents type of game in one.

sarrixx 2017-08-07 12:46

Cool concept for a game! I think some of the puzzle timers may have been a bit short, and would have been good to see some kind of UI indicator of how much each building costs. A tutorial would be nice as well, took me a while to understand what I was trying to do. Awesome graphics and nice audio too.

2021-11-30 10:31

At first glance, the game is very interesting, but I don't understand what to do there.

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